The Paducah Effect

At first, Mark Palmer’s paintings looked like an homage to Joan Miró, the Spanish surrealist: spare, with lots of white space and little dots and dashes of red and black. He lived in a condo in the bustling Adams Morgan district of Washington, D.C., and worked on his art when he wasn’t at his job as director of marketing at the Ritz-Carlton or later, as a freelance hotel- management consultant.

Then one day he quit and moved to Paducah, Kentucky, population 26,000. He renovated a 4,000-square-foot brick Victorian home and opened a gallery, and his paintings grew large and crowded with color.

“I was painting small watercolors,” says the 45-year-old, who is originally from Buffalo, New York. “Now I’m doing larger oil paintings. 

I’m starting to incorporate writing in my work, and to reveal more. You have no anonymity here, and I think being more exposed has come out in my work.”

Palmer has plenty of neighboring colleagues: At least 70 artists have moved to this small community in western Kentucky in the past seven years. Paducah’s seductiveness is a recent and entirely engineered phenomenon. The city-sponsored Artist Relocation Program gives artists financial incentives to come to town, including fully financing the purchase and rehabilitation of historic homes, like the one Palmer bought.

Other cities are so eager to emulate Paducah’s success that the two city employees who cooked up the scheme have started a consulting business. The Paducah Guys, as they bill themselves, are Thomas Barnett, 55, now the director of city planning, and Mark Barone, 47, an artist-turned-planning consultant. Barone, who arrived in 1989, and Barnett, who came in 1994, were drawn to this river town halfway between St. Louis, Mo., and Nashville, Tenn., by a historic neighborhood called Lowertown set near the confluence of the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers and filled with Queen Anne and craftsman houses.

Like many historic city centers in this country, Paducah had been neglected for years, overrun with dilapidated buildings, some boarded up, many littered with broken bottles—a commonplace of aging small cities. As owners moved out to the suburbs over the last century, landlords and renters moved in, and no one wanted to—or could afford to—spend the increasingly large sums required to fix up the properties.

Barone, who had spent years renovating his own home, wearied of watching the traffic in and out of a drug house across the street, so in 1999, he went to see the mayor. Around the same time, Barnett, then an assistant city planner, had been thinking about how to revitalize the neighborhood he loved; he had young children and worried about raising a family in the area. At first, Barone just wanted the city to pass tougher building codes. But getting laws passed was one thing; getting anyone to enforce them was another. Barone read of a plan to bring artists to a small town called Rising Sun in Indiana. With the backing of then-mayor Albert Jones, the two neighborhood allies hopped in a rental car to check it out.

Rising Sun, as Barnett describes it, was so small, “you could see the corn fields from Main Street.” But the town had a great idea: invite artists—who could envision how to beautify a haggard structure with great bones—to rebuild its Main Street and, by attracting tourists with a hankering for watercolors and landscapes, revive its economy. “We saw that it was something we could steal and do a lot better,” says Barnett.

Barnett tried recruiting Barone to the city ranks for this project. Barone demurred: He was an artist, not a planner. Months passed, and little changed in Lowertown. Barnett knew this program would only work if Barone were involved: “He had actually done what we were going to be asking people to do: Come to Paducah, fix up an old place, make your art.”

Eventually he wooed Barone to the nether-precincts of municipal government, and in summer 2000, the two set about enticing the artists of the world to Paducah. They took out ads in art magazines throughout the country. One read, “Artists Wanted,” and portrayed Vincent Van Gogh holding a prison number. Bill Renzulli, a doctor in Maryland who was looking for a place to retire and paint landscapes, saw the ads. He drove to Kentucky with his wife one bleak January weekend in 2001. “It was dark, it looked like just grain elevators and industrial places, and we were both thinking, ‘what the hell are we doing here?’” Renzulli recalls.

But then the Renzullis saw houses in Lowertown that weren’t just cheap, they were practically free: the fruits of the Artists Relocation Program’s inaugural year. With an initial budget in 2000 of $46,000 from the city, Barone and Barnett had raised additional seed money of $100,000 to purchase seven dilapidated homes to entice the first batch of artists. Because they had run out of money to restore it, the local preservation group sold one 1850 brick home to Barone and Barnett for $1,200—about $400 more than the cost to simply raze it—and the pair put an additional $70,000 into stabilizing it for occupancy.

