Sometimes a little subterfuge is in order.
— Justina Ireland
I despise subterfuge. Despise it.
And I despise the developers who so often use it.
Developers in Alexandria, Virginia, are about to torpedo a favorite old haunt of mine, the Torpedo Factory, evicting the artists who've occupied it for 40 years.
In their relentless pursuit of profits, the developers will replace the artists' studios with Burger Kings, Cinnabons, and Gap Stores—even though these sorts of dumps are already within five minutes' walking distance.
The Torpedo Factory, they claim, isn't diverse: the artists are all White.
They've hung a big banner on the grounds demanding "A Torpedo Factory for All" and have promised to engineer diversity into their newly commercialized Torpedo Factory.
Their chicanery sickens me. And their hypocrisy.
The developers are all White, as well. Lilly White.
The City of Alexandria, which owns the building, wants to earn a profit from it, too—even if that means evicting the artists.
The developer's promise of future profits for the city is yet another subterfuge.
A local waterfront preservationist told ALXnow, "Looking at the Torpedo Factory as a negotiable source of revenue that we would farm out to some developer who would make the future profits is a grave mistake."
The art community isn't happy with the plan, either.
"We’re being asked to step aside and sacrifice our livelihood and this institution in the name of development," one artist told The Washington Post.
NOTE: For accuracy's sake, I'll acknowledge there's in fact one Black on the developer's 48-person senior staff. Odd, for a firm using diversity in its self-promotion.
