When painter and printmaker Siena Pullinzi first took up residency in The Hungerford Building in 2021, it was a dream.
“From when I was in college, I would go to First Fridays, and it was a goal to have an art studio in the Hungerford, because it was just so pivotal to be in that place,” she said. “I was awestruck.”
To Pullinzi, the Hungerford was the center of Rochester arts. A vibrant ecosystem of painters, sculptors, craftsmen and virtually all other varieties of creatives scattered across the four floors of the repurposed factory building.
“I just viewed it as this central community for what Rochester stands for as an art community,” she continued. “I don’t know if it is that anymore.”
The dream is now dead, killed by the hands of a Staten Island real estate investor. In 2022, Peter Hungerford purchased the building from former owner Dennis Maguire for $7.7 million. Hungerford, a controversial figure in Rochester real estate who was previously sued by the city in 2018 for code violations at his residential properties, spurred fear in artists that rents would go up and the building’s studios would be vacated in favor of high-dollar renters.
But nearly three years later, the reality is the building has instead rapidly deteriorated under Hungerford (a distant relative of the building’s namesake, J. Hungerford Smith). Water leaks openly from pipes throughout the building. Trash and human excrement litter the hallways. Homeless encampments have popped up in the building, and the scent of stagnant water and mold is omnipresent.
Most studios are now dark, their inhabitants diffusing outward into various venues around the city: The Refinery building on Exchange Street, the nearby Anderson Arts Building on North Goodman Street or their own spaces.
Pullinzi, for example, now runs her studio out of a spare room in her and her partner’s apartment.
“I think it dented or made a large hole in the community with the lack of space that we have for studios already,” Pullinzi said. “It was kind of the only space.”
The loss of a community
Danielle Pagani and Brynn Capwell hosted their pottery club Wheel & Slab at the Hungerford for several years before finally making an exit during summer 2024. They were evicted from one space under circumstances Pagani described as “random” with little notice, and no cause given.
Hungerford claimed he had never evicted a tenant from the building for no reason.
It was a hard choice to leave, both for losing the Hungerford’s artist network and for the difficulty finding a new home.
“But honestly, for the price, I wasn’t expecting it to be five-star accommodations,” Pagani said. “It is one of the least expensive places in Rochester.”
“It was,” Capwell interjected.
“Yeah, it was,” Pagani said.
For startup organizations like Wheel & Slab, The Hungerford Building’s benefit was twofold: It offered access to a broad range of artists and a vibrant community to engage with both each other and the public. But it was also relatively affordable, giving young artists a chance to pursue their passion as a business.
“The most important thing to us was having a community, and building a community in our studio,” Pagani said. “For us, it just didn’t feel like it was possible.”
Wheel & Slab shopped around a while for a commercial space that could accommodate their studio. It was a difficult pursuit. Spaces that were affordable did not fit the bill of what was needed for a large-scale pottery studio, and those that did were far too expensive.
The pair eventually ended up at an 8,000 square-foot space on Mt. Hope Ave.
But for Pagani and Capwell, the loss of The Hungerford meant more than just the loss of simple studio space. It was a signifier that a city which bills itself as a “city of the arts” was unable to save one of the purest incubators for the city’s art community.
“I think art is a catalyst for change, and if you look at any example of a community that’s being pulled up, it’s typically artists that start out in that community,” Capwell said. “It drives technology, it drives community change. Without that art, you’re really at risk of stagnating.”
A portion of the artists who exited the Hungerford ended up at the nearby Anderson Arts Building. That building, next door to Village Gate, has also long been a hub of the local arts community.
Lynne Feldman has called the Anderson Arts Building home for her studio for over 30 years. She said while it’s sad to see the decline of the Hungerford, there are still homes for artists in the community.
“We’re a tight community, and that was a wonderful place,” Feldman said. “I mean, I feel very lucky. I like my building better, but for a younger artist starting out there were less expensive studios (at The Hungerford).”
Lingering at the Hungerford
The Hungerford Building is mostly a ghost town now. An eerie silence permeates its cavernous hallways, each footstep and splashing water droplet punctuating the ever-present quiet in the building.
