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+-----------------------------------------------------------
+-----------------------------------------------------------
Photo by Michael McElroy
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F
irst there was darkness.
Then a single point of light exploded with
the brightness of three suns, shattering the night
with a crack and the smell of ozone.
Paul Fioretti worked the light between his hands.
Through the tinted glass of his facemask, he watched
iron return to its beginnings: a ballet of metal melting
into metal. Heavy pipes and gears glowed red-hot as
he bonded them together into sculpture.
The light spread through the workroom, flickered
on old oil drums and shelves, and shone through a bay
door into an alleyway. Some of the light fled into the
late-February sky, and some of it reflected off the sides
of buildings along the railroad tracks.
From balconies, people could see the light. They
saw a quiet intersection, the nexus of a makeshift vil-
lage where, for the past 13 years, tenants had come and
gone, creating things as they passed through.
The people who worked there a handful of art-
ists and entrepreneurs wanted more than anything
to make the place succeed. What did success mean?
Visitors, mostly. Somebody to notice this place in-
stead of driving by on the thoroughfares a block away.
Somebody to come by and linger at the galleries and
studios, marvel at their beauty, spend some money.
Success had already come for Fioretti. It arrived one
night in late 2010, when he was working late at South
Florida Window Lift, the cluttered shop he had run in
the neighborhood for 20 years. During the day, he made
and repaired the motors that move car windows. But
something flashed in the back of Fiorettis mind that
night, igniting a connection like the white-hot arc of
his welding tools: an impulse he had ignored for a long
time. On the nights to come, he began experimenting
with discarded parts, building a second life as an artist
after his wife and kids had gone to bed.
If you stand on the corner outside Fiorettis work-
shop and look across Fifth Street, down First Avenue
to where it dead-ends at Sistrunk Boulevard, youll
see a long line of warehouses down the left side of
the avenue. Some are large; some are more like little
concrete offices; some have domed roofs like inflatable
tents. On the other side of the avenue are a few empty
lots, an auto mechanic.
This is FAT Village, a humble crucifix in downtown
Fort Lauderdale. It sits between the Florida East Coast
rail line and the central artery of Andrews Avenue. Its
not very well lit, and parking is an informal affair. Shops
that have windows need to cover them with iron bars.
Perhaps tougher than the problem with crime is
FAT Villages battle with perception: Fort Lauderdale,
and Broward County overall, were long considered
wastelands of culture, even as arts districts sprouted
in Miami, Delray Beach, and West Palm. Few people
expect to find great art in a gritty, landlocked section
of Fort Lauderdale.
Still, the developer who owns nearly all of the
property, Doug McCraw, charges relatively high rent.
Many of the artists who helped form FAT Village have
fled for cheaper real estate elsewhere, and those who
have remained continue to struggle.
FAT Village exists almost by accident, a remnant
of a shining economic plan gone bad. If everything
goes well, this sleeping neighborhood will become
South Floridas next great arts district. If something
money, people, artists fails to materialize, FAT
Village might just remain another abandoned byway
out of Fort Lauderdales industrial past.
O
n a recent afternoon, Doug McCraw stood in a
room that smelled like printer ink. About five-
foot-five, 61 years old, wearing a polo shirt with
khakis, he leaned into the wall and squinted at a
portrait of artist Chuck Close. Two balding men with
glasses, communing. McCraw tapped his fingernail on
the portrait, a metal plate covered with a dye-sublimation
print. A pair of tiny pug dogs snorted around his loafers.
The work theyre doing here is really one-of-a-
kind, he said, the word kind stretching out in a Bir-
mingham drawl softened by 35 years of South Florida.
He was inside Digital Artwear, a tenant in FAT
Village. Neal Yaffe, the proprietor, showed off a shelf
of digitally printed objects: messenger bags, tiles,
notebooks. Yaffes assistant, a hip-looking Asian kid
named Tone, prepared packages for shipment to cli-
ents around the country. As a working shop with an
established outside client base, Digital Artwear is one
of the villages more stable tenants. McCraw likes
them and wants them to stay. He owns the building,
and they pay their rent.
Thats not always how things go in FAT Village.
Some tenants credit McCraw with designing and
championing this arts district he created from noth-
ing. But others say his quest is simply about making
money from artists, building an arts district as a way
to give value to an unwanted stretch of warehouses.
