There are many things to say about the Dirt Palace — an impossible many. It started in 2000 as an artist-run performance space in Olneyville, the same neighborhood that used Fort Thunder used to be in. The building is old. It used to have many more floors (as you can see from the photo above: at this time, the building only has two). I heard it was once a pharmacy and once a library. I’ve also heard it was a nunnery, but I don’t know that I believe that story. Before founders Pippi Zornoza and Xander Marro moved in, it had been abandoned. Since purchasing the building they have hosted countless events and residents: artist live upstairs and it works like a kind of collective.  They curate their storefront window, occasionally make their own mead and boast a S.S.C.O.W.L. library (Shivering Shelves Collection of Weirdness Library).”S.S.C.O.W.L. houses an extensive collection of rare and independently published comics and zines as well as antique, arcane and unusual books, periodicals and videos on a wide variety of subjects.” The library is open to the public on days when guest librarians have curated the collection around a particular theme.
Band Room
When I visited the Dirt Palace this summer, it reminded me of a Wes Anderson set. Pippi was creating a stone mosaic for the building’s exterior in their main ballroom on the first floor. A few others worked on other projects: the ballroom I stood in was a communal studio. Adjacent stood the band room, complete with a drum set, guitars and recording equipment. Nearby was a dark room for burning screens, a cartoon studio with hand-me-down equipment procured from RISD and a separate printing studio with a wash tub. Everywhere I looked I saw original prints.
The Library
Xander led me up  the widest flight of wooden stairs I think I’ve ever seen. The banister was thick and, like the stairs, stained dark. I remember the wallpaper was a deep rose, printed in a Victorian pattern. Did I mention the height of the ceilings? The ceilings were high, everywhere: like 12 feet at least. The whole place felt like an old and giant East Coast house, a little rickety and creaky and very likely full of ghosts. The library was on the second floor, as were the bedrooms: seven separate rooms, all built out with lofts. There was a bathroom on one end of the hall and, on the other, a lovely kitchen with a living room. The kitchen was bright and full of light. Plants and knick knacks were everywhere. The wall behind the stove had images from vintage cookbooks wheat pasted all over it like a homemade wallpaper. There were two fridges to accommodate the various residents and tons of plants and a breeze blew threw the house so that, despite the day’s heat, I felt pretty cool. And certainly, totally bowled over by the imagination that just seemed to leak out of the walls.
The Kitchen
How does a space like this come to be? How do a couple of twenty-year olds go about buying a building? What is like to interface with the politics of one’s own environment? This is what I’d come to ask; it was why we were in their kitchen and why we sat down. Xander and Pippi were immediately affable; it was obvious they had invested years not only in a physical space, but also into their friendship.
I’ve divided the following interview into four parts and will post it over the next four days. This first section I call, The Early Years.Â
Caroline Picard: I’m interested in how the Dirt Palace started.
Pippi Zornoza: When we first started the space Xander and I had both at different times lived in this building that had gone through a series of evictions of artists who were illegally living there. They would sort of fill up the spaces and after a certain amoung ot time the fire department would pay attention and all of these people would get evicted. It was also the same time that they were starting to look at the Eagle Square development, which is the building that Fort Thunder was in. There were alot of artist studios in that same building. I’m not sure how many people actually had spaces there, but it seemed like there were a lot. And so around that time I think we first started working on acquiring the Dirt Palace property; before Eagle Square became a development-
Xander Marro: There were people in suits walking around [Eagle Square] taking measurements but it wasn’t like their development plans were public; no one knew what was going to happen.
PZ: And Xander had a friend looking into opening up a bookstore, so she had been looking at spaces and was looking at the space that is a kitchen right now for the bookstore, and found out it was not that much more expensive to just rent the whole building. So she and Xander started talking about it, and I didn’t even know Xander at this time, but she had the idea of, “OK, so what if we got this space and it could be another collective space.†The landlord was sort of pitching the rent-to-own agreement, so it started from that—people just reaching a certain frustration level with other people being evicted over and over again. We wanted some sort of sustainability.
The bookstore idea fell out of the picture really quickly, and Xander approached me and some other people, and as we started getting a group together we asked what this could really be? Maybe we could actually buy this building. The model of AS220 was already there, so we thought what if there was this artist not-for-profit women-run studio? We were really young, I was 21 at the time, you know, and really idealistic. I had a lot of naive but positive energy, and we just sort of threw ourselves into the idea, almost in a cockamamie way. And now looking back and knowing the trajectory of course I still would have, but I definitely went into it, I would say more than Xander, pretty naively.
We had this idea of starting a not for profit, which we did. And that the NFP would own the building and there would be artist living spaces up here, and shared facilities downstairs. Definitely with the idea that the studios downstairs would be more open to the community. Within the first year it became really clear that there were different goals and motivations from different people in the group.
CP: How many people were involved?
PZ: There were six of us originally. And there sort of became a little bit of a faction of what the direction was going to be. We spent a lot of time forming the NFP and creating a board of directors and applying for a grant, and we had 18 months of the rent to own agreement. The landlord was a slumlord. He pretty much knew we would do some improvements to the building, thought we wouldn’t be able to buy it, and imagined he would reap the rewards after he evicted us, or keep us on as tenants until he could sell it later.
XM: We had the fear of him yanking it out from underneath us and I think that fear wasn’t irrational—I don’t think he was a nefarious person, but I do think he was in it for the money-
PZ: He was definitely in it for the money. And it also became clear at some point just- well there were two different conflicts of interest- we were just working on the space every moment that we weren’t working our day jobs. it was just what had to happen at the time, because there wasn’t really plumbing upstairs. We couldn’t wash dishes. I don’t think we even had a stove right away—people were sort of camping out in different areas of the building and we just wanted to get it to a livable place. I had just been evicted a few weeks before we started this project and I didn’t have a place to live, so we just sort of moved in and started working.
