INTRODUCTION:

First I should introduce myself! I am Andy Krehm, husband of the late Donna Jean Stover-Krehm. She always liked to be called DJ or Donna Jean but never Donna!

Donna Jean passed away peacefully on November 15, 2011. She fought a tough year long battle with Leukemia but in the end, the disease won.

Like many people, DJ was a multi-faceted person with lots of life experiences and stories to tell. But not many of us will be leaving behind an edifice and legacy like she did!

Donna Jean was the founder and driving force behind the creation and realization of the Arcadia Artists’ Co-operative!

Physically, Arcadia is a 7 story, 110 unit building located at 680 Queens Quay West in Toronto, Ontario, Canada at the west end of Harbourfront. The building was completed in 1986.

Today, It is one of several co-ops in a sea of condos but is clearly distinctive in one respect.

IT IS A CO-OP FOR PEOPLE WHO WORK IN THE ARTS!

Further, it is a co-op for all people who work in the arts, from box office managers to visual artists to musicians, etc, etc. In other words, pretty much anyone who works in or is directly associated with the arts is eligible for membership. This is unlike some other artists’ co-ops which are only for one facet of the arts, i.e., visual artists.

Before I continue, I should mention you are welcome to share your thoughts of and experiences with DJ by clicking on the “leave a reply” button or anytime by scrolling down to the end of this post. If you have a private comment, please email me: andy@silverbirchprod.com

WHAT IS AN ARTS CO-OP?

DJ was the consummate expert of the subject of housing co-ops as they apply to the arts but since she is not around to ask, I will attempt to explain it myself. Please excuse any factual errors and feel free to correct me on any of these statements!

The concept of an art’s cooperative is not new. Westbeth in New York City is a couple of decades older than Arcadia but Arcadia was the first one in Canada. Yes, before us there were artists in Canada living in lofts and warehouses and in other communal/co-operative type situations but they had no control over their environment nor did they know how long they would be permitted to stay there!

Arcadia is a place for people who work in the arts, and their families, where they can live, and if practical, have a workspace in their unit. There are also some shared facilities in the building such as the Workshop, Kiln Room, Performance Space, Art Gallery, Music Rehearsal Room and a ventilated room where photographers can develop film.

Conceptually, I don’t believe that Arcadia and Westbeth are that different but how they were funded and built was very different! DJ came up with the idea to enlist the Co-operative Housing Program of Canada in order to finance her dream building whereas Westbeth was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts in the USA.

I’m going to paraphrase Wikipedia to give you an idea what co-op housing in general is all about.

A housing cooperative is a legal entity—usually a corporation—that owns real estate, consisting of one or more buildings, usually residential. The co-op, by charter, is a non-profit. Each member in the legal entity is granted the right to occupy one housing unit, subject to an occupancy agreement, which is similar to a lease. The occupancy agreement specifies the co-op’s rules/bylaws. Canadian housing co-operatives are set up so that the member-residents own the co-op collectively but do not hold equity in the assets.

In Canada, the program is administered by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). I am a little unclear on why the program was started but I believe it was one part of the government’s strategy to provide a number of ways to assist people in the lower income brackets to have access to decent, affordable housing.

Housing co-ops are based on the idea of co-ops that had come before them such as the grain co-op or fruit co-op. These came about as farmers couldn’t individually afford to pay to have their produce processed and ready for a broader distribution, other than the local markets. However, by banding together and sharing the expenses and labour with no middleman to pay, they could.

The co-op housing program is based on the same principal and so the key points are that it operates on a non-profit basic and with democratic representation, i.e., one vote per member on ALL important decisions and bylaws. As with most organizations, committees are struck in smaller groups in order to come up with policies and procedures. When they have what they believe is a workable policy on any issue that needs addressing, they bring it to a member’s meeting for discussion, modification and eventually ratification.

Co-ops are not communes! They employ an office manager (and sometimes an assistant) and maintenance staff. Of course some volunteer work is necessary to keep things running efficiently and in a cost-effective manner. Members staff the Board Of Directors and other committees and also do work like shoveling the sidewalks in the winter which can be helpful to save hiring additional people, thus keeping expenses down!

