FAT Village Struggles to Create an Arts District in Culture-Starved Broward

"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. McCraw's developer friend, Alan Hooper, was planning the Avenue Lofts, a set of high-rise condominiums just to the south along Andrews 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 theatrical prop manufacturing shop that employed recovering drug and alcohol abusers. It was called Starting Over Enterprises. Despite its good works, Starting Over was soon moving 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.

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More About

• Paul Fioretti
• P. Douglas McCraw
• Doug McCraw
• Visual Arts
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

The tracks. It seems like such a cliché, 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 some of the mostly white artists and shopkeepers in FAT Village will watch them with suspicion. The intersection at First and Fifth has cleaned up considerably — "crack central," 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 studio 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 didn't buy anything that day.

McCraw's dream, at the beginning of the century, was to build FAT Village into a technology workplace. The name — an acronym for "Flagler Arts and Technology," 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. Tenants lost money, and McCraw was stuck with warehouses he couldn't 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. There's 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 can't afford to be a philanthropist by renting spaces to starving 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. It's more than anything I imagined in the beginning."

Saturday night. Meredith Lasher sat in a director's 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 Women's 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 glitters near the ceiling. Near the back, there's 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 doesn't need to make money from the people who drink its wine.

FAT Village wasn't crowded on this Saturday 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 Miami's Wynwood or West Palm's Antiques Row. With Hula-Hooping competitions 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.