The duo convinced the local Paducah Bank to float low-interest loans for the then-hypothetical artists who would come, buy the homes, and spruce them up. The loans would not be contingent on an appraisal. For professional services—like architectural consultations and landscaping—Paducah offered a $2,500 grant. To apply, artists only had to attest that they were working and serious about their art.

Mark Palmer made his first trip from D.C. to Paducah about one year after the Renzullis, in January 2002. He left unsure of what he’d seen.

“I thought, god, can I leave D.C. and my friends for a small Southern town? But I felt a certain energy, and a connection with Mark Barone. He said, ‘If I were selling my work in D.C., I’d think twice about leaving, too.’ But then, under his breath he said, ‘I know you’re coming.’” Palmer acquired that 1850s home for $1. He was the fifth artist to move, arriving in September 2002.

Today, Paducah’s arts community has blossomed. It has its own web TV station, thanks to Aynex Mercado, who moved to Paducah three years ago after finishing college in Massachusetts. Mercado is a quilter who grew up in Puerto Rico and, at 29, is one of the youngest artists around. Her web dispatches of openings and parties show up on her vlog, or video blog, artinlowertown.blogspot.com. In one video taken at the local coffeehouse, Etcetera, and in other shots at the annual Art and Music Festival held in May, partygoers seem to be having an unpretentious good time.

“Everybody’s from the area except the artists. The Southern culture was a little bit of a shock,” Mercado says. “You would go to buy a gallon of milk, and it would take an hour because everyone said hi and would tell you their life story.”

She says it has helped her work to have the older artists around to answer her questions, and the architecture has inspired her quilt designs. Paducah is home to the Museum of the American Quilter’s Society (as well as a contemporary art center, an independent film theater, and coming soon, an art school), and during the annual quilt show and contest, she becomes a local celebrity. “There’s no place I’d rather be,” says Mercado.

It doesn’t hurt, either, that the home she originally bought and fixed up for $100,000 recently sold for $300,000. Other buildings are listed today in Lowertown for $200,000 to $300,000. (A handful of free fixer-uppers for artists remain; others are available with the cut-rate financing as an incentive.)

The Artist Relocation Program is an emphatic success. Tourism revenues in McCracken County, which is composed of Paducah and its suburbs, increased by nearly $10 million in 2002 (the second year of the Artist Relocation Program), from $129.5 million to $139.3 million. The Chicago Tribune, ABCNews.com, and Governing have all written about Paducah. Instead of broken bottles and boarded windows, the town has a café, a yoga studio, and monthly group art openings. The annual budget for the Artist Relocation Program has blossomed to $300,000.

Barone and Barnett now consult for places like Des Moines, Iowa; Tupelo, Michigan; and Granite City, Illinois. But in truth, even with all of the Paducah Guys’ insider tips, a few transplanted artists can’t save most city cores from decades of neglect. Paducah thrived because of two passionate advocates and a mayor willing to back a creative risk with cash. Even Barone, whose livelihood comes from promising Paducah-like transformations, says that cities can rarely surmount their own bureaucracy to let artists have their way with an entire neighborhood.

“Every time we go into a community that wants to do this, it starts at a very high level,” says Barone. “They don’t understand the arts, and they are reluctant to relinquish power. They think you are going to get this stuff done by committee, and it just never gets done. It was just the two of us, and we really believed what we were doing, and they left us alone.”

Barnett echoes Barone: “You had two guys that love the area and work really well together, that knew the arts, construction, financing, and had the vision. We are also pretty good salesmen.”

The artists that moved to Paducah were the ones that improved it. Other mayors and city planners want the Paducah effect, but they have to start thinking more like artists and less like bureaucrats. They may have to act a little crazy—say, giving away buildings to anyone who pledges to make art.

Barone now lives in Syracuse, New York, where the university hired him last year to help transform a blighted area of the city center. He is cautiously optimistic about a turnaround. It’s a much bigger project than Paducah—starting with $13.8 million in seed money from Syracuse University—in a primarily commercial area, with more players and more state regulations. Barone’s brainstorm for Syracuse is to make it a kind of United Nations of the arts: He is arranging for the embassies of Sweden, Ireland, and India to send their nation’s best artists to Syracuse—just the kind of wacky, inspired idea that turned Paducah from graying Southern river town to national symbol of arts-driven urban revitalization.