A very important distinction between renting and becoming a member of a co-op is that a member cannot be evicted unless they break bylaws in a big way, like not paying their housing charges! This is called “security of tenure”. Even if given an eviction notice by the Board, a member can still call a meeting and appeal to their fellow members. By vote, at an officially called meeting, the members are the final authority and can overrule any staff or Board Of Director’s decision. In a rental situation, with proper legal notice, you can be evicted for any number of reasons.

Housing co-ops are designed to attract people with mixed incomes, unlike Toronto Community Housing, where rents are all subsidized. I believe this was done in order to make for a more diverse community as people of all income brackets are eligible to become members.

In the initial years, CMHC’s Operating Agreement with the Co-0p provides it with a subsidy to be used to lower the rent (we call it housing charges) for people with lower incomes. How this amount is distributed is administered by the co-op’s staff as directed by the members through the Co-op Bylaws/Policies. In principal, it could be “deep” subsidy for a small number of households or it could be “shallow” subsidy where it is spread around to a greater number of those in need, in smaller amounts, to offset their housing charges. A side note is that the Subsidy Agreement does reduce over time and will eventually come to an end. So at that point, co-ops are not going to be able to offer subsidy or will have to come up with another solution if they vote to somehow keep it going.

As mentioned previously. the Co-op’s major decisions are made at General Member’s Meetings by members, one vote per person. In the early years, we agreed to the idea of spreading around the subsidy pool as just a little bit of reduction of housing charges would be helpful for the many residents who were pursuing a career in the arts or making a living in very tough profession, like being a full-time musician!

As a person who worked in the arts the majority of her life, DJ knew that many people working in the arts were in a lower income bracket so the subsidy program would be perfect compliment for her idea!

A housing co-op is a building where housing charges are generally lower than comparable rental units due to its set-up as non-profit corporation. As mentioned before, it is also a place where you can live in a unit a below the set housing charges in the building, if you qualify for subsidy. Because the housing co-op is open to all income groups, they tend to be a very diverse group of people. Some people have been living in Arcadia for years paying market rates, some go on and off subsidy and others stay on subsidy for a long time. Upon retirement, a member who finds their income reduced is eligible to go on subsidy, at least as long as the subsidy program is still in effect!

The interesting thing about the system is that CMHC sets the first year housing charges at slightly below “market” for the area but in practice over the years, a well-run co-op has housing charges that slowly and steadily move lower and lower against the current rents in the area. I don’t know if it was meant to work that way but that is the reality!

So a co-op is an interesting study in “renting” vs owning. If you can get together the down payment, you can go the traditional route, buy a house and pay off your mortgage, hopefully in time for retirement or, live in a co-op and retire in one! That is the route my wife and I chose but more on that later!

HOW WE STARTED OUR CO-OP:

Before I begin, I should mention this story won’t be repeated, a least any time in the near future, as the Canadian government canceled the last of the federal co-op housing programs in 1992. The province of Ontario canceled its own programs in 1995 and British Columbia’s modest program, which began in the early 1990s, was terminated by 2001. Only Quebec has continued to sponsor housing co-op development!

So back in the ’80’s, just how did one go about starting a co-op under this program?

You assembled a group of like-minded people with who were interested in forming a co-op and started brain storming! In fact, you essentially create an initial Board of Directors and a few committees relevant to the formation of a co-op, such as membership and design. For instance, the Design Committee discussed what space and features were most desirable in the future building and the Membership Committee gave information meetings so that interested people can sign up in order to apply to become future members.

Once you had your goals defined as a group and had a large enough membership list, you then enlisted the help of a co-op developer such as the Co-operative Housing Federation of Toronto, the oldest federation of its type in Canada.

CHFT was founded in 1973 to develop, represent and serve housing co‑operatives in Toronto and later in the York Region. There are over 160 CHFT member co‑ops.

If the co-op developer believed in your idea and competence to have a fighting chance to see it through to the building stage, they took you on initially for no charge knowing they be paid for their services once CMHC approved of start up funding.

THE BIG IDEA:

The idea for Arcadia sprung from two events in our lives, neither of which was very profound!

