From Autos to Arts

“At one time we had 23 automobile manufacturers here in Jackson, including the Hudson. We're also home to the Michigan International Speedway, which was built by some locals in the 1960s.” Allan Hooper told me on my tour of Jackson, MI. “When the two NASCAR races are here in June and August our population soars to 160,000, making us the third largest city in the state for those two weekends.” We toured the Commercial Exchange, an incubator of sorts that started out as the Jackson Automobile Company.

Automobile manufacturing developed here because of its proximity to Detroit and its early cluster (in the days before they were called clusters) as a carriage manufacturing center. Many carriage manufacturers added a gasoline motor to their buggies and became cars. The conversion of one of these old carriage manufacturing plants into an arts center really caught my attention.

Steve Sayles, the owner of ARTS 634, told me about the colorful history of his building, “The building is over 150 years old. It was built here because of the state prison next door offering them cheap labor. When the laws were changed which didn’t permit prisoners to work outside the prison, they built tunnels under the prison walls so that they could continue to work here clandestinely, paying the warden under the table. In 1857 this was the largest carriage manufacturer in the world, making 7,000 carriages.”

It went thru various phases of manufacturing and storage until the place was virtually abandoned in the 50s. Then the story got really interesting, “John Brown bought it in the 1980’s to grow pot in it. The second floor of the factory was full of grow lights. We found all of this out after he died. After his pot phase he turned it into a speakeasy gambling hall. It had all sorts of steel doors, big locks and passageways. When I moved in it was all boarded up.”

Steve originally brought in Art Space out of Minneapolis to develop it into an art community, but took it back over in 2004 and now has 30 artists located in various spaces in the building. The weekend before our tour they had 1,500 people in for an open house. Sayles is taking his concept to other cities, hoping to gain synergies from multiple locations. He is doing a duplicate project in Albion, MI where he already has 20 artists signed up to locate in an old Masonic Lodge. Check out his website at www.studiozcreative.com. I hope to have pictures of this place next week, if I recover my hard drive.