The Waterloo Road area has always been a friendly place for artists. Now a new $500,000 program will provide small loans to artists in order to help them buy and renovate homes in the growing East Side arts and entertainment district. The program will also allow artists to receive grants for neighborhood projects.
A Cleveland advocacy group, the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, received half of the $500,000 budget from Leveraging Investments in Creativity, based in New York. The national, foundation-backed initiative seeks to build support for artists and strengthen their contributions to society.
The partnership, which will raise the balance of the $500,000, then picked Waterloo in a citywide competition among nonprofit neighborhood development groups. Although data did show that other areas had higher concentrations of artists by neighborhood, according to Seth Beattie, the partnership’s strategic initiative director, the judges saw a chance for Waterloo’s proposed Artists in Residence program to “play a transformative role.”
In recent years, painters, musicians, other artists and people who want to be near them have moved onto Waterloo, an area that straddles Eash 156th Street just north of Interstate 90. Part of the attraction is the mix of older ethnic residents, minorities and suburban expatriates.
R.A. “Rafiq” Washingtn, a poet, author, guitarist, drummer and resident in Waterloo says, “It kind of reminds me of a New York borough.”
He says he is excited about Artists in Residence, hoping the assistance and Cleveland’s affordable housing prices will woo friends from larger markets.
