Love City Love exists by putting empty spaces around Seattle to good use. Its latest rebirth has made use of a former Capitol Hill dry cleaners for two years. Now it is preparing the neighboring home of long-gone Artificial Limb Co. for expansion of its top of Pike/Pine space home for arts, events, music, love, and inspiration.
The managers of Love City Love don’t have a timeline for the latest project, don’t have real funding, and don’t have an exact goal. Simply put, founder Lucien Pellegrin wants to set precedent.
“Seattle wants to gear itself to be hip and cutting edge but all the people who made this city in the ‘90s don’t live here anymore because of the lack of creative space which kept the city alive,” Pellegrin said. “It was more a project just to make an example.”
Love City Love is in the middle of renovating the new Artificial Limb space. The expansion adds to the event and gallery space it created in the former home of Royal Cleaners on E Pike and 14th. CHS reported in December 2015 on the nonprofit’s plans to move into the space powered by more than $18,000 in crowfunding. It previously occupied four locations — including Pike and Summit and a former Mexican restaurant in Eastlake — where it hosted open mic nights, LGBTQIA+ poetry readings, birthday parties for local community leaders, live music performances, art and food pop-up shows.
“It’s synthesizing everything that is great about art and culture and trying to house it under one roof,” Pellegrin said. “Like what Cornish is, but a little hipper and multicultural but figuring out how to create a base of it to be free with alternate income streams.”
Pellegrin never planned for Love City Love to last longer than six months when he first began on Melrose.
“Just as smart phones are ubiquitous now and normalized maybe a spot like Love City Love can be normalized in our culture,” he said. “the end game is to be integrated.”
Currently, Love City Love holds a lease that could get extended to five years with real estate investment firm Northwest Real Estate Capital which continues to hold the property. Pellegrin and all those at Love City Love want to keep the space accessible, intersectional and multicultural. But at the same time it’s a balancing act with big businesses.
“Everything gets commodified by conglomerates,” Pellegrin said. “Maybe anything that’s created or authentic by nature gets eaten up by large amounts of money.”
Love City Love wants to collaborate with gentrification rather than go to war with it. Even with volunteers willing to maintain and grow the venue, Love City Love struggles to stay afloat and be accepted. But Pellegrin is not swayed.
“When the first automobiles were on the road, people threw rocks at them because they thought they were the devil’s work,” he said. “People don’t get it in the beginning, so we don’t have a timeline. Most cosmopolitan cities have these cultural, artistic hubs and Seattle doesn’t have one.”
Reaching Love City Love’s true vision requires funding. Ideally, the hub would grow to have bicycle repair, a skateboard park, dance rooms, nonviolent community workshops, poetry reading, printing, sewing, and a garden and honeybees roof, the group behind the effort hopes.
“You start to get this cross-pollination, start to remove barriers around subjects,” said Julian Genette, one of the partners in Love City Love. “If the stars align and we kind of pick up some resources, we’ll try to build this out to the point where people can really fully understand or have a chance to experiment with what we’re trying to do.”
As work continues, Love City Love will put on small gallery shows, dance performances and pop-ups. Artificial Limb will officially open in December with holiday markets, a New Year’s Eve party, and open spaces for rentals.
Love City Love is located at 1406 E Pike. You can learn more at lovecity.love.