At the time of the sale to Maguire, the Hungerford boasted about 170 tenants, from painters and sculptors to woodworkers and small shops. Back then, the community was so vibrant that there was a waiting list for new tenants to take up space in the building.
Today, only a handful remain. Many tenants bailed in 2024, as the conditions in the building rapidly deteriorated.
Nancy Coons of Muze Gallery is an abstract nude artist, painting human visages in wood and using the natural knots in the grain as representation of nipples and genitalia. She’s held a space in the Hungerford for 18 years, and remains in her studio on the second floor of the building.
“I don’t want to leave this place, but at the same time, what do you do?” Coons said.
She remembers the era before Hungerford’s purchase as a period when the building was filled with energy. Though the building was aged and rife with quirks, it was safe, maintained and cleaned.
These days, the hall outside Coons’s studio is marked by deep puddles in the hardwood, water pooling from dripping pipes overhead. Mice have become a regular presence in her studio.
Two floors above Coons is Godfrey Muller Studios. Just outside the doors sits a couch and a smattering of clothing and trash, remnants of a site where someone had set up camp in the building.
Owner Jeffrey Mueller has done repairs of stained glass out of the space for 32 years. He, for now, is staying — but largely for one reason.
“Look at all the shit I got in here,” Mueller said, standing in the doorway of his studio.
He remembers a bustling art community at the Hungerford just a few years ago.
“You had a waiting line for people to get in here,” Mueller said. “First Fridays, Second Saturdays, people could come in here to buy your stuff. They’re all gone.”
The Hungerford Building is actually a collection of different structures, with the worst signs of decay seen in the eastern portion of the site, where most of the artist studios were rented.
A few doors down from the building that houses Coons and Mueller, in the front section of the plaza, is Main Street Clay. Formerly occupying a studio in the other building, Jennifer Buckley and Kate Hevers still toil away in the studio. Traffic has dropped to an all-time low.
For example, during the First Friday events in years past, Main Street Clay’s rent was usually covered just from those sales. On First Friday in January, the studio did not make a single sale.
“It’s the community we miss the most,” Buckley said. “The building is a building, and we like our old building, but the community is the issue.”
Buckley and Hevers both said any hope for repairs under Peter Hungerford’s ownership is mostly gone. He’s largely off the grid with tenants, and the deterioration only seems to be accelerating.
During the time this story was being reported, for example, someone came into the building and attempted to break into several studios after successfully breaking into a room containing the keys to every studio.
At the time, there were no functioning locks on the building’s exterior doors.
“He doesn’t answer anymore, and with the loss of the community, we just don’t have the power,” Hevers said. “We don’t have the numbers.”
Hungerford’s explanation of the building’s rapid deterioration is that he was unable to attract the kind of high-dollar tenants he expected to use as the main economic driver.
He also blamed the city for increasing his property taxes and the artist community for being unwilling to pay for his planned premium-cost spaces.
“The goal, at that point in time, was to keep it entirely artist-focused,” Hungerford said. “There was virtually no interest from the artist community in collaborating on the basement-level plans. Then, on the higher floors with more windows and more attractive layouts, there was no interest from the artist community to pay a little bit more in rent for those spaces.”
The city of Rochester, meanwhile, offered a written statement. In it, the city said it had little power to enforce change at the building beyond issuing code enforcement violations. If Hungerford ignores those, they can take him to court.
Since Hungerford bought the building, it has accrued 22 code violations, 11 of which are health and safety related. Three violations for trash were logged since CITY/WXXI began reporting on the building in early January. Hungerford has been fined a total of $1,200 in the past year.
The basement level plans never saw the light of day, as Hungerford began working on renovations without a permit and received a stop work order from the city.
At Main Street Clay, Buckley and Hevers have been plotting an exit for a while. But while small artist studios found easier homes, it’s the larger spaces which struggle the most to find accommodating commercial spaces.
“We know where other artists have gone, and we looked at a couple of spots, but for our particular situation, it’s really hard for us to walk away from this,” Buckley said. “If we were in the (main artist) building, we would have been long gone.”
Gino Fanelli is a reporter at WXXI/CITY. He can be reached at gfanelli@wxxi.org.
This article appears in Dec 1-31, 2024.
