by Bob Pacelli
It was 1981, and the balloon payment we had used to buy Project Artaud ten years earlier was coming due. We had no money to pay for it and were going to lose the building.
Wells Fargo said they’d give us a loan if we got the building up to code. We were under a condemnation order. This building had never been a place where one could legally live, work, and hold public assembly. There was no code in SF that would allow this so we had to write one and get the city to accept it and change the zoning laws.
I became president of Project Artaud and hired our very effective project coordinator, Barbara Jonesi. She was doing an amazing amount of legwork to liaise with the city, Mission Housing, and the banks to work out a deal to save the building and bring it up to code.
One day at a meeting at City Hall where $300K of federal housing funding was slated to be granted to Western Edition, it was pointed out that this grant was not intended to be given to the same organization each year and Western Edition had already been the recipient. I stood up in the middle of the meeting and said “I am the president of Project Artaud, and we would like that money.” And so began our negotiations with Mission Housing.
We were working on this project and scrambling to get the books in order day and night. We had many setbacks and a lot of bureaucracy to contend with to ultimately free up the cash from the federal housing authority in Washington, DC. Eventually the day of the deadline rolled around and we still hadn’t heard from Washington. I was really tired, wallowing in the backyard of Artaud when a small group of Artaudians who were financially secure and who had wanted to purchase the building, repair it, and raise the rents for the artists, came up to me and told me “You lost the building, and now we’re all going to be on the street.. We could have bought it like we planned and saved everyone.”
I had to get away so I went to the Whistle Stop restaurant down the block. I was sitting outside the restaurant feeling the lowest I ever had, having just lost our artists’ studio and our home. Right in the middle of my despair, Jon Ingleton, the building manager, and a group of Artaudians came running down the street looking for me. We had gotten the loan! I remember that day vividly and the feeling that together we could do anything.
Once the money was secured, the real work began. We had until the end of the year to get a huge building that had never been up to code, up to code. We had to install the sprinkler system, put in the sheetrock walls, put in the bathrooms, and rewire the whole building. Ultimately we got the city to suspend the condemnation order so we could refinance the building.
All of this happened within a year, and I didn’t even have a bank account to my name.