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Roosevelt Row was not handed to anyone. It was kept. Neighbors fought for old houses, small business owners signed leases on blocks other people had written off, and advocates kept arguing for local ownership when tearing down was the easier answer.
The Steward's Residence is named for all of them: the people whose real work was making room for everyone else.
Of those stewards, we recognize Kimber Lanning, because she has done that work on this street, in public, for decades: Modified Arts on Roosevelt, Local First Arizona, and a historic house she moved rather than lose.12
Some people make art. Some people make sure artists have somewhere to exist.
Kimber has spent decades building and protecting the independent businesses, creative spaces and neighborhoods that give Phoenix its character. It started with Stinkweeds, the independent record store she founded and still runs.
In 1999 she opened Modified Arts at 407 E Roosevelt Street, in a building that had been Metropophobobia, a performance space and bookstore. She had been playing in an improvisational band there when the director announced he was leaving.1
She later founded Local First Arizona, which grew into one of the country's most recognized organizations advocating for locally owned business and place-based economic development.
None of that is art in the narrow sense. All of it is the reason the art had anywhere to happen.
Kimber has described the Roosevelt of that period plainly: the street was largely dirt, and the buildings were empty.1
Modified Arts became one of the first reasons to come anyway. Eye Lounge, opened by Greg Esser and Cindy Dach, followed about a year and a half later. What is now a First Friday drawing roughly thirty thousand people started as a handful of rooms with their lights on.1
That sequence matters to this project. Roosevelt Row did not arrive as an arts district. It was assembled, slowly, by people who took a lease on a block nobody wanted.
When a historic house on Roosevelt Street was set for demolition following a land deal, Kimber did something most people only talk about. She had it moved.2
The Wurth House was relocated to a previously empty lot next door to Modified Arts and restored, which meant new engineering, new mechanical and electrical systems and structural repair before it could meet code. It is now one of the few historic structures remaining on the Row after decades of demolition.2
“I jumped in to save this old house, and knew Phoenix folks would step up to help make it happen.”2
Kimber Lanning
In February 2018, Kimber offered the patio at Modified Arts to a poet who wanted somewhere to hold readings on art walk nights.3
That poet was Rosemarie Dombrowski, and what she built there became First Friday Poetry on Roosevelt Row.
Two of the six residences on this block honor two people, and the reason one of them has a story to tell is that the other one handed her a patio.
Rosemarie Dombrowski is honored at The Writer's Residence, 214 W McKinley Street.
We could have called it Unit 1.
Instead it is The Steward's Residence, named for everyone who makes sure Phoenix keeps the things that make it Phoenix, and recognizing someone who has spent thirty years doing it. Independent businesses. Old buildings. Room for artists to work.
Stewardship is unglamorous. It is leases and code compliance and showing up to the meeting. It is also the reason this neighborhood exists in a form worth naming homes after.
When you support local artists, you are supporting your neighbors and your neighborhood.
A Storied Series by Bri Roche, founder of Roche Home Co.