I loved this article and the hope that projects like this offer for building community, supporting the arts and giving new life to old structures. Mornin', DU! :hi:
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Elevator for Grain, Reinvented for Art The New York Times
Published: July 28, 2009
WASSAIC, N.Y. — When Sally Zunino’s husband and his business partner decided five years ago to buy the old grain and feed elevator here, a crumbling cathedral of agriculture that was raining siding onto the Metro-North tracks and the tiny hamlet below, Ms. Zunino would not even agree to go see it.
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But many tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of repairs later, the rambling old elevator, known as Maxon Mills, has turned out to be a different kind of folly, closer to Merriam-Webster’s definition No. 5 of that word: “an often extravagant picturesque building” used in the service of “a fanciful taste.”
A rare survivor among the stately wood-crib elevators that once towered over rural America, this 105-foot-tall structure has been reincarnated as one of the strangest new homes for contemporary art in the Northeast, a place that feels like a Lower East Side gallery transplanted into a treehouse, redolent of damp pine and the animal feed that once filled the spaces.
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Since last summer, after the bulk of the renovation was completed, the project has drawn dozens of visual and performance artists and musicians from around the country, most not long out of art school, to show work and to help with the upkeep. And, at least on occasion in the summer, to camp out and turn Wassaic — a sleepy town of 1,200 that is the end of the line on Metro-North’s Harlem branch (the town’s name is taken from an American Indian word sometimes translated to mean “land of difficult access”) — into a well-mannered art happening.
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