I was the owner of a house at the time I met DJ. When we made the decision to live together, she and her children moved in with me. DJ and the kids, Ron and Jocelyn (Joss) Arnold, were used to living downtown but my house was in the North Beach (Woodbine & Gerrard). DJ didn’t drive and the TTC was was just enough out of the way so downtown was a long trip for them.

After a couple of years of being stuck in the “country” (yes, that’s what they called it!), they were getting increasingly frustrated with the location.

The second significant event was my five year mortgage was coming up for renewal and it was a time when the interest rates had just gone sky high (to 12%, if I recall correctly!). Even with our combined income, I wasn’t sure we were going to be able to comfortably afford to keep living there.

One day, DJ sat me down and said she figured out a way for us to live downtown AND lower our monthly expenses! I listened with skeptical interest as she told me she found a 4 bedroom townhouse in Cabbage Town (College and Parliament) for less than we were paying to carry our 4 bedroom house! Not only that but it was an older “character” building that was renovated. The last thing she said was that it was in a housing co-op called DACHI (Don Area Co-operative Homes Incorporated).

After a lot of consideration, we sold the house and made the move. Over time, the concept of co-op living grew on us and became part of our lives. Co-ops are more like small villages than the average apartment/townhouse complex. I guess that’s because the members go to meetings and sit on committees together. You tend to say hi to your neighbours more often and strike up relationships that don’t normally happen in rental or ownership situations. And of course, the downside of a small village is the problem that all groups run into and that is politics! However for the moment, I’ll leave that subject and stick to the positives!

DJ always had an affinity for the arts. She also had the ability and drive to motivate people to work with her on realizing goals. When she was younger, she rewrote Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales which was mounted at the Manulife Theatre on Bloor Street. She also authored many poems. Along with her first husband, she promoted various entertainment venues, most notable a series of Jazz on the Lake cruises. One of their highlights as promoters was bringing in Cleo Laine and John Dankworth to Canada for their first concert in our country. As DJ moved through various arts careers, she worked for the National Ballet and then her last job, before retiring, was the Box Office Manager for Harbourfront (managing 17 venues!). As for myself, for the first two plus decades of my working life, I was a professional free-lance musician, playing in studios, theatres and doing the odd one-nighter. For the last 18 years, I have been a mastering engineer (an audio engineer whose specialty is mastering, or working on the last link of the chain of events necessary in the making an album).

So we were both working in the arts and were sympathetic to how difficult it could be to live a comfortable lifestyle while working in those professions.

THE BEGINNING OF ARCADIA:

One day, DJ came to me with the idea of starting a co-op for people who worked in the arts! I have such a poor memory for events that happened so long ago that I really can’t remember what lead up to it but there she was presenting this idea. She had done some research and wondered if we could use the CMHC Co-op Housing Program to build it.

Fortunately, she had struck up a friendship with Maggie Keith who was the manager of DACHI, the co-op we lived in. Maggie was knowledgeable about the housing co-op sector and promptly hooked us up for unofficial meetings with CHFT (the co-op developer). As well, her husband Bob Stacey, who was a respected arts researcher/historian and writer, joined us in our quest. So now we were four!

I believe it was Alexandra Wilson who was our early connection at CHFT. She was really great to work with and was very supportive of DJ’s idea of combining the arts with the housing co-op principles and program. However, upon further review and research, we were told that the CMHC guidelines did not allow for “specialty” housing co-ops. In other words, the guide lines said you couldn’t exclude anyone based on profession (and other things, I’m sure!).

However, we persisted and basically in the end, Alexandra persuaded CMHC to support the project. And, by the way, our cornerstone bylaw was to be that one member per unit must be working in the arts. That later got modified to “…must be working, or attempting to work in the arts”! Given there were only 110 units for people who worked the arts in Toronto, some of us felt the membership criterion should be more like the original idea!

During those formative years, we put together a full Board Of Directors and finally legally incorporated as the Arcadia Board Of Directors on June 23, 1981.

We advertised and held information meeting for prospective members until we had a very large list, probably enough to fill several buildings.