McCraw says hes given up on unloading the proper-
ties to a developer, but changes in the economy have
proved him wrong before.
Back in the 90s, McCraw himself rented the space
that houses Digital Artwear. He ran a document stor-
age company and needed space to expand his archives.
Back then, it was just one in a row of obso-
Warehouse
RENAISSANCE
-----------------------------------------------------------=
-----------------------------------------------------------=
In art-starved Broward County,
a creative district struggles on a
rough patch of downtown.
BY STEFAN KAMPH
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>> p12
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954-462-0222
or browardcenter.org

NOW THRU SUNDAY ONLY
BROWARD CENTER
FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS
FINAL 5 PERFORMANCES
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lete warehouses, filled with crap that nobody
wanted. He rented this building and then a
larger one next door.
I never dreamed when I was using the
buildings that I would own them one day, he
said. But he had already been thinking about
property investment, ever since he made a
bunch of money flipping a house in the early
80s. Then, in the late 90s, dot-com fortunes
were on the rise, and property was hot. Mc-
Craws developer friend, Alan Hooper, was
planning the Avenue Lofts, a set of high-rise
condominiums just to the south along An-
drews Avenue. McCraw decided to make
an offer. In 1998, for a sale price of just over
a million dollars, the buildings were his.
He inherited a few tenants, like a theatri-
cal prop manufacturing shop that employed
recovering drug and alcohol abusers. It was
called Starting Over Enterprises. Despite its
good works, Starting Over was soon mov-
ing out. Doug Jones and his fledgling event
company, Sixth Star, moved in. Jones rented
a wood chipper and used it to destroy the
props and detritus of addiction that were
left behind. The piles of wood chips still sit
behind the building by the railroad tracks.
The tracks. It seems like such a clich, the
role they serve, separating this side from the
other side: the traditionally black Sistrunk
neighborhood. Inevitably, black men with
dreads, black women with strollers, and black
children will walk down the right of way. And
inevitably, the mostly white artists and shop-
keepers in FAT Village will watch them with
suspicion. The intersection at First and Fifth
has cleaned up considerably crack cen-
tral, McCraw called it during his first days as
a landlord but occasional break-ins persist.
One day in January, an art collector with
some money to spend was visiting the stu-
dio of Francisco Sheuat, an artist who had
recently moved in. The prospective client
parked his silver Dodge SUV on the street
outside, and he and Sheuat talked business in
the doorway, looking on nervously as a group
of kids wearing skullcaps sat on the top of the
wall and threw rocks. As if preordained, one of
the rocks smashed the windshield of the SUV.
The collector didnt buy anything that day.
McCraws dream, at the beginning of
the century, was to build FAT Village into
a technology workplace. The name an
acronym for Flagler Arts and Technol-
ogy, as tenants are constantly having to
explain occurred to him during a drive
to the beach. He envisioned a collection of
businesses hooked up to T1 internet lines,
building the future from sunny Florida.
Then the dot-com bubble burst. Ten-
ants lost money, and McCraw was stuck
with warehouses he couldnt rent. So he
drew up a contract to sell them all, to pull
out of the neighborhood. The buyer would
probably demolish them for condos. In
2005, Hurricane Wilma stopped the deal.
Suddenly, said McCraw, There
was nobody here to buy it. Theres still
not really anybody here to buy it.
And so FAT Village was born, an attempt
to do something unconventional with space
that nobody seemed to want. McCraw says
he has lost millions of dollars maintaining
the buildings. He insists he cant afford to be
a philanthropist by renting spaces to starv-
ing artists below market rate, but he says the
capacity of art to generate wonder excites
him more than the bottom line: When we
do art walks, nobody is more surprised than
me. I just get goose bumps. Its more than
anything I imagined in the beginning.
S
aturday night. Meredith Lasher sat
in a directors chair inside the roll-up
door of Sixth Star Entertainment,
legs crossed, eyes twinkling. Hey, no
photographs, she called in a joking, sing-
song tone to visitors who stopped to take
pictures of 20-foot-high shelves filled with
stuff. Lasher runs the Womens Theatre
Project in a space shared with Sixth Star.
On the last Saturday of the month, FAT
Village opens its warehouses for an art walk.
