Photo by Michael Schiess

The former Clamp Swing factory on Blanding Avenue is currently undergoing renovation to become a community art center, with artists residing on site.

In large, white block letters touting the name of the original tenant, the brick building on Blanding Avenue still bears its former identity as headquarters for Clamp Swing Pricing Co., the company that made its name manufacturing the little metal product signs lining the aisles of supermarkets.

A very different future now lies in store for the formerly neglected building, as East Bay artist Janet Koike redevelops the space into what she hopes will be a new artistic center for the Island community.

Her plans are ambitious: the 16,000-square-foot space will include seven work/live units for resident artists, an art-book store, a sizeable gallery space, and central to the vision, a large, vaulted-ceiling performance space upstairs designed to host music, theatrical events and community forums.

Koike’s roots in the Bay Area artist community run deep. When she was in her 20s, she lived in a West Oakland warehouse, a space she shared with a number of other artist friends. Many of them have remained close over the years, and that example of a tight-knit creative community left a lasting impression on her.

“It gave us a chance to grow and develop as artists,” Koike said during a tour of the Blanding Avenue construction site. She views her project in part as an attempt to recreate that ideal of a creative collective.

In 1999, Koike, a taiko drummer, started the nonprofit RhythMix Cultural Works, and began looking for a space to house an arts center. In 2003, she purchased the old Clamp Swing building for $1.3 million, and with funds from a family inheritance, she’s spent several million more renovating the brick-and-timber structure.

Michael Schiess, a local artist and owner of the Lucky Ju Ju Pinball Gallery is excited by what he says will be a major new venue for artists and audiences on the Island.

“I’ve always felt like the Frank Bette Center and the Ju Ju were little oases in a cultural desert,” he said. He’s looking forward to Koike’s art center as “a lighthouse, a beacon for artists.”

But the project, as with most new developments in Alameda, isn’t without its fair share of controversy.

After Koike’s work/live design was approved by the Alameda Planning Board, Alameda residents Edward Murphy and Pat Bail, the latter a two-time candidate for city council, lodged separate appeals with the Planning and Building Department.

Murphy, 73, argued that although the work/live units may comply with a city council work/live ordinance, the ordinance itself was a violation of Measure A, the 1973 city charter amendment precluding multiple-dwelling units on the Island.

In 1998, Alameda City Council passed an ordinance allowing work/live studios in the Northern Waterfront area in an attempt to encourage preservation and creative reuse of buildings within what has historically been an industrial zone bordering the Estuary.

After Edward Murphy’s appeal of the Clamp Swing project was denied by city council, his son Matthew went on to sue the city, arguing the council’s ordinance conflicted with the 1973 voter mandate to halt construction of multiple-dwelling units.

Following an Alameda County Superior Court judge’s ruling in favor of the city, Murphy has appealed his case to the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco.

Joseph Wood, the lawyer representing the plaintiff Matthew Murphy, expects a ruling in the case sometime in the next six to nine months.

But the elder Murphy says that even if he and his son were to prevail in court, he isn’t particularly concerned about stopping the Clamp Swing renovation. His concern, he says, has more to do with what he considers the city’s willful violation of Measure A than with Koike’s particular project, caught as it may be in the crossfire of Murphy’s battle with the city.

“I’m not going to do anything if she is allowed to build it. My primary argument is that no one else should be allowed to build. She snuck under the wire somehow,” Murphy said.

Koike’s project is the first and only development to take advantage of the 1998 work/live ordinance. In 2004, city council decided to review the work/live ordinance, but the ordinance was not altered in the wake of that review.

‘There’s been no movement to change the ordinance,” said councilman Frank Matarrese. “I don’t think it violates the spirit of Measure A. I think it provides a remedy for buildings that are basically left to deteriorate.”

Meanwhile, construction that began on the Clamp Swing building in April 2005 is slated to wrap up sometime next May.

Koike says she’s already heard from artists interested in occupying one of the seven work/live spaces, some from as far away as Los Angeles and Boston.

She has a number of ideas for how she’ll use the space, envisioning “as diverse programming as possible.” Given her own background as a taiko drummer for the multicultural world music ensemble RhythMix, she’s planning on hosting a world music series. And Koike’s husband is a member of the popular San Francisco Mime Troupe, so some political theater is another likely possibility.

“It’s going to be a really active community center,” she said, with after-school classes during weekdays and performances held on weekend nights.

Although the exterior of the Clamp Swing building may harken back to the warehouse aesthetic of her youth, the beautiful vaulted wood ceilings over the stage area suggest Koike’s artistic home has come a long way from her bohemian haunts in West Oakland.

“I wanted to provide a way to share work in a nice venue and have the community respond to it in a nice venue,” Koike said. “It should bring an influx of people here.”

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