Along the way we got our start-up funds from CMHC. At that point, CHFT was starting to get paid and so we started a search for land and an architect to design our building.

The architect we chose was Jack Diamond, one of Canada’s premier architects. One of his more well-known newer buildings is Toronto’s Opera House. So perhaps I should say he chose us because I doubt very much if the stipend, as provided by CMHC’s Co-operative Housing Program, was anywhere close to his regular fee. However, we were going be the first official arts housing co-op in Canada and he wanted to design and see it built!

ONE STEP CLOSER!

So now we had a co-op developer to advise us, a promise of more funding from CMHC and an architect; Next we needed land to build on.

By consensus, our board and unofficial members wanted to be in downtown Toronto (I’m guessing DJ must have influenced them too!). Unfortunately, land downtown for a new building was more expensive than could normally be afforded under this program.

So to the rescue came The Harbourfront Corporation. They were looking for co-ops and non-profits to build on the Bathurst Quay! Being an arts organization themselves, they thought having an arts co-op in Harbourfront was a great idea so we put in an expression of interest and began negotiations.

However, there is a side story that was to affect our co-op in a big way. We were told that there was another arts group vying for the same plot of land! Logic dictated that since Harbourfront was probably the most ideal location for our building, that we should not leave anything to chance and therefore decided to delegate a board member to talk to the other group and see what they were all about. We needed to know if they could seriously challenge us for the land and if so, we had better bite the bullet and see if they would be agreeable to joining up with us.

So one our board member to meet with them and investigated. He came back to us and presented them as serious competition so we voted to offer three of their prominent members positions on our Board. We also had to agree to merge their membership with ours and here is where our original idea for a co-op for ALL people who work in the arts got a little diluted. You see this group was entirely visual artists! So that skewed our membership much more in that direction than some of us on the founding board had envisioned.

So it seems every story has to have a little deception and shadowy background and this incident proved to be a big one for Arcadia! After bringing in the new directors and their list, we discovered at a later time that this group had long ceased functioning effectively as a group and had no solid funding! In other words, there was no way they could have built a building at Harbourfront on their own as they had very little in place to make it happen!

However, the reward for our flexibility was that we officially got the Harbourfront land without a fight and were ready for groundbreaking!

DESIGNING ARCADIA:

During the lead-up to the Architect’s design of the building, our design committee was becoming more and more active as the architect needed input as to what kind of a building we wanted. We had many arts disciplines represented here and were discussing how could we build a building that would be satisfactory to all. The reality was that the co-operative housing program did not offer funds for anything but economical housing but we were determined to find the best compromises we could.

Painters told us they wanted north light! Musicians wanted sound proofed units! Writers wanted a quiet unit and on and on it went! You can see with only these three demands how difficult this was going to be!

In the end, we were able to build quite a few different unit types but the best idea we could come up with under the frugal Co-operative Housing Program budget was to leave open architecture within the units as much as possible so that the members could craft the units the way they wanted, even if it had to be at their own expense. We even considered building the units without walls, i.e., without the standard living/dining/bedroom(s) floor plans, but we were reminded that funding for each unit was based on number of bedrooms so we had to settle for compromises that didn’t break their guidelines and rules. All housing co-ops under the program had to offer a mix of unit types (i.e., 1 bedroom, 2 bedrooms, etc.) and they all had to be designed in a conventional manner or funding would not be approved.

In order to stay CMHC legit, we asked that the walls be as easy as possible to remove. Jack Diamond’s Project Architect, Andre Lessard, came up with the idea of designing the building office style which in our case, meant only one retaining wall between the north and south sides of the building. I believe it is columns spaced at intervals on the edges of the building that hold the rest of it up! That meant that there was only electrical outlets in most of the walls every 6 feet as required by code and of course there had to be light switches for all the rooms, whether they would exist later or not. While there were permanent electrical and plumbing stacks, they were central and still left lots of space for opening up or changing the floor plans of the units.

I should mention that one of our bylaws requires that there be at least one member living in each unit so as to avoid people taking the units as workspaces only! Living and optionally working was the original idea and we didn’t want businesses to move in and take advantage of the excellent housing charges when affordable places to live are what artists need first and foremost! Businesses were welcome but only if the owner lived in the unit and so working from home was expected and welcomed!