The Bathroom
XM: I remember you were sleeping at the top of that stair because all these windows were boarded up and that was the only crack of light.
PZ: And I had just heard a bunch of rumors about this building being broken into all the time, and people squatting here
CP: Was this a sketchy neighborhood?
XM: I think socioeconomically it’s probably similar now, but the trajectory that drug use has taken over the past ten years, like there were more crackheads basically. There were more people who were just freaked out and whatever else that stuff does. I think that maybe the average income and whatever other factors people throw into a good or bad neighborhood, crime is probably the same—I never felt super unsafe, but I think there were just a lot more visible drug users.
PZ: And that was when I was here. I was sleeping in this entire abandoned building alone. I was irrationally scared, just cause there was no electricity up here—now when I think back on it I think that the doors all worked. But you know, being a woman in this building that people identified as being abandoned, sleeping here at night, it was sort of sketchy.
CP: Especially since you’re removed from usual domestic things.
The Hallway
PZ: Yeah, yeah. So it became clear to us A) that we were spending our own money. We needed drywall, so we would just go buy it and split it amongst the six of us. And it just wasn’t the proper model for a NFP. There was no real business structure except for that we split expenses.
XM: And that there was a board but they were really backseat.
PZ: Yeah really backseat, like people who were excited about the idea, and who had some sort of connection either through the city, but mostly just people who were idealistically supportive. Even maybe in a different echelon of professionalism, but not people who were gonna come home from working their day job and throw in a bunch of hours of work. It was more like, you ladies do the work and we’re the figureheads who are supporting you to provide legitimacy. So we just started realizing that the way we were running the project, even though we knew that we were working towards this NFP model where the structure would be different, what we were doing just wasn’t sustainable. Being a constant volunteer but also in the place where you lived. Even the idea that once things were comfortable there would be programming, it was the idea that you’d wake up, go downstairs, and work more. And we all wanted to be artists as well, so that balance of artist, art administrator, and not getting compensated, was all really blurry. And also just realizing that we were running out of time; if we were going to fundraise 40,000 dollars, we weren’t going to make it.
XM: We had to come up with a down payment, and mortgage, and financing if we were going to buy the building.
CP: And it sounds like the amount of construction that you had to do, if you got it professionally done, would have taken a year at least.
XM: And it would have doubled our mortgage. We just figured it all out to do it ourselves.
PZ: Yeah, scrapped things together- you know, like maybe we did some things illegal, maybe we didn’t-
XM: We tried to build up to code.
PZ: We did try to build up to code. I meant more being like, “Oh there’s this giant stack of 2×4’s that are twelve feet long outside of that Dominoes; they’ve been there for 6 months, maybe we should just go there in the morning and take them.â€
XM: Oh yeah! I remember that.
CP:Â But still everything was so compressed. On top of the timeline you had to build the physical infrastructure , and organization, you were trying to raise money.
PZ: And also people didn’t have experience and at the time we operated by consensus. I like the idea of operating with a goal towards consensus, but for me through that experience I came up with the phrase tyranny through the minority, you know? If one person doesn’t like the idea, but everyone else thinks its good, it’s hard to move forward. I do think we strive here to agreon everything, and there’s sort of a give and take and compromise, but consensus was a hard way to operate.
CP: How the group was splitting?
PZ: Oh yeah the group. Oh and the other thing was that the board of directors has to be comprised of a certain amount of outside people. We couldn’t all just beon the board. Maybe one of us could, but at any point the board could decide that people were only allowed to live here for 2 years: We realized that we had no control over our home.
I think we decided that we had put so much time and engery into this- what was it going to amount to in the end? Really nothing. And realizing that we had no control over it, it just felt sort of wrong. There were so many conflicts of interest and there became a split in the group where some people really wanted the NFP to exist, and maybe change the thing so no one lived here, and there were other people who I think had been more present for a lot of the work who thought it made more sense to privately buy the building but still do what we’re planning on doing, but not to run it as a NFP.
Dirt Palace Lamp
XM: In a lot of ways it had to do with mentorism—people who had experience in this community—AS220 was the real first experiment that had existed for how artists could own real estate and how artists could collectivize and work together in all those things. So that was like, a real instant model—when we decided to do this we talked to a lot of people. I feel like we were on a listening tour of everyone who had done something similar, asking them to impart their wisdom. The wisdom of the day was to do the NFP model and it took a while for a few other people to really understand who we were even as individuals and say hey you know what, why don’t you try this other way. I felt like finally we started to listen and say well tell us more about what you know about this other way… and realized that it kind of made more sense.
PZ: Yeah and it got a little complicated, we ended up getting an outside moderator to listen to both sides and the decision that we came to was that the NFP would still exist and those people could take the name of the NFP and the grant—we had a $40,000 grant—and that’s the Hive Archive in town. And they ended up purchasing a building on Aleppo, and they’re still working on that building and I think they’re starting to do some programming now. And then we were able to keep going with trying to buy the building
XM: And one of the people who was on the board, who had personally gotten a loan from the city for her own business, held our hand and walked us through that process. Because the grant we had gotten was from the city, through their CDBG money, but they also used CDBG money to help give loans to small businesses. And there was no way we would’ve gotten a loan otherwise, you know- Pippi’s 21, I’m 25. I’m a teacher and she’s a waitress.
PZ: Yeah and I was totally working off the books.
…Go here to read the second part of this interview…
(Special thanks to Daryl Meador for help transcribing this audio into text!)
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