By Jeff Grossman
The New York Times

Jon Yanofsky came to Peekskill in June 2003, to take the helm of the Paramount Center for the Arts. Earlier this month he bought a home in the city, the first house he has ever owned.

Ryan Brown started working as the registrar of the new Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in the city in December, managing its collection. By the end of the month he hopes renovations on his new apartment will be complete so he and his girlfriend can move up from Brooklyn.

Mr. Yanofsky and Mr. Brown are just two examples of the growing number of newcomers in jobs in arts-related fields who have settled in Peekskill, benefiting indirectly from changes in the city’s zoning laws. The zoning changes have brought more artists and more people interested in the arts to this city of about 24,000.

Peekskill first changed its zoning laws to entice artists to make use of the long-abandoned space above downtown stores 15 years ago. Faced with a loss of downtown business to newer commercial strips, city officials feared that Peekskill was becoming a ghost town. They decided that they had to bring people back to their sidewalks and keep the tax base from crumbling.

By converting obsolete commercial spaces into an artists’ residential district, the new traffic would be continuous rather than limited to weekday shopping hours, said Ralph DiBart, an urban planner and an expert on downtown reuse who was brought in by Fran Gibbs, the mayor of Peekskill at the time, to help revitalize the area.

“Artists are very enterprising,” he said. They would live and work in town, support businesses struggling for customers and start new endeavors of their own, he said.

The zoning amendments created a new purpose for the upstairs storage rooms of storefronts by allowing them to be used as living space, as long as a portion of each apartment was set aside for working studios. Mr. DiBart gave personal tours to prospective residents and persuaded building owners to rehabilitate their upper floors and helped them find tenants.

“These landlords who were suffering with unoccupied buildings were not asked to invest on a speculative basis,” Ms. Gibbs said. “There was a tenant for whom they were renovating the space, and that makes a huge difference.”

In the last two years, the pace of the resident art community’s growth has surged.

The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, a 12,500-square-foot museum, opened last June in a former lumber yard on Main Street after four years of preparation. Since Mr.Yanofsky took over the 75 –year-old Paramount Arts Center, the theater has invested $870,000 on its auditorium to repaint it, repair the plaster and add a rebuilt stage, a new curtain, refurbished seats, new lighting, new carpeting and a new concession stand.

The theater was scheduled for demolition until it was rescued in the early 1980’s by George Pataki, who was then mayor. Its renovation and the opening of the Hudson Valley Contemporary Arts Center represent the most recent phase of Peekskill’s development: the arrival of art institutions and affiliated professionals.

Bernard Molloy, president of the local Chamber of Commerce, said of the burgeoning arts community: “These are professionals who make their living in the business of art. These are business people who are artists, so that’s a sea change.”

Koki Doktori, a painter, has lived and worked in SoHo in Manhattan since 1969. Edward Burke, an art gallery owner, brought Mr. Doktori to Peekskill in September to see if he might be interested in showing his work at Mr. Burke’s 25N Gallery. Mr. Doktori was so impressed with the neighborhood that he spent almost $400,000 to buy the building across the street. He intends to gradually relocate his home and his studio to the Peekskill building, where he hopes to open a cooperative gallery on the ground floor. It was important, he added, that he buy a place in Peekskill rather than testing the waters by renting. “I almost feel like it’s whether you live with your girlfriend or marry her,” he said. “I got married. That’s it, I’ll work it out.”

The expansion of the city’s art community has come in distinct stages. The first was initiated by Ms. Gibbs with the help of Mr. DiBart.

The departure of Steinbach’s department store, the city’s last remaining anchor retailer, had left “a pall”, Ms. Gibbs said. Many of the downtown retailers had upstairs storage spaces that had been crumbling for decades from lack of attention. At its outset, the redevelopment plan sought to make those spaces economically viable again. By modifying the zoning code to allow artists both to live and work above the stores, landlords have an incentive to repair the spaces and put them on the market, she said.

Derek Reist, a painter who specializes in New York City landscapes, relocated to downtown Peekskill from Manhattan more than five years ago. He found his loft on his first visit to the city.