We found out more ways we could get some of what we wanted without having to bend completely to the CMHC Co-op Housing guidelines. Someone discovered that while each unit size had a maximum square footage allowable, based on the number of bedrooms, there weren’t the same restrictions on ceiling height. So we were able to work in 10 foot ceilings on the south side and the units on the north side have some beautiful units with very high living rooms (I think 16/18 feet?) with tiered bedrooms/workrooms on two stories off to one side. So the visual artists got their north light but as much as we wanted to build sound deadening walls, they were just not practical on a CMHC budget. Being a musician at move in and later becoming audio engineer with my own studio in my unit, I learned first hand just how expensive it is to truly soundproof a unit! But more on that later.

This reminds me that I did not mention one of the main reasons why we chose to build our arts co-op through the limited but workable CMHC program. The main reason is that CMHC enabled the Non-Profit Corporation (Arcadia), through the Co-op Housing Program, to obtain a mortgage with NO down payment and with preferred interest rates! I believe the loan is made through conventional lenders but it is backed and insured by CMHC.

Obviously it would not be possible to get a 100 plus artists together and collect a down payment from them plus a promise from each to pay their share of the mortgage! This was NOT going to happen so taking advantage of an existing program to get the building built was the key to our dream. Of course the co-op, via the members, would have to pay the mortgage off in full but no funds would have to be raised in advance for any stage of the development whatsoever!

So as the story winds down, we got our mortgage and as President, DJ signed a cheque for millions of dollars! Over the course of a year and change, we watched our building go up

MOVE-IN:

The beginning of the move-in was to usher in some profound changes for both DJ and Arcadia.

As I look back 25 years ago, I wonder exactly how to frame the events that followed in a fair, yet factual way, without being entirely negative about the story!

However, this story IS about DJ and Arcadia and so I have elected to tell it from the perspective of how I think she perceived it and how I most definitely saw it affect her!

My motives here are to explain how deeply some of the following events affected her for the rest of her life and what it’s really about is the sad tale of the founder and mover not being able to fully enjoy and participate in the fruits of over a decade of labour!

DJ and I stayed on the Board Of Directors for at least the first term of the board. We had already been on it seven years, both as the “unofficial” board and then as part of the legally incorporated board before move-in. We wanted to stay on for continuity reasons and to try and ensure that we got the co-op off to a good start.

DJ was elected President of the Board every year she chose to run, which I believe was a total of 8 years, maybe more! A remarkable record and a testament to her leadership ability.

So, as I alluded to earlier, groups of people seem to naturally succumb to people politics and embrace favouritism and other undesirable traits and Arcadia was no exception. Rifts were starting to develop on our board. I’ll take the high road here and not name names! But what happened was that the Board Of Directors had been slowly polarizing into two camps for a while. One of the members of the defunct visual arts group we had invited on to our board had a big hand in this! And moving in, with different demands than the formative years, seem to exasperate the situation.

If you live in Toronto in 2011/12 and are following City Hall’s new mayor and councilors, the acrimony between the two extreme political sides is close in feeling to what happened to our move-in board and office staff! Mainly, my analogy refers to the acrimony and lack of resolve to work together for the common good, not the left/right politics! In other words, not really a great environment to be in, and, when one is in a volunteer position, there is not even a financial component to be positive about!

DJ felt that, in an attempt to please everyone, some of the policies we had had in place as cornerstones of an artist co-op were getting watered down. For instance, a key policy that had been voted in years ago was that one of the main qualification for membership was that you had to be a person who was WORKING in the arts (as decided by a sub-committee of the prospective member’s peers in their particular field). Now some people wanted to change this to “attempting to make a career in the arts”.

Now there’s nothing wrong with helping people hoping to get an arts career started EXCEPT (at that time) we were the ONLY arts co-op in Canada, and with 110 units, how liberal could we afford to be? The fall-out of changing this policy was that if the person did not succeed in their stated career goal, there would be a unit without an arts person in it. This was not to exclude a profession where one was not always expected to make a living, such as some visual arts, but the differences in what it mean to be a “full-time” artist and a “dilettante” could be easily decided during the interview of the prospective member by the sub-committee of their peers.

