Artists' Lofts

A committee was formed to decide what art would be hung on the walls, but Reece soon shut it down. "They never would let us show our art," she says. "Because Aaron, even though he made me chair of the committee, he told me everything had to be approved by him."

But the greatest battle wound up being over Johnson's electrical bills, which soon hit $300 a month. Her ground-floor unit had a shaft that ran up through the building, and not only could she hear other residents bumping uglies throughout the night, she also couldn't keep the bills down. "One month I was in the hospital for more than half the month, yet I still had the same high electricity bill," she says. The management ran tests to see if her meter was connected to another unit. They brought in engineers. Nothing worked.

Eventually, ArtSpace agreed to start paying for Johnson's electricity.

"Aaron would hold it against me," she says. "‘Why are you complaining? We're paying for your electricity.' These really rude, horrible comments to me. As if I was getting something for free that I didn't deserve."

Reece says he did everything he could to satisfy Johnson. "I don't want to get into her medical condition, that whole history there," he says, right before doing just that. "She was a very emotional person and I think her illness contributed to her emotional state."

It was eventually agreed that Johnson could break her lease. She moved out, less than a year after she'd moved in, and went back to Sugar Land to live with her parents. Defeated.

"It just took your soul away, after living there," she says. "You didn't want to make art, and if you're an artist, that is your soul. You were totally dried up."

Johnson's situation was definitely unique, but her interactions with management were not atypical, according to five current residents interviewed by the Press who wished to remain anonymous for this story.

"A lot of people are afraid to speak, because they're afraid — Aaron Reece can kick me out for speaking up," says one artist. "There's this underlying fear that they're going to lose this apartment, that they're going to get evicted if they speak up about any problems with the building."

"Because we've gotten no support from Avenue CDC, because we've gotten no support from ArtSpace, it kind of made a lot of people feel like, ‘Well, all right,' so we stay in our lofts and our apartments and paint and do what we're going to do anyways," says another artist. "Where's our community we were told we were going to have?"

The mission got sidetracked somewhere along the way, they say. But then again, you wouldn't expect anything less in one of our city's most storied sites.

"We don't like thinking about dying and we don't like being dead and so we don't like taking care of cemeteries," says Mark Denton, an archaeologist with the Texas Historical Commission. "Our society has this out-of-sight, out-of-mind philosophy about the dead, and it's reflected in how many cities have built over and turned former cemeteries into something completely other than a cemetery."

Need proof? Just take a look at the history of the Elder Street site.

Originally deeded to the city for $750 by the A.C. and J.K Allen Trust — yep, the Allen Brothers — the land became the city's second cemetery in the 1840s. (The first was Founder's Cemetery, on West Dallas.) Buried beneath its surface were white people, black people, brown people, yellow-fever victims, pretty much everyone.

"Everybody and their mother was buried in this cemetery," says Denton. There were four official sections, one for rich white folks, one for poor white folks, one for Hispanics and one for African Americans, he says, "but it pretty much included everybody over the years, including the Union general who occupied Houston during the Reconstruction years. His body was eventually exhumed and sent back to wherever."

The city grew. People kept dying. By the 1870s, the caretaker was showing up at city council meetings, complaining he couldn't dig one grave without hitting another, so the city decided to kick some black folks out of their homes in Freedman's Town, in the Fourth Ward, and build the new cemetery there. This third cemetery eventually wound up underneath what would become the Allen Parkway Village housing project, but that's another story altogether [See "Lenwood Johnson's Last Stand," by Brian Wallstin, December 14, 1995].