In many instances, these arts infrastructure projects are announced as integral components of urban revitalization efforts targeted at under-utilized and crime-associated downtowns. From Albuquerque to Albany, development professionals and concerned citizens are closely examining the track records of these large-scale arts infrastructure projects in a continual effort to identify precisely what level of investment and project planning is best suited to their individual downtown revitalization efforts.

Small towns and cities with modest populations are also facing their own downtown revitalization dilemmas. With mountains of good intentions, civic leaders from Quincy, IL to Moscow, ID are grappling with the same beasts that their big-city peers are confronting: the underutilization, deterioration and even destruction of the downtown architectural legacies handed down to today's leaders by community founding fathers.

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As much as we profess admiration for small town lifestyles and values, and as often as Hollywood mythologizes these values in films like "Pleasantville" and "American Graffiti", the underlying truth is that until fairly recently the continent's small towns and cities were in dire straights when considering what strategies could be used to stabilize, let alone revitalize, their downtown business districts. The flat side of the cyclical natures of industries ranging from extractive to natural resources, manufacturing, maritime, agriculture and transportation had decimated local and regional tax bases. On top of that, downtown vacancies tied into regional shopping mall and suburban sprawl development had cherry picked community cornerstones ranging from department stores to accounting firms. Even Mike Tyson couldn't handle Evander Holyfield's one-two combinations, and for small town civic leaders these economic blows were a fast track toward a third-round knockout.

But then, just as places like Telluride, CO; Beaufort, SC; LaConner, WA; and Moab, UT were ready to toss their towels into the ring, (after having given up on the prospect of attracting a new Toyota or IBM manufacturing facility), the shifting sands of the continent's arts, outdoor recreation and cultural tourism forces offered these and other small towns and cities a life preserver in the form of newly-defined economic opportunities. Several economic forces came into play at approximately the same time to rebuild local tax bases, restore property values and provide developers and entrepreneurs with investment incentives.

First, improvements in telecommunications and transportation links allowed for two developments: working professionals could reside part or full-time in small towns yet remain connected to their home offices and clients; and entrepreneurs could utilize these same telecommunications links to expand their sales beyond the reach of their immediate landscape.

Second, the development of new sport trends coupled with vast improvements to the infrastructure of existing sport and outdoor recreation facilities provided weekending, daytripping and vacationing sport patrons with the incentives for traveling longer distances from their metropolitan area homes to participate in their favored activities. Better highways and more accessible airports allowed these patrons an ease of access rarely found in previous years.

Third, important changes related to the arts had a dramatic impact on the economic opportunities and community impact of the arts in small towns and cities. The first of these changes resulted from arts professionals and artists leaving metropolitan areas in search of small town safety, affordability and sense of community connectedness. The second change happened when a new generation of art-savvy Americans and Canadians reached their high-earning years and began confidently making significant purchases of art while they traveled outside the reach of urban art galleries.

The combined impact of all three of the above-mentioned "life preserver" economic developments had the result of delivering arts-supportive people with substantial financial resources to small towns and cities, areas where they had not been visible in previous years. In other words, the same types of arts consumers who had in the 1950's made possible the sustained profitability (as seen in their art galleries, real estate values, diversity of restaurants and plethora of interior furnishing stores) of what were once referred to as "art colonies" in places like Carmel, CA; Provincetown, MA; Woodstock, VT; and Key West, FL; had suddenly exploded in number and were lifting a page or two from Jack Kerouac's books in their continent-wide search for new frontiers.

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Instead of using the quaint, but inadequate title of "art colonies" to describe communities where the arts are making substantial contributions in terms of economic development, cultural tourism development, downtown revitalization and the restoration of civic pride and direction, I've coined the phrase "Small Art Town." Unless one is referring to isolated places such as Yaddo in upstate New York or the D.H. Lawrence Ranch in northern New Mexico, the notion that multifaceted economies such as those of Taos, NM; Ojai, CA; Fredericksburg, TX; or Bennington, VT. have anything to do with narrowness of cultural pursuits is romanticized silliness.

