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Seattle arts venue nomad Love City Love making new home below 12th Ave

Love City Love’s new home below Stumptown (Image: Love City Love)

Love City Love’s fantastic journey of art and community across Seattle will bring the venue to yet another new Capitol Hill home.

With its move was marked by the disappearance of its neon sign that used to light up the former American Artificial Limb Co. space on E Pike, the nonprofit has created a new event space and art gallery under Stumptown Coffee on 12th Ave. At its new location, Love City Love will continue to house a variety of creative endeavors.

“Love City Love is an all inclusive art and culture hub. It is designed to bring all people together, connect, inspire, activate, and push cultural criticism of the status quo,” said founder Lucien Pellegrin who spoke to CHS as a representative of the collective. “Love City Love supports individuals who continue the conversation of how to re define culture, what do about our new found technology crisis, and how to create more spaces fostering human interaction and authentic connection.”

In 2012, Love City Love began securing spaces throughout Capitol Hill and downtown Seattle for art shows, pop-up shops, musical and dance performances, poetry readings, workshops, and other outlets for artistic expression accessible to individuals of any age and economic background.

Since its founding, Love City Love has occupied venues for short amounts of time, ranging from ten months to its three years in the former Royal Cleaners space on E Pike. In 2017, Love City Love renovated and took over the adjacent Artificial Limb space. Staying in one place was never Love City Love’s plan, as the nonprofit has sought to “integrate” itself into Seattle’s cultural landscape by providing accessible space for the arts in a variety of locations.

Love City Love benefitted from an “absurdly” good rent rate on the E Pike space in exchange for the arts collective handling the renovations and resulting costs. “While there are no permits yet on record for any construction at the site, it’s expected the block will eventually be redeveloped,” CHS reported in 2015 — the development situation appears to have not significantly changed, but there are new owners. Developer NWCC Investments purchased the property for $1.8 million when Love City Love was just moving in. Permits now show the property is being overhauled with new electrical work and new windows. NWCC Investments could not be reached to ask about plans for the space or a new tenant.

Pellegrin only said Love City Love doesn’t like to stay in the same spot for long periods of time.

Its new home will put an unused space below Stumptown back in motion after the coffee chain stopped roasting beans at the location in 2016.

After a brief hiatus, Love City Love will be reborn below 12th Ave to continue to provide Capitol Hill with a multipurpose creative space. The nonprofit says it hopes to nurture the city’s creative spirit in the face of relentless development:

In a neighborhood where upscale housing development and bars have claimed the landscape, Love City Love emerged as a blank canvas for the creative community to convene. We believe continuing to craft this alternative is not only possible but crucial to keep art and culture alive and thriving in our city.

Although Love City Love will be occupying a new space, its intention to offer Capitol Hill creatives an accessible venue as a means of countering gentrifying forces has remained the same since Love City Love’s founding. The collective hopes to further Love City Love’s mission in its new space.

“Eventually we will have multiple @lovecitylove operating in many cities around the world,” he writes. “We can all continue to lead by example, and be respectful and inclusive towards one another,” Pellegrin said.

You can learn more about Love City Love on its Facebook or Instagram pages.

 

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catherine hillenbrand
catherine hillenbrand
4 years ago

glad to see – I still believe there is art in the water on Capitol Hill, in spite of all the changes in the city. Thank you Lucien for persevering!