Visual Arts

In the Dallas art world, this is truly the year of the Dragon.

Dragon Street, that is. Some call it an exodus, others an explosion. Whatever the term, art galleries by the dozen are stampeding to the funky warehouse district on or near Dragon Street, just a few miles east of the Trinity. Lush, upscale Uptown simply got too expensive for most galleries, which are moving to Dragon Street for a lot more space at a strikingly lower cost – albeit with a few trade-offs.

Photos by G.J. McCarthy / DMN

Director Karen Fedri's Gerald Peters Gallery's new Dragon Street location is being renovated and will have 11,000 square feet of space.

Art connoisseurs new to the area might be surprised to find, as they enter Dragon Street from the south, that the pavement is bumpy and sports more than a few divots and potholes. As with fine art itself, Dragon Street at the moment is a work in progress.

Instead of plush eateries, there's a Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits next door to a check-cashing stand near the south end, where Dragon intersects Continental. Heading north, there's a Greyhound bus facility, a Goodyear tire plant and Craighead Green Gallery, which moved here to save money.

"We reached a point where we just couldn't pay the rents they were asking," Kenneth Craighead says of Uptown.

He and Steve Green, co-owners of Craighead Green, had leased a space for 14 years across from the Hotel Crescent Court. It was "uptown" in more ways than one. They moved to 1011 Dragon St. two years ago to a location they were able to purchase.

They had 1,800 square feet in Uptown but are now wallowing in more than 6,000 square feet.

"It was a huge bonus for us to do that," Mr. Craighead says.

Right next door, at 1019 Dragon, will be the new Gerald Peters Gallery that recently announced plans to abandon its location on Fairmount Street, near Cedar Springs, its home for 14 years.

Its directors, Ashley Tatum Casson and Karen Fedri, want to be part of what Ms. Fedri calls "the energy and spirit going on down in the Design District," which she equates to a Dallas version of New York's Chelsea.

Like other gallery owners, they cite a litany of collective perks that are part of the package of moving to Dragon: more free parking, fewer competing interests, even a sense of camaraderie and spirit among galleries, which are banding together in a way that many say is unprecedented for Dallas.

Holly Johnson, who owns her own gallery just down the street at 1411 Dragon, agrees. She came to the Design District in 2005.

"We wanted high ceilings and a concrete floor and a decent amount of square footage for a fair price," Ms. Johnson says. "I wanted a building that had the feeling of a loft and not a made-up loft. All of which I got by coming here."

Kenneth Craighead stands in the Craighead-Green Gallery. The 15-year-old business moved two years ago to its current location on Dragon Street.

Whereas rents in Uptown are approaching $50 a square foot, they tend to be at least 50 percent cheaper along Dragon. Having to pay even a little less works wonders for gallery owners, Holly Johnson says, because it gives them a fiscal leg up.

"Moving here hasn't meant a pot of gold or anything like that," she says. "But I do this for a living, and my artists do this for a living. It's not the easiest business, even under the best of circumstances. So you need whatever edge you can find."

For the moment, Dragon Street represents to the art community – especially the ever-expanding contemporary-art community – an easier pathway toward reaching its dreams. Dragon Street, they say, means much bigger bang for the buck.

Missy Finger, who co-owns Photographs Do Not Bend with husband Burt Finger, moved to 1202 Dragon last fall from Routh Street in Uptown.

Wanting more space, "it was hard to continue looking in Uptown because of the rents," which have been driven ever higher, she says, by increasingly lavish development, such as the impending arrival of the new Ritz-Carlton Dallas hotel, along with an influx of high-priced commercial and residential enclaves.

Sandra Johnson, director of marketing for the Uptown Dallas Association, says the migration is having an impact on Uptown but not necessarily in a bad way.

"While we're sad to see old friends depart, it makes way for new galleries and a new, fresh, healthy kind of growth," says Sandra Johnson, who cites the continued growth of the Goss-Michael Foundation at 2500 Cedar Springs that she contends has brought an international following to the area. Formerly known as Goss Gallery, its founder is Kenny Goss, whose partner is British pop icon George Michael.

Sandra Johnson concedes the escalating rents but says Uptown remains "a vibrant and happening area. Naturally, to pay for the types of services happening here, rents will be at a premium. But Uptown remains a great value, particularly if you look at similar areas in San Francisco or even Houston."

Although the Goss-Michael Foundation intends to keep its space on Cedar Springs, it has leased a gallery in the Design District at 1350 Manufacturing, two blocks from Dragon. Foundation official Joyce Goss says the new space, which they hope to occupy in the fall, will be used for storage but will also house the first British artist chosen for the foundation's new artist-in-residency program.

"It's the kind of neighborhood that makes a city great," says Ken Reese, executive vice president of Victory Park, whose gleaming W Hotel towers over Dragon Street from its perch just east of Interstate 35. It's only a matter of time, he says, before the Dragon Street area will be open to the same kind of development infiltrating Victory.

"Whether it's SoHo or Tribeca in New York City, we've always believed the success of Victory would ultimately push and accelerate development in nearby areas. It's always been our hope – and our prayer – for the kind of halo effect you're seeing on Dragon Street."

The Dragon Street migrants credit the renaissance in large part to Nancy Whitenack, owner and director of Conduit Gallery, calling her among the first to brave the Design District experiment. (Joel Cooner, who owns his own gallery at 1601 Dragon, moved into the Design District in 1979, which he says makes him the first.) Ms. Whitenack's gallery is at 1626 Hi Line, which is only a block from Dragon Street. She came to the area five years ago from Deep Ellum.

"Deep Ellum got to be very painful," she says, adding that the area had deteriorated dramatically since Conduit opened there in 1984.

There, she found herself confined to 2,200 square feet, but in the land of Dragon, she has almost 4,500.

When she arrived, the so-called Design District was confined to interior designers and others in "the design community." Many such businesses are still there but now have the added punch of being surrounded by an increasingly large phalanx of contemporary galleries.

Ms. Whitenack says she and other gallery owners, rather than see themselves in competition, revel in the fact that they can stage collective opening nights and have plenty of free parking – a longtime problem in Uptown.

Mr. Craighead at Craig-head Green says he had long dreamed of his native Dallas having an area comparable to Bergamot Station in Los Angeles, "where they took an old rail yard and converted it into an art center. It didn't happen here in a planned way, but now along Dragon Street, it seems to be happening naturally, entirely on its own."

Art dealers around the country, even the world, are beginning to notice. Mr. Craighead recently attended a conference in Santa Fe, N.M., where he says the talk was all about Dallas and what's happening on Dragon.

"I must have been asked 1,000 times," he says, " 'What the heck is going on in Dallas?' "

Passers-by new to the area may be put off at first by how the much funkier Dragon Street contrasts with the sleek, cool Uptown. But Mr. Craighead is among the Uptown defectors who love the funkiness of Dragon Street, calling it a bohemian blessing.

"Our clientele loves it," he says. "It reminds me of Chelsea in New York. You don't need to be across from the Crescent or across from opulence to be a thriving art gallery. A lot of this goes along with the creativity of what we do ... the environment of what we do. It has much more of a warehouse feeling, which for an art gallery is great.

"The truth is, those of us who came here feel much more at home ... and hope to be here for a long time to come."