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Artists turned a dead factory into an experiment built to beat gentrification. Five years later, it's a pickleball club.

Watch the sizzle
Artists build it Artists build it Artists build it
Someone else sells it — someone else sells it — someone else sells it
Repeat Repeat Repeat Repeat

St. Petersburg, Florida calls itself an Art City. Murals sell the condos. The artists who painted them are getting priced out.

ART CITY spent three years inside the city's creative scene with painters, muralists, record-store owners, typewriter poets and community elders, while the cycle that remade SoHo and Wynwood ran again in real time.

At the center of it is The Factory: six and a half acres of old warehouses, rebuilt by a founder who had studied the world's artist districts and designed this one to break the cycle. We were filming inside when it came apart.

The
Factory

Keep scrolling. In street art, "the buff" is when someone rolls flat paint over a mural.

  1. Founders buy the old window-film plant on Fairfield Ave S.
  2. The Factory opens: cheap studios, every discipline, a deliberately diverse crowd.
  3. Openings, concerts, murals. The Warehouse Arts District gets a heart.
  4. A trust tied to a co-owner files foreclosure against the ownership entity. The two sides tell very different stories.
  5. Kara and Jordan Behar sell their stake.
  6. The property sells to real-estate investors. Artists are told they'll stay.
  7. A 45,000 sq ft pickleball and social club opens. The remaining artists move to "Gallery Row" out back.

From reporting by the Tampa Bay Times, St Pete Catalyst, St Pete Rising and Creative Loafing Tampa.

Mural, 2020

Roll the tape.

26 artistsone city

Painters, muralists, a candlemaker, a record-store owner, a typewriter poet, a glassblower, a DJ, a fashion designer, a storyteller whose childhood home is now a stadium parking lot.

Move across the wall ↗

Posted
on the wall

Straight from the interviews

"Artists are the true developers."

Luke Vest · Painter

"They make so much money off of claiming that it's an art city. It doesn't translate to value for citizens."

Raheem Fitzgerald · Painter & curator

"Where the Tropicana parking lot is, is where our house used to be."

Wanda Stuart · Storyteller

"The artists come in and use the space that nobody else is willing to use, and then next thing you know, Urban Outfitters is here."

Jason Hackenwerth · Artist

"Give us a seat at the table we helped build."

Derek Donnely · Artist

"There's not enough kids that look like me that know that they can be a muralist."

Zulu · Muralist

"The opposite of war isn't peace. It's creation."

Made inFlorida

Alexander Davidowski

Director / Producer

Founder of Mirador Studios. Twenty years making television for Discovery, A&E, TLC and CMT, and director of the award-winning documentary Rise of the Clambassador. Licensed pilot, and he shoots his own aerials.

Cranstan Cumberbatch

Contributing Producer

St. Pete native and co-CEO of DreamMakerz Productions. Winner of the Jackie Robinson Breaking Barriers Award, organizing director of the Sunshine City Film Festival, and executive director of the Tampa Bay Actors Guild.

They buffed it. Move your cursor to paint it back ↘

Paint
it back

ART CITY is independent. The final shoots, edit, music and legal review still need funding, and sponsors are credited in the film.

Sponsor the film Get the press kit