Over the years, the co-op would also lose “arts units” to people who quit the business and stayed on at Arcadia. There was a motion to give them a year or two notice but that never got any traction as no one wanted to see their neighbours asked to leave due to a career change.

These new guidelines were people friendly but it would be interesting to do a survey 25 years later and see exactly how many of our 110 units have a principal arts person in them! I think we’d be quite surprised at the results.

Another conceptual change being proposed was that people who were not actually “artists” were now being called support people rather than people who worked in the arts. Not really any difference except maybe philosophically a “first amoungst equals” issue! A support person could be seen as “second tier” but a person working in a non-performing role is really a partner in the overall workings of the artistic world. A musician seldom gets anywhere without a team of management, agents, sound guys, etc., nor do plays get seen without box office managers and a host of other related theatre folk to set-up the actual performance!

During the many years before move-in, we unofficially called our organization “Arcadia Housing Co-operative for People Who Work In The Arts”. As you may have noticed, we are now called the Arcadia Artist’s Co-operative.

We also heard credible reports of straight ahead favouritism where a friend would be “line-jumped” re the internal move list. Same for the subsidy list. A co-op is a democracy where everyone should have the same rights and none of this was acceptable to DJ.

So at this point in time, DJ had a lot a trouble coming to grips with this and other issues and eventually decided not to run for the Board of Directors any longer. Her goal was still to continue to develop and ensure Arcadia moved forward as an Art’s Co-op but being on the Board Of Directors was becoming unproductive and stressful. So she put her efforts into working on committees and with individual members and I have heard from many, many people who she touched in a very positive way during our first few years at Arcadia. Shortly after her passing, a great number of people stopped me the hallways of Arcadia to offer a touching story of how she had helped or guided them through a crisis or encouraged them to start a committee so I’m hoping some of you will leave a comment with your stories! I found them touching and comforting to know how much you cared for her.

DJ was also working very hard at her new job as the Box Office Manager for the Harbourfront Corp. Managing 17 venues was a time consuming job so she lessened her participation in her beloved co-op.

FOURTEEN YEARS LATER:

By about the year 2000, DJ had retired from the Harbourfront job and now had time on her hands again. Given the work she did to get Arcadia started and moving along, she was ready, once again, to devote some time to the co-op.

Given all her experiences with starting and building Arcadia, DJ had become an absolute scholar on how the co-op sector operated. So in lieu of not wanting to be involved in Board Of Director politics again, she wanted to get back into working with committees and volunteering for what ever tasks needed doing.

Volunteering is really the back-bone of co-operative living as that is how all the committees are filled and many ad hoc tasks are carried out.

What she found, however, is that Arcadia had slipped into a very different operating system from what she felt was the ideal template. Upon talking to many members, she felt that the committees were being dictated to by the Board Of Directors and staff whereas normally it is the members thru meetings and committees that give the Board and staff their direction.

Here’s a quote from one of DJ’s journals I discovered after her passing:

Sunday, May 05, 2002

“In a healthy co-op, the members are the final authority, the committees are each given an area of responsibility on which they advise the board, and the board carries forward the committee’s recommendations to the members for approval. The board in itself has its own set of responsibilities overseeing the running of the co-op and a strong committee structure ensures that the workload is spread around. My observations when I got involved again, was that the board was not letting the Committees advise them, but were instead making all decisions, thereby negating and diminishing the responsibilities of the committees, thereby increasing their own work load tremendously and discouraging participation generally. So, after very openly expressing my view and concerns to staff and board alike, I tried to work with the Garden, Workshop and Music Committees to get things back on track.”

Somewhere along the line the members also made what in retrospect was a huge mistake! Our bylaws say that no members shall be employed by the co-op in a managerial position. Why? Because of the obvious potential for many conflicts of interest! Supposing a staff person is also a member  and neighbour and they have access to your confidential financial information (if you are on subsidy). What if you have a problem with a staff member? What if a board member is the spouse of the member/manager? Well, you get the idea!

