Blauner said that if the Point could recruit the artists, he would lease several 400-square-foot studio spaces to them for $375 a month. This allows them to stay in the neighborhood.''Ībout a year and a half ago, officials at the Point contacted the landlord, Max Blauner, and asked him if he would be willing to lease the space in the building, which is at 1241 Lafayette Avenue, to artists. A lot of artists in this neighborhood were working out of their homes for years, and they needed larger spaces. ''And there was a vacuum here, lots of space waiting to be used. ''Artists love a vacuum,'' said Paul Lipson, the executive director of the community center, the Point Community Development Corporation. Now, according to both the landlord and the community center, what was once a useless hulk has become both a financial and an artistic success. The deal was that a neighborhood community center would agree to recruit artists to lease long-vacant space in the 365,000-square-foot warehouse, if the landlord would donate part of the space to a dance company affiliated with the community center. But now, after years of dormancy, the Hunts Point warehouse has been brought back to life through, of all things, the barter system. At its peak in the early 1960's, the American Bank Note Company building in the Bronx was quite literally a capitalist machine, churning out five million pieces of paper each day, including currency and half the securities certificates for the New York Stock Exchange.
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