Inside Sixth Star, a scale-model Christ the
Redeemer beams down from a high shelf; bits
of old vanity mirrors and mock-up storefronts
look like the wreckage from a bombed-out
Our Town. A Seminole Hard Rock logo glit-
ters near the ceiling. Near the back, theres
an Oscar statue left over from a private party
in the Fort Lauderdale Isles neighborhood.
Sixth Star is an example of the kind of shop
that works indisputably well in FAT Village: an
event-planning and stage-show company, with
a healthy client base, that needs somewhere to
work. The art walks, for it, are an opportunity
to show off what it does, but the audience
is an afterthought. It doesnt need to make
money from the people who drink its wine.
FAT Village wasnt crowded on this Sat-
urday in February. Maybe a hundred people
walked the block, ducking into galleries and
workshops. The audience felt more like a
group of friends exploring a neighborhood
than the crush of humanity seen during art
walks in Miamis Wynwood or West Palms
Antiques Row. With Hula-Hooping com-
petitions in the street and plenty of time to
talk with shopkeepers, the vibe was right.
Still, if these crowds were any indication of
whether FAT Village would succeed, it was
clear the neighborhood had some work to do.
Down the block, the large warehouse
sat wide open. The inside was a bright ca-
thedral with cement floors and wooden
rafters, a void that could likely hold your
childhood home a few times over. McCraw
stood in the corner, serving wine in plastic
cups. On the walls were large abstract paint-
ings by Miami-based artist David Marsh.
A gray-and-white floating web hung as the
centerpiece of the room, extending from the
ceiling trusses and lit from all sides by spot-
lights that cast a soft net of shadows. Jamey
Grimes, a soft-spoken artist from Tuscaloosa,
Alabama, created the web, called Roil. Grimes
wandered the open room with a camera and
tripod, taking pictures of his work. Around
10 p.m., a band called Pocket of Lollipops
began to play at the back of the warehouse.
About five mildly excited 20-somethings
gathered around to sort of dance. A few
older art patrons chatted with McCraw,
who explained how he discovered Grimes
art in a Birmingham gallery and matched
him with David Marsh. The space
Warehouse Renaissance from p11 1. The Collide Factory, 2. Project Space,
3. Digital Artwear, 4. Sixth Star Entertain-
ment, 5. Francisco Sheuat, 6. Paul Fio-
rettis shop, 7. Doug McCraws office, 8.
The Puppet Network, 9. Former Art of Alex
studio, 10. Former Gallery 101. McCraw
owns the buildings here in blue.
>> p14
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was empty for long stretches at a time.
Some of the art walks were good; some
were terrible, recalled Alex Benitez, a prac-
ticing artist with a retail shop who moved
out of FAT Village when his one-year lease
expired in December. Theyve been growing
in attendance recently, and the feeling on
the streets is livelier than ever: All the shops
keep their doors open, and performances
at the villages two black-box theaters draw
crowds. Still, the events lack publicity.
People are surprised when theyre here
for a show and theres an art walk going
on, said Lasher. Its like an underground
secret that only the cool kids know about.
Leah Browns 18 Rabbit Gallery displayed a
group exhibit of conceptual sound art, includ-
ing a set of speakers filled with water, sand,
and beans. Flutelike contraptions screwed
into the air-conditioning ducts broke the air
with a high-pitched whistle. At Andrews Liv-
ing Arts Studio, a sold-out crowd watched
a premiere of The Laramie Project after the
nights signature distraction, a demonstra-
tion by the toxically antigay Westboro Baptist
Church of Topeka, Kansas. Though the pro-
prietors did not admit it, the theater may have
benefited from this unsolicited publicity.
On the corner, Fioretti had transformed his
shop into a gallery. Two welded and polished
iron torches burned outside the entrance, and
a Kool-Aid fountain circulated above a tray of
cookies. His artwork was on display: a working
clock, some smaller pieces, and a cactus-like
floor sculpture made of heavy polished gears.
Fioretti is the only artist in FAT Village
whose building isnt owned by McCraw, but
he may have had the most success during
the art walk: He said he received multiple
commissions during the three-hour event.
They included two more torches, which
he said he would sell for $1,000 each, and a
$5,000 dancing skeleton, made from the en-
gine valve of a decommissioned battleship.