The error in judgement happened when a highly thought of member decided that they wanted to be the co-op manager, despite the bylaw. Since members are the final arbitrators of all decisions, the members, at a General Meeting, decided to suspend the bylaw so that this person could interview for the job. Of course they got the job!!

The problem of conflict of interest got more severe when the person’s spouse got elected to the Board Of Directors and then elected by the Board to be the President of the Co-op!

This is significant in DJ’s story because all this happened before she decided to jump back into action with the co-op. And in jumping back into the fray and very openly expressing her views and concerns to staff and board alike, she unfortunately ruffled more that a few feathers! And given the relationship of the President and Manager, since DJ was seen to be an agitator, it was easy to influence others into believing DJ’s goals and ideas were less than pure!

To put this another way, supposing you are the manager/coordinator or assistant of an artists’ co-op or on the Board Of Directors and the founder and ex-president of eight plus years offers to investigate and do whatever research was needed to get the co-op operating the way it was meant to operate, wouldn’t you be pleased?

You might think how happy these folks would be to share knowledge with a person of such stature and relief from having finding others to do some of these tasks. Well, if you thought that, you were wrong! The staff did not react well to a volunteer expert wanting to sort out co-op business! In fact, the relationship between DJ and the staff got so bad that they actually got the board to ban her from the office! I know, because I was at the meeting they called to deliver the news! The Founder of Arcadia and President of the Board of Directors for eight plus years was now banned from speaking to the staff of the co-op she founded!!

I will say, though, that DJ did not react well to what she considered pettiness, did not like favouritism and did not wish to politic! As you can see, those three traits were the beginning of the end for her future involvement in the running and shaping of Arcadia! I’ll be charitable and just say that some staff and Board Of Directors could have handled things in a much better way! What I do know for sure is that everything DJ did was from the point of view of Arcadia, the co-op, and not at all to do with any personal agenda. Was she a saint? Knowing her as I did, I would say in terms of motivation and action, at least in the area of her beloved co-op, she absolutely was! However, I’m sure she didn’t react as a saint when all her efforts to get the co-op back on track were viewed with suspicion and acrimony!

DJ’s shortcoming, if you want to call it that, was that she was unable to swallow some of the negative things she saw and didn’t agree with in order to achieve her goals. Perhaps if she could have soldiered on with more patience, knowing she could continue to make a difference, it wouldn’t have come to such a bitter end.

THE PLAQUE ON OUR WALL:

The final blow was when a few years later, we were called to a get-together to unveil a plaque to the founders of Arcadia. To our surprise and consternation, the plaque, which reads in part “…to the celebrate the joining of two fledgling boards…” was to celebrate how the original board and the “other” group got together to make Arcadia happen.
The re-writing of history is rampant in this world and this is a great example. As I wrote earlier, the duly incorporated Board of Arcadia was legally and financially set-up and ready to buy land. The other organization was NOT and was fading away until we unnecessarily invited them to join us so there would be no competition for the Harbourfront land.

So it wasn’t the end of the world that we took on a three directors that were not from our membership list plus their huge list of visual artists, but a plaque that actually celebrates them as “co-founders” years later is just such a strange act! They founded their own group and wanted to start a artists’ co-operative but weren’t able to bring their idea to fruition until they caught the Arcadia train! If a plaque was desired, it should have been to honour Donna Jean Stover, the true Founder of Arcadia or at the very least, the real Founding Board. The latter was legally incorporated officially in 1981 and didn’t have any members of the visual arts group we took in at later time (the collage at the top of this blog has a list of the Founding Board Members).

This is not to disparage any of the current members of Arcadia that became members through that group but more about historical fact and how the lack of it around Arcadia at that time was just one more thing that really bothered DJ!

Anytime you go to the office and walk by the plaque, remember its contents are a fabrication and that is has no place in the real history of Arcadia. In fact, it really should be removed!!

And so the story of DJ and Arcadia really has to end on a note of personal tragedy for my wife! Perhaps I am being too melodramatic but to see her systematically frozen out of the running and further shaping of the co-op was disturbing. After spending a decade of her life working 20 to 40 hours a week to get it started and working properly it really WAS a tragedy for her! Yes, in a world where much bigger negatives happen every day, it’s not a big deal but this blog is about DJ and Arcadia and that was a sad end to a remarkable beginning for her!

