24 Nov What happened to the Pilsen Arts District?
Chicago is a great walking city. Being mostly flat does have it’s advantages! From the obvious – picture perfect Michigan Avenue, and the always superb lakefront – to lesser known gems like Clark Street from Armitage to the Newberry Library, Chicago is a very pleasant place to get your stroll on.
So an arts district based on getting out on foot should have worked here… but it hasn’t, so far. The Pilsen Arts District is dying on the vine, and I cannot really figure out why. Or maybe I can?
The photos tell the tale: empty storefront after empty storefront… and the vacancy rate seems to be going up. I first went to the Pilsen Arts Walk – held every second Friday evening – a few years ago. The Pilsen Arts Walk happens on South Halsted, between 18th and Cermak Streets, roughly. I took a group with me and it was fun! We went into around 7 or 8 galleries, had some free snacks, ate at De Colores afterwards, and called it a night. I was living 4 blocks away in Pilsen, and as Pilsen began heading warp-speed into gentrification, I expected the Pilsen Arts District to take off.
The opposite happened. Several of the galleries we visited that night left, and nothing replaced them. There has been a grand total of zero new restaurants in that stretch of Halsted since then. The presence of UIC, tons of new, supposedly higher income residents, the rising popularity of the University Village commercial district… it mattered not.
Maybe it was:
parking and transit: that stretch of Halsted looks like it should have tons of free parking, but some of the side streets are zoned for residents only, and Halsted itself is metered. There is no direct bus from the Loop or Streeterville, where many tourist hotels are located. Lots of students live in the area, but the walk from University Village south on Halsted goes through a kinda forlorn viaduct and isn’t really inspiring… and the walk from Chinatown is just long enough to keep the hordes who go there from walking over.
galleries weren’t making a lot of sales: I’ve been back to the Pilsen Arts Walk several times since then, and I (very unscientific research methods here) never see people buy any artwork. I admit that the costs that go into running a gallery are kind of opaque to me, but I know the costs to staff your gallery later than normal and buy snacks for the masses might have added up. It was fun for the participants for sure, but for the galleries it is a dead serious business. Which leads us to…
sky high rents: For the past several years, Pilsen has been gentrifying and rents have been rising. Other than the nights of Pilsen Art Walk, that stretch of Halsted is pretty barren. I caught the bus there quite often, and it always felt abandoned. Low foot traffic + high rents cannot be a good recipe for art galleries.
Poor promotion: Lots of people have heard of the gallery walk, but even in the warmer months, it wasn’t as busy as it could have been. Maybe food trucks or live music could have brought more people, but Chicago isn’t a really friendly city towards food trucks.
Well, whatever the reason, I am really curious about the future viability of the Pilsen Arts Walk. I suspect eventually the empty storefronts will give way to restaurants, breweries, and other operations apart from art galleries. Which is really too bad, because given how popular the surrounding areas are, and how few places there are – especially south of downtown – to enjoy lots of galleries in close proximity, Chicago really could have benefited from having the Pilsen Arts District take off.