The hyper-charged arts economies in places such as Santa Fe, NM; Aspen, CO; Park City, UT; Hilton Head, SC and Asheville, NC support dozens of art galleries selling everything from international-caliber contemporary art to top-shelf wildlife art to serious photography and monumental sculptural works in bronze and aluminum. In Santa Fe's case, the number of art galleries exceeds 200, while in Aspen there's half as many. As for defining the clients patronizing these galleries, in many instances it's vacationing or second/third home owning urbanites who have cut their allegiance to metropolitan area art galleries and have started making their art buying decisions without the obsequious assistance of pasty-skin salespeople wearing $500 eyeglasses and Italian-designed suits (always, of course, in black).

In the same way visual artists and art gallery owners have found it possible in recent years to make a living in places that had never been widely known for supporting the arts, so have performing artists, art center administrators, musicians, writers and theatre directors found small towns and cities to be welcoming, if not always lucrative, places to pursue their career goals. Chamber orchestras, community theatre companies and literary conferences have sprung up from the continental landscape like mushrooms after a spring rain. In many small towns and cities (some with university presences) full orchestras, performing arts centers seating audiences in excess of 1,000, and performing arts presenting organizations capable of booking the same contemporary touring acts that do well in metropolitan area performing art centers, are flourishing.

Several Small Art Towns have channeled their success as outdoor recreation and cultural tourism magnets into projects adding luxurious arts facilities to their community infrastructure. In the past few years alone, places such as Grand Marais, MN; Vail, CO; Ruidoso, NM; Missoula, MT and Park City, UT; have opened performing arts centers whose positive economic impacts have resulted in everything from more meals served in local restaurants to more gallons of gas pumped at local filling stations. Important economic developments associated with these arts scenes are the parallel entrepreneurial investments being made in dozens of communities in terms of art-filled coffeebars, live music nightclubs, artist cooperative galleries, interior design showrooms and high-end crafts galleries. As art scenes improve, so is there vast improvement achieved in both economic opportunity and the quality of life these communities offer residents and visitors.

Many Small Art Towns and cities have capitalized upon their increased demand for arts-oriented facilities and services as vehicles for restoring historic buildings and adapting them for reuse as arts centers. Charlottesville, VA. and Bozeman, MT. have turned their old high schools into vibrant centers that incubate creative field businesses ranging from art creation to web design and poetry chapbook publishing. Salida, CO refitted its power generating plant as an arts center, while Durango, CO turned an old car dealership building into a community arts center. Burlington, VT. did the same with an historic firehouse, while Portland, ME. saved an historic department store by converting it into a downtown arts school. Berkeley Springs, WV. turned an old apple warehouse into its community arts center, while Santa Fe, NM converted a beer warehouse into a center for cutting-edge, international contemporary art.

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Because small towns and cities are faced with more limited municipal financing options than are available to urban areas, their arts-related economic revitalization and infrastructure development efforts usually shy away from large project planning in favor of supporting incremental steps toward creating the type of climates best suited for entrepreneurial investment. Old schools are renovated, percent for the arts programs are instituted, planters and traffic calming devices are installed along city streets, tax incentives are developed to encourage art galleries, artist studios and cafes in certain downtown neighborhoods, and building codes are changed to permit the development of artist live/work space in the unoccupied second and third story levels of downtown buildings.

These strategies may not sound to project developers' ears like the meat-and-potatoes of municipally and privately financed infrastructure modifications that place communities on a fast track toward economic revitalization. But the simple facts are that forces ranging from strong historic preservation groups to politically powerful arts organizations and most importantly, to shallow municipal coffers dictate the need for their development of incremental strategies targeted toward gradual downtown revitalization rather than buying into large-scale project planning. On the positive side, these lower profile steps to encourage arts-related economic development have a high degree of community involvement and tend to reflect the unique demography and culture of each Small Art Town, thereby boosting their long-range prospects for success.

