yo its merkin on the scene. its nice to feel needed. live work spaces as i have seen are not legal(zoning stuff). there are veery affordable live work spaces through out lower and mid kensington and also in port richmont. usually the problem is that people get ahold of them and basically someone either buys his/her own building and then the apt is up for grabs and usually that is taken by a friend. that said, this is for the affordable ones ($.30/ft-$.50/ft). there is a huge building on berks and cecil b that has been renovating this last year and we called when we first moved here and it was $1.00/ft.
here is a building that is around the corner from me
http://philadelphia.craigslist.org/off/86368955.html
it seems that they are marking their prices up due to the demand. call him anyway i think that he ownes more buildings in the area.
the other option is to get a really cheap long term lease up here in the hood and renovate youself. if you are handy, as most of self sufficient artist are, then get a circular saw and some drywall and get choppin.

we are leaving our 2500ft2/$900month studio because we are buy three building in brewerytown that we will renovate and rent live and work in. unfortunately my potter friend mike connelly will be movving in here this fall.

just as a reminder. these spaces are not all the greatest. they are huge and usually not very well insulated so utility bills can be astonoshing. we keep our heat at 55 and in jan feb the gas bill was on average $250. i dont have a heater in my studio and i work in there eeveery day 9-5 including weekends. i was going to buy a heater if we were going to stay any longer and i have suggested that to mike.

the other option that one has is to live/work in lolibs and pay way more and keep a false sence of safety( i feel that it is safer up here, your not a target and my neighbors know i aint got no money.02)you would be perfectly fine alone up here if need be. just keep your sences of you.

i have seen the kensington studio lofts up there on abmber street. i had mixed feelings about them. they are layed out like any rehab apt and they dont utilize they massive space, too many walls. the advantage of them is that they were constructed by DOMUS. very well made and have all sorts of advantages like a garbage shoot, central air/heat. the hood isnt that great but nore are some of mine. you should check it out. from what we sawit wasnt designed for a full time studio artist. you basically got a living room that you could work in with two bedrooms on the side. the price has gone up and people havnt moved in yet. they where asking 500 when we looked at them last year when they were putting up walls for a 2 bedroom apt. i think that when people are living there the scene will be great. that area of fishtown/kensington is awsome and if we could of afforded it we would of bought one of those warehouses, maybe someday when things go "pop". i know lots of people who have resently bough homes near there and they are great peeople. props to the Rocket Cat! i think that the rent is desent if the rent is no more than .50/ft.
if it is somewhere around 1.00/ft i would check out the place at cecil b. and 5th they are much better.

my last and final suggestion that i alays offer to friends who want cheap studio/live spaces is find a neighborhood that you are compfortable living in (like lower kensington) and rent a two story house will a basement. kathy and i almost rented one on mutter ( just next door to where we live now). essensially it is the same as moving to the kensington work space. you would get 2 bedrooms and a large living room. the rent would be better. if you look hard enough you can find em for $450/month around here. craigslist is the best for any of these options. make sure that you look in the commercial listings. that is sometimes where they hide the live/work so that they dont get too publized.

these are .:work only:. spaces but i live next door. i do maintanace for my landlords and also show them if people are interested. just to give you an idea of pricing in the hood.


good luck

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where waspresentation and what else did they say?

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i havnt talked to her yet about it. i might see her tomorrow at a friends house.....

bhineyho! i just realized that was you! you know all this crap, you have heard me ramble off on tangents to many times. are you coming to aaron and jacelynes tomorrow? im making cream puffs:rolling_: did you contact keiffus about that apt next to keiko ?

we need to go on a long bike ride soon. i have been glazing in my studio for too long and this chicago show is in two weeks :cussing:

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merkin: do you know of any loft space f/s in Kenso/Fishtown/Port Richmond?

