The Front Line

On a recent afternoon, Steve Klimek and his partner Nilus Klingel go downtown to check on their storefront and complete a few chores there. The door to 217 E. Genesee St. sticks a bit when opened, so Klingel, a thin young man with short black hair, gives it an extra little push to enter. We stand for a few minutes talking about the place, the first storefront they plan to refurbish, decorate and generally make habitable. Just as I am about to praise them for fixing the place up, I trip over one of the large holes surrounding the front door and half-tumble into a nearby table. They still have a long way to go. "Be careful," Klingel laughs.

The storefront is in the first floor of the State Tower Building downtown.

It's a long, narrow room, about 50-feet long and 20-feet wide. The ceiling is high, which appealed to both Klimek's and Klingel's aesthetic. Halfway up the wall opposite the entrance are two doors sealed shut with paint; in the past, the doors opened onto a balcony overlooking the first floor where we stand. The place badly needs a new coat of paint. I spot several patches of exposed brown wood, and the paint seems to fall off in small sheets, not in chips. Klimek, who is also young and thin but with short blond hair, warned me earlier to avoid the paint flakes: The place is so old, the last person to redecorate used lead paint. This means, eventually, Klimek and Klingel will need to replace it all, an expense of several thousand dollars. Despite these

cosmetic deficiencies, they consider the place perfect for their project.

"We were trying to set up a challenge for ourselves," Klimek says. "It's a space that was empty for a reason, but there are new things that can be done there."

Klimek and Klingel moved into 217 E. Genesee St. back in October. This is their first storefront, but the two Syracuse University architecture students will attempt to renovate several more. The idea came to them three years ago, when SU moved their architecture program into the Warehouse building on W. Fayette Street. They grew to like downtown and wanted to maintain some presence there after SU brought its architecture program back to campus. Vacant

storefronts stood out on every block — Syracuse has more than 1-million square feet of empty storefronts, Klimek and Klingel estimate.

"We thought, why don't we do something with those? Just take over a storefront. Just make it a gallery, an office space — something," Klimek says. Soon the two hatched a plan to revitalize Syracuse, one empty storefront at a time. They would move into an empty place, fix it up, attract attention to the space, and go on to the next. They called their project The Front.

To get to the State Tower Building, I meet Klinmek and Klingel on SU's campus, and we take a Connective Corridor bus, No. 443, to City Hall. They hope people will do just this when

their space opens as a store, a gallery, or some other business sometime next fall. On the bus ride, they explain to me how their ambitious idea turned into an actual, empty storefront with holes in the floors. Leading up to last April, the two worked on a concrete pitch they could make at SU's Emerging Talk conference, an annual event the university holds to give away $70,000 to student start-ups. The Front and 12 other projects won seed money, and Klimek and Klingel walked away with a $5,000 grant. They hope to raise $30,000 total, so they can move past their current Clinton Street storefront. They came closer to that goal on April 11, when they won a second $5,000 grant from Emerging Talk 2011.

With cash in hand, Klimek and

Klingel toured the city, looking for a suitable place to make over. They drafted a list of around 30 properties that could serve their purpose; the E. Genesee storefront was in the top three. While the search went on, Klimek and Klingel refurbished a S. Warren< Street storefront and made it into a pop-up gallery, where, in the fall, SU's architecture program hosted a reception. The Warren Street project was exactly what they hope to do in the State Tower storefront, and they did it all in a month on a $200 budget. They needed that tangible evidence of their vision to convince naysayers.

"When we were just starting out, people were like, 'You're SU students. You're really young. What do you want to do?'" Klimek says. The Warren

Street store wasn't exactly what they wanted to do. They needed a place where they could stay for more than a month.

The search for The Front's first permanent home led to Mary McDermott, a vice president at J-F Real Estate. McDermott took Klingel and Klimek over to the State Tower Building and showed them 217 E. Genesee. The situation was a win-win for both parties: J-F Real Estate gave them the space rent-free, and Klingel and Klimek agreed to renovate it at no charge. "Sometimes when these storefronts sit vacant, they need some special attention to attract new tenants," McDermott says, explaining the deal.

The State Tower Building is a tall brick building in between Hanover

Square and Armory Square. It looks sort of like a dwarf Rockefeller Center and has that same art-deco style. When we exit the bus at City Hall, it takes only about a minute to reach E. Genesee Street. Despite its prime location and design, the State Tower Building had trouble keeping clients in its properties in the past. When we walk around the building, we see a vacant storefront two-spots down and another that Syracuse's artist-in-residence just moved into. We run into Michelle, the building's lobby attendant, who sweeps cigarette butts up outside. "In here, people come and go," she says before she goes back into the building to help someone with the elevator.

The Front faces a wide, brick pedestrian walkway with trees, wooden

benches, and black wrought-iron light posts. "We hope people will pass us on their way to work," Klimek says. Yet if they want to make this particular walkway a major thoroughfare, they have their work cut out for them: I went back a couple days later to have another look, and I saw only two women in parkas and a man with long hair and a dirty green overcoat, carrying plastic bags full of bottles.

But for now the place is home, and Klingel and Klimek have already put in a lot of work there. To start, the space needed a good cleaning. They mopped the floors, then mopped again. "And it still needs a professional cleaning," Klingel says. (Bottles of cleaners still sit on the tables by the front door.) They ripped down the black plywood

that the city put over the windows. At one point, they also needed to get rid of the 30-foot boxes that took up most of the space; The State Tower's managers had left boxes of window trimming in No. 217. Soon after Klingel and Klimek found the place, they assembled of a team of friends who spent a couple hours carrying the boxes into the empty place two doors down. Moving those boxes was probably the worst task — certainly the most laborious. "It was a really big bitch," Klingel says. Klimek nods. "It was my biggest workout, well, ever," he says.

In the next few months, they hope to find someone to help with lead abatement, hopefully for free. After that, Klimek and Klingel aren't actually sure what their storefront will

become or even what it will look like. They're just drawing up design plans now. The place's exact use is even more up in the air. It might just be a gallery. Or perhaps a gallery that also doubles as a gelato shop. No matter what it eventually becomes, it will certainly rank as an improvement over how Klimek and Klingel found it.

After our tour, Klimek and Klingel spend about 15 minutes completing some chores before our bus back to campus arrives. They move some chairs out of a back closet and talk about the future arrangement of the space. We leave a few minutes before the bus is due and walk over to the bus stop outside of City.

"I just see color there," he says, sweeping his hand in an arc, making

him look like an artist discussing a painting on his easel. "Maybe red lights. Anything that makes people stop and wonder, 'Why the hell is this in Syracuse?"

We board the bus and take three seats facing the windows. As it drives away, all three of us turn for a final look, perhaps imagining all those red lights.