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With their greater affordability and more subtle community impact, its not surprising that small communities and cities across the US and Canada have started paying close attention to the successful strategies employed by Small Art Towns in their efforts to enlist the arts as efficient, long-term drivers for their more broadly-based economic development efforts. It's important to note, however, that in the same way many communities have experienced deep disappointments in their efforts to launch high-profile projects such as business parks targeted toward attracting high-technology firms and small manufacturing concerns, so is there the possibility of over-estimating the reach of arts-related economic impacts in communities seeking to emulate a Small Art Town's success. Time and again, the strategies that seem to work best for communities able to capitalize on the arts as economic development drivers have proven to be incremental ones developed from the street-level activities of artists, arts entrepreneurs and creative field professionals.

Commenting on the subject of arts-related infrastructure projects and community or neighborhood revitalization efforts employing the arts, author Roberta Brandes Gratz, whose latest book is "Cities Back from the Edge: New Life for Downtown" (Wiley & Sons; 1998; $??), said that a broad sense of purpose needs to be incorporated into these plans. "Arts projects with the best chances for success in revitalizing underutilized downtowns are ones that target the local community as well as visitors. Projects that target only the needs of tourists or suburbanites will find it difficult to spread their impact to the local economy or even to businesses down the block and around the corner."

According to Gratz, arts infrastructure projects and revitalization efforts do best when "...they reflect the personality and character of their local place and reject a formulaic approach. Underused buildings and historic theaters that are renovated for an arts-related purpose become creatively woven into a revitalized area and have an excellent opportunity to spawn adjoining entrepreneurial investment in the form of restaurants, art galleries and art schools. When a community targets a certain neighborhood as an arts district what usually results is a revaluation of already existing infrastructure, but even a new project that connects reasonably well with the downtown streetscape can have a good chance for (neighborhood-wide) success provided it relates to its surroundings."

In surveying the continent as a whole, I've arrived at the conclusion that the regional and local impacts of the many dozens of arts-related economic development and revitalization success stories currently underway are resulting in a significant national impact. Small town and city downtowns are discovering new economic opportunities in their quests to become places where the arts and entertainment flourish, thereby giving strength to their efforts at heading off project plans requiring the dismantling of their historic architectural legacies. Unanticipated and, to a surprising degree, unprogrammable arts-related economic development has had far-reaching results ranging from downtown revitalization to the creation of creative-field job opportunities to broader impacts such as the development of cultural tourism economies and rising valuations of underutilized downtown real estate.

Each community successfully using the arts for economic development seems to write their own playbook, developing strategies carefully taking into consideration the nuances of their downtown infrastructure as well as gauging the degree to which their local arts community can absorb and adapt to arts-related infrastructure improvements and expanded public art programs. Equally importantly, communities serious about using the arts as vehicles for economic development always bring artists, arts administrators and art business owners into the earliest stages of their planning efforts, thereby crafting approaches aimed toward achieving community-wide concensus on issues involving the arts.

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Burlington, Vermont When art galleries in this Lake Champlain city began scattering themselves across a wide swath of Burlington's historic downtown, Burlington City Arts (a public sector agency) developed a strategy with two goals: proving to the downtown business community and chamber of commerce that arts-related entrepreneurship was playing a significant role in Burlington's revitalization; and linking the activities of downtown's art galleries and arts-exhibiting cafes in a way that generated undeniable downtown foot traffic and economic activity. The solution is Burlington's monthly Art Walk, an event coordinated and promoted by Burlington City Arts in which these galleries and cafes stage opening receptions for art exhibitions on the same evening each month. During cold weather, Art Walk becomes the Trolley Tour when Burlington City Arts funds the use of a motorized (and heated) trolley to shuttle art lovers amongst these downtown Art Walk sites.