Around the corner, a storefront on Andrews
sat dark and empty. It used to house Gallery 101,
which until February was a star tenant of FAT
Village, bringing in collectors and serving as an
anchor for the villages eastern edge. Then, al-
most overnight, it was gone. Taped to the door
was an eviction notice, claiming $18,788.07 in
unpaid rent, signed by P. Douglas McCraw.
O
n a sunny, salt-sprayed afternoon on
Galt Ocean Mile, Adam White reclined
on a black leather couch in the new
location of Gallery 101. A stocky man
with silvered hair and a taste for gossip,
White expressed no regrets about packing
up his gallery and leaving FAT Village. He
was in good company: Alex Benitez, the art-
ist who moved out in December, set up shop
in a retail space a block away from Whites
new gallery. Rachel Henriques, another
FAT Village artist, joined them in March.
The Galt Mile is a fusty strip along A1A
north of Oakland Park Boulevard, known for
buildings and residents that might have been
glamorous in the 1960s. The neighborhood
shares a name with John Galt, Ayn Rands in-
dustrialist hero in Atlas Shrugged. In the novel,
Galt persuades the worlds creative leaders
to go on strike, revolting against a collectivist
society that suppresses individual freedom.
Ive sold more art here in the last three
weeks than I did in six months in FAT Vil-
lage, said White. He said the pedestrian
mall around his gallery, along with a mix of
amenities like a wine bar, restaurants, and
other galleries, made Galt Ocean Mile a more
pleasant place for people to buy art. He also
cited the economic benefits: I was paying
$3,800 a month in my old space, and now Im
paying a third of that. White and McCraw
would not discuss details of the eviction.
At Galt Ocean Plaza, the shopping center
where Gallery 101 is now located, busi-
nesses include old independent restaurants,
hair salons, boutiques, a cigar store. The
diagonal parking spaces are filled with Volvo
sedans and old Cadillacs. Parking costs 50
cents an hour. Still, White said it had some-
thing that FAT Village lacked: people.
In 2010, the Art of Alex Studio was one
of the most prolific and visible artists shops
in FAT Village, occupying the corner of
the intersection opposite Fiorettis shop.
Alex Benitez painted swirling, cartoonish
masses of color that hung on prominent
display during art walks; he painted wooden
signs saying FAT Village and attached
them to stop-sign posts along the avenue.
Ultimately, the bottom line won. For sure
I gave up the hip factor, said Benitez. In
the end, if Im in a mall and can sell more art,
Ill give up hipness any day of the week.
Benitez said city codes prevented the art-
ists work from spilling out into the street.
Even those stop-sign paintings he did wor-
ried a few of his FAT Village neighbors, who
didnt want a bad relationship with the city.
Similar codes prohibit vendors from setting
up tables at art walks, and tenants are not al-
lowed to hang large signs off the buildings.
Slowly, people are moving forward any-
way: Local graffiti artists have been painting
murals on the backs of the warehouses, fac-
ing the railroad tracks and the Regal Trace
housing complex. McCraw and Leah Brown,
of 18 Rabbit Gallery, are planning murals on
the front sides, facing the avenue. McCraw
recently received a set of street-improvement
grants to install glass doors and roll-down
aluminum grates over the entrances.
The tenants all agree that a vibrant-looking
streetscape would draw more traffic. Still,
they find it hard to reach consensus. Jim Ham-
mond, owner of the Puppet Network pup-
petry and scenery shop in FAT Village, said
somebody needs to take the lead if the appear-
ance of the neighborhood is going to change,
even if permission from the city doesnt come.
Maybe the artists have just been
too well-behaved, he said.
W
hile Fioretti welded, another noctur-
nal transformation was taking place.
A hundred feet up First Avenue, light
poured out of a small door at the front
of the largest warehouse, now emptied of
artwork. At the center of it, in a small leather
club chair, sat McCraw. He ate takeout pizza
under spotlights as workers in black moved
velvet screens into place all around him.
He had been talking about this for months.
The workers were setting up the display
and seating areas for an expensive whiskey-
tasting event, sponsored by Dewars. Very
slick, very high-end, cooed McCraw as he
spoke about the event. McCraw liked the
whiskey-tasting because it paid good money,
and it would bring the attention of >> p16
Warehouse Renaissance from p12
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well-heeled Floridians with disposable in-
comes. But some FAT Village tenants didnt
think this move toward money and luxury
and away from direct support of the arts was
a good idea. Was McCraw selling out his
goal of giving creativity a place to flourish?