“Quite apart from the fact that you’re surrounded by artists, it’s a nice place,” said Mr. Reist, 59. “It’s quiet, the spaces are good, they’re reasonable and it’s got great light.”

The quality of light, he said, shows that it is not by happenstance alone that the area has a history as a fertile ground for masterworks. “The Hudson River School guys, they were on to something,” he said. Although he stills travels to New York City at least every weekend to find new images to paint, Peekskill provides an atmosphere for his ideas to gestate, Mr. Reist said.

“I kind of like the way Peekskill is now,” he said. “I don’t want it to become a boomtown.”

All of the second-floor studio spaces have been leased, said Mark Cavanna, president of the Peekskill Business Improvement District. Instead of just inhabiting formerly derelict areas in the retail district, the arts community is flowing outward into other neighborhoods.

Once the abandoned spaces were filled, the growth of the Peekskill arts community entered its second stage. Three years ago city, state, and county finished building 30 units of subsidized housing available only to artists or people in arts-related high-tech professions. The residents are required to continue their artistic-endeavors as long as they live in the building, and can’t sell the lofts for fair-market value for decades.

All the units in the building have been sold, and a similar project is now planned for Main Street using $1.2 million remaining from the state funds, said Mayor John G. Testa. The new plan will be coordinated by a private company, Community Preservation Corporation. It involves the rehabilitation of two buildings as well as construction on empty lots. Unlike the 30 units in the first project, the 18 new lofts will be condominiums rather than co-ops, and buildings will have retail space on the street level. Construction is expected to start this spring, Mr. Molloy said.

Among the artists living in the art lofts, Linda Jean Fisher is unusual because her family has deep roots in Peekskill. She also is the new president of the Peekskill Arts Council, which has a membership roster of 100 local artists. Her grandfather, Vincent Fisher, was excused from military service during World War II because he maintained all of the city’s ambulances, police cars and fire trucks, she said. As a young woman, her mother, Joyce Moretti Fisher, was a “popcorn girl” at the Paramount.

In 1991, after the zoning laws were modified, Ms. Fisher became one of the original downtown studio tenants. When the lofts became available, she was one of the first buyers.

Andreas Engel, 36, moved into a loft with his wife, Stephanie, and their newborn son, Aidan, two years ago, and they now have a 4-month-old daughter, Remi. In Chelsea the family lived in 400 square feet, Mr. Engel said. His studio was blocks away. Now they share a combined studio and living space of about 2,000 square feet. A professional Web designer, he has space to work on his paintings and sculptures, while Ms. Engel runs her knitting business, Nooknits.

Pat Braja, a professional arts manager who moved to Peekskill in June and has since become executive director of the artists’ council, said, “Right now we’re small, we don’t have a lot of money,” adding, “Our biggest thing is the thing that costs the least, and that’s communication – communicating with the community, communicating with the other cultural organizations.” Ms. Braja joined the Paramount’s board of directors on March 8.

The city’s annual open-studios days, to be held this year on May 21 and 22, give all the local artists and the six commercial gallery owners a chance to work together on a single project. Mr. Engel has contributed a new logo to be used to advertise this event.

It is not unusual for Peekskill’s gallery owners to coordinate their show openings for maximum effect, or to advertise jointly, said Wendie Garber, who runs Flat Iron Gallery. In June the Business Improvement District will inaugurate the city’s “First Fridays” program, in which local businesses are encouraged to stay open late and provide special events the first Friday of every month. The Business Improvement District is also working to put banners and an informational kiosk downtown, Mr. Cavanna said.

The Paramount, the museum and the leadership of the arts council have provided “a massive injection, a shot in the arm,” to the evolution of the community, said Mr.Yanofsky, the theater’s director. The theater supplies exhibition space on open studio days for artists whose workspace isn’t centrally located.

We all have a very collaborative, forward-thinking approach to putting our energy and our efforts toward this momentum that’s been building over the past 15 years,” he said. We couldn’t be accomplishing what we’re doing without the precedent, and that fertile ground already being laid. So what we’re able to do is hopefully take it to the next level.”

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