Hot Springs, Arkansas When two art gallery zones began developing six blocks removed from each other along Central Avenue's underutilized south end of Bathhouse Row (part of Hot Springs National Park), property owners along the south end of Central Avenue created the Central Business Improvement District to develop a special tax assessment targeted toward funding street-level improvements in the form of new sidewalks, lighting fixtures, planters, banners and water drainage systems. The BID's improvements, coupled with historic building facade restoration consultation provided through Hot Springs' Main Street USA program, has been so successful that the length of Central Avenue's south end is today filled with restaurants, more than a dozen art galleries, and several interior furnishings stores. Motivated, in part, by Central Avenue's economic development success, Hot Springs has recently restored its nearby historic train depot by turning it into a transportation center, and has completed a 300,000-plus sq. ft. expansion of its convention center.

Loveland, Colorado The state's first percent-for-the-arts program was established here in response to Loveland's unanticipated emergence as the continent's preeminent location for the creation of realist bronze sculpture. Today, Loveland is home to several hundred of the art world's most successful sculptors as well as several bronze foundries, a dozen art galleries, and North America's largest annual sculpture exhibition. Using percent-for-the-arts money (derived from municipally-funded capital improvement projects) to purchase works of bronze sculpture, and combining those purchases with sculptural works donated to the city by artists, benefactors, and the organizers of the annual sculpture exhibition, Loveland has placed dozens of monumental-scale public works of art throughout its downtown and along main thoroughfares. Today, a steady stream of cultural tourists from across the Rocky Mountains region visits Loveland for its self-guided public sculpture tour, an art school has been established, more art galleries and restaurants are continually added to the city's tax rolls, and downtown Loveland's storefronts are filled.

Lawrence, Kansas Historic Massachusetts Street, the vibrant pedestrian core of this university town's economic activity, became the setting for a juried, rotating outdoor sculpture exhibition coordinated by the Lawrence Arts Commission. Using Massachusetts Street's sidewalks as the setting for public works of art has had some interesting results, according to Ann Evans, director of the Lawrence Arts Center. "It's become a focal point for our visitors, and an identifying point for the downtown's supports for the arts. Plus, it's a beautiful enhancement for downtown's already active streets. One of Lawrence's assets is that its a different sort of community, a place that promotes the arts as an important element of what the community offers in terms of its quality of life."

Easton, Maryland It didn't take long for a top-to-bottom renovation of the historic Avalon Theatre, a 1921 art deco masterpiece in downtown Easton, Maryland, to have a broad-reaching and positive impact on this Eastern Shore community's economy. According to Ellen General, president of the Avalon Foundation, the 1989 restoration of the theatre's interior was followed by several years' worth of upgrading to the Avalon's sound, lighting, projection, broadcast and film production facilities. Now home to everything from classical music concerts to live radio shows and touring national dance company performances, the Avalon "...has brought 40,000 people yearly into a town of 11,000 residents. On the nights we have shows, the restaurants are filled, the gas stations are pumping more gas, and the stores are busy. More stores have come into downtown as a result of our success, we're even putting in a new visitors center, and local folks have a place to bring their guests, a place with a sense of vitality," said General.

Nelson, British Columbia Upon moving to this lakeside corner of southern British Columbia in 1994, Palo Alto, CA. innkeepers Brooke and Sandy Leatherman determined that this hotbed of fine crafts and visual artists (and home to one of Canada's largest art schools) needed a summer arts festival that could inject some much-needed business traffic as well as a little zaniness into downtown Nelson. Capitalizing on the success of Edmonton, Alberta's, International Street Performers Festival, the Leatherman's launched StreetFest, a smaller presentation showcasing street buskers and singers on the weekend following the Edmonton event. On its first year in 1997, StreetFest drew an unheard-of 37,000 visitors into downtown Nelson over its three-day run, prompting Nelson's business leaders to come up with a $12,500 contribution to ensure the event's continued success. The results were more than tangible, when 1998's StreetFest drew 53,000 into downtown Nelson for its late July madness./////////////////