Of course, regardless of my personal feelings and recollections about how things went down for DJ, Arcadia just celebrated its 25th anniversary (2011) and lives on with 110 units available to people who work in the art and their families! Now that transcends any personal stories, positive or negative!.

MY STORY:

So I’ll end this on a positive note and tell you briefly about some of my experiences at Arcadia.

I was also on the Board of Directors as long as DJ was but my focus was mostly on the Design Committee. As stated before, our idea was to keep the units as flexible as possible so the units could be changed easily to suit the occupant’s workspace needs. I, along with many others, worked very hard to make this happen but I did not do it for personal reasons!

At the time, I was a pro guitarist and arranger/composer and my own workspace requirement was simply an extra room in which to have a piano and a place to lay out my various guitars when I wasn’t working.

But a funny thing happened shortly after move-in! I added “music producer” to my resume and began to work with artists to make albums. In the course of doing that, I needed a place to record demos inexpensively and so my extra room got equipped with a microphone and a tape recorder. Over time I needed a more pro set-up and we began what was to become an ongoing series of renovations, spanning many years as my studio moved from a typical “home” studio to a professional one!

The beginning of the real studio was creating a vocal booth out of a conveniently placed storeroom. One day, as I worked on a track for one of my artists, I turned around to ask her what she thought of the change I had made to the music and she had left her chair to join my wife who was watching TV in our living room!

Yes, we had the foresight to put in for a 4 bedroom, 1,500 square foot unit so at that point, we enough space to put a wall between between my little studio and our living space!

My career morphed over time from guitarist/producer to a mastering engineer and our unit went through several renovations until that “4th bedroom” became impossible to work with any more. I had mastered close to 2,000 albums by 2004 and felt the need for a world-class studio to continue to advance my career.

The cost of professionally designing and building just the control room of a small world-class pro mastering suite starts at about $100,000. That’s just for making the room…no gear!!! So I then started to consider where to build. It was either build at Arcadia, a place that was a non-profit where we shared the costs of the building with no middle man but held no equity, or go back to owning again.

Despite DJ’s uncomfortable relationship with management and the board of that era, we both really liked the co-op life, many of the members and the location of Arcadia. And in truth, as I mentioned earlier, after almost two decades at Arcadia, the housing charges were relatively low compared to other places on prime downtown property. So I made the decision to stay and invest a non-recoverable $100,000 here at Arcadia. I figured I’d get at least 20 plus years out of it before (possibly!) retiring and, truth be told, that money would have had to be spent anyway, as I would still have to have the studio built anywhere I had I chosen to buy.

What always amazes me, when I look back at my work on the design committee, is that I had ABSOLUTELY no idea I would become a mastering engineer and would one day want to build a world-class studio for my work. My reward for all the years on the design committee is that myself and others created a place where my dreams could be realized without moving out! I hired one of the best studio designers in Canada, had our unit gutted and rebuilt as a one bedroom with den completely divided from my office and studio. Of course it helped that my 1,500 square foot unit had two washrooms!!

I should also add that in the early years of my mastering career, I saw that my clients were taking my masters to companies who were “brokering” the manufacturing of CDs. So I decided to get in that business as well and Silverbirch Productions was born!

So the 3rd bedroom became the office and, as mentioned earlier, the whole business side of my unit got a professional design into a proper office space and pro mastering room. That left DJ and myself with a decent sized apartment with one bedroom and a den, totally workable for a couple.

And who was ultimately responsible for my good fortune? My beautiful wife, Donna Jean Frances-Stover, the Founder of Arcadia Artists’ Co-operative.

So if you got to the end, I thank you for sharing our story. As time moves on, my pain at losing my best friend and the rock and anchor of my life will lessen and hopefully I’ll be able to look at back at our whole experience with renewed interest and an even greater appreciation for what Donna Jean accomplished in her life!

Here’s to the Founder of Arcadia! What a legacy!