Hes renting to a gym and a tequila
company now, said White in his new gal-
lery. That has nothing to do with the arts
in any way, shape, or form. He cant figure
out what he wants to do with the space.
In fact, McCraws vision for the village
is hard to pin down, in part because hes a
businessman who has learned to hedge his
bets. After getting stuck with a couple of
blocks of warehouses he can barely afford,
McCraw will not act on idealism alone. When
first asked by New Times about his vision
for the future of FAT Village, McCraw was
vague. Well, Id like to get a couple more
high-tech companies in here... He trailed off.
When asked again a few days later, he
painted a more detailed picture. I see murals,
lighting on the street. Boutique restaurants,
maybe a microbrewery. Tech companies, art-
ists, studios... Id like to see it be permanent,
not just something thats around until the
rents go up. But you have to get critical mass.
McCraw seems to have decided that the pos-
sibility of a pedestrian-based creative district
is worth the money hes sunk into it. But unless
artists stay and people visit, calling something a
creative district wont accomplish anything.
One of the neighborhoods newest ten-
ants, with a gleaming space anchoring the
north end of First Avenue, was run by Mc-
Craws idealistic younger counterpart.
Travis Webster is 29 years old, a clean-cut
young professional though hed cringe
at the term yuppie with long brown hair.
A self-described business guy, he helped
found the Collide Factory, which he calls a
creative and collaborative idea incubator.
Like McCraw, he has business acumen thats
stretched to its limits by the scale of his plans.
In the summer of 2010, Webster and a few
friends, including local singer/songwriter
and coffee-shop owner Ryan Alexander, con-
verted the trapezoidal warehouse into a slick,
air-conditioned space dominated by two
shipping containers expertly covered in graf-
fiti. Webster needed the space for his busi-
ness, Collide Brand Partners, which would
provide marketing and branding services. He
decided to turn that into something far big-
ger by renting out desks to other creatives.
I thought, what if my office was ev-
erybodys office? said Webster, sitting at a
table made of rough-hewn wooden planks
that he and his friends nailed together.
There was an element of subdued terror
in Websters voice when he arrived in the
empty space after a cathartic bike ride on an
afternoon in late February. He said he had put
nearly all of his money into the space, and it
was still too early to know if the pipeline of
clients he envisioned would flow though the
Collide Factory, enabling him to continue
paying his rent and hosting shows or con-
certs during art walks. Im going to wait,
he said. I look forward to the day when its
actively working and breathing by itself.
A
fter Fioretti stopped welding and Mc-
Craw went home for the night, as props
and scenery sat tucked away in dark
corners, a freight train headed north
on the railroad tracks. It passed workshops
and studios and the wood-chipped remnants
of Starting Over. It passed the relics of false
starts, the vaulted space of the big warehouse,
and the gym that has nothing to do with art.
The train engine hummed and the boxcars
rolled, clack-clack, clack-clack, over the
joints, and finally, it went by the graffiti-clad
back of the Collide Factory, a testament to
optimism at the end of the block. The lights
were off; the silver overhead doors were
drawn down and locked. The space waited
for people, and miles away on that Febru-
ary night, Webster waited for a day when
his project his huge, messy, all-too-real
project by the tracks could sustain itself.
Webster had recently taken stock of the
inventory that had cost nearly all of his money.
We need two more desks, a couple of chairs,
he remarked. We have to finish what we
started. Otherwise, this is just a big warehouse.
Less than two months later, on April 14, sad
news would appear on Websters Twitter feed:
Friends, I have officially closed the doors
at Collide Factory FAT Village, due to over-
whelming complications. He would move to
Orlando, leaving behind FAT Village for good.
The train rolled away into the dis-
tance. All around the neighborhood, there
was silence, and darkness, and space.
Stefan.Kamph@BrowardPalmBeach.com
Warehouse Renaissance from p14 Top: Doug McCraw owns most of the build-
ings in FAT Village. Bottom: After a dispute
about rent, Adam White moved to a cheaper
and busier space at Galt Ocean Mile.
Photos by Michael McElroy