Raw space is preferred. Thanks

loft meaning?

i have looked all around and there are plenty of interesting buildings and if the price is right anyone will sell anything. ****, if you had 3 mill our landlords would consider selling their 50,000 ft2 landmine. we looked as far as alegheny for warehouses, talk obout raw. i know that a potter that i just meet a few weeks ago bought a peice of a larger warehouse that she now lives in at 111 norris for $300,000. its about 5,000 ft2 with a full basement. she then bought a bay for parking next door for $75,000. right now i couldnt imagine paying that much but what ever.after you buy a place like that you need to make it livable and safe. kathy and i took many bike rides to find warehouses and they are not cheap and if they are cheapish they may not have a roof and a 5,000 ft2 roof in not cheap. the last one they put on this building cost $40,000 and that only lasts 40 years.

i wish that we had only moved here 10 years ago and could of bought something here when no one wanted these buildings. if you do the research on there large textile mills in kensington they bought them usually for around $40,000 or less. granted the roof would cost more than the building itself and i guess thats what people thought back then too.

we just met one of our neighbors tonight who is a close friend of our landlords. the building that he has been working on for the last year is an amazing 2 story firehouse that was is bad shape when he got it but he is an architectual conservationist and has been making it into an amazing home and studio. there was a huge hydro ponic operation in it before they got busted. i wish we had the $$$ to stuff like that. we would have bought the gretz brewery on oxford and germantown ave. he has lots of great stuff from restorations in his shop and we are doing a trade for this elaborate white brass shower thing that almost looks like a mid evil torturing devise. he aslo has some left over slate from his renovation that we can use for our bathroom. im so excited.

i just found ou that bardo pond lives around the corner from me. i used to listen to them when i was in college.

what is your plan? how much $$$ do you have and when you get the shithole how much are you willing to put into it. alot of the buildings up here are in really bad shape and right now the prices are way up.

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Meaning converted warehouse type space. 14'+ ceilings and big windows.

I'm not looking to spearhead a conversion project..rather buy a space in a building that has been legally converted to living space...Just like Miles and Generalis did in the 80s. Id prefer raw space, with just electric/plumbing roughed out.

Ya know?

i dont think so, at least not yet. our landlord wanted to do that for this building but it was going to cost an astonishing amount of money to put in sprinklers. i talked to one of the owners of the crane building when they where putting up walls there and he said to put in sprinklers there was going to be in the millions. code here in philly is pretty difficult to comply with in order to get these old buildings legaly livable. i heard that it had something to do with ahuge fire downtown next to city hall years ago that made code in commercial buildings difficult.

i only know of people who have found interesting building and made the best of it and im not sure if it is legal or not.

14+ ceilings? like 30? i think ours are 12 or 13 and i coulndnt imagin dealing with the energy cost with all that extra cubic footage.

actually come to think about it there was a listing on craigslist awhile back that said something about lofts for sale on cecil b and 7(?). i drive that route almost every day and didnt understand where it could be. i figured that it was a typo or something cause there inst anything at that corner that would remotely resemble a conversion there. also the price was wicked high, somewhere in the 300,000s.

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Yeah, The Meridian Plaza fire.
http://www.iklimnet.com/hotelfires/meridienplaza.html

I heard there were still some immense factory/warehouse structures farther north, around the Hunting Park area east of Broad. Guess you could really be ahead of the curve and buy in there.

some of those warehouse are massive up there. maybe that will be our next project someday one step at a time. if we can make this new place somewhere artists can live and work and it works out finacially we might consider doing something like that someday if the price is right. we had looked a sprinklered warehouse up near algheny and 5th streets. i think that it was half a mill though and that is way out of our budget. if whay people say is right about the bubble then the time will come again when no one will want the warehouses as far up as algheny. i like the area around the uhaul at algheny and 7th.

i like this area
http://cml.upenn.edu/sitefinder/psfS...14002700&TAB=1
http://cml.upenn.edu/sitefinder/psfS...14002750&TAB=1

this one sjust around the corner here in fishtown
http://cml.upenn.edu/sitefinder/psfS...02001701&TAB=1

heres a niice port richmond warehouse
http://cml.upenn.edu/sitefinder/psfS...56002000&TAB=1

this building sold in 2001 for $35,000!
http://cml.upenn.edu/sitefinder/psfS...09002905&TAB=1

this one is in a neighborhood with coblr streets on the edge of fishtown
http://cml.upenn.edu/sitefinder/psfS...58001626&TAB=1

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Thanks for the links. I love that building on Broad (not the area) and that one on Tulip could be a prime conversion.

Port Richmond has a bunch of warehouses, and really the 'hood isnt that bad. I was driving around the other night writing addresses etc.