photo: David Olsen
Ron Schwabe has made a positive impact on the Downtown streetscape for over twenty years now. His latest two projects are just the most recent in a series of quiet, subtle, but dramatic improvements to historic Downtown buildings that had been overlooked by others.
The newly-renovated Old Market Inn, most recently home of the Arizona Glass & Mirror Company, at 403 N. 6th Ave., joins two neighboring Schwabe projects that have created an island of vitality in the Warehouse District.
The 1880 Old Market space features wood trusses, exposed brick inside and out, with original painted signs from the grocer, cigar purveyor and meat markets that were there before and after the turn of the 20th century.
Schwabe was approached by businesspeople interested in opening bars and microbreweries in Old Market, but it will be long-time downtown gallery owner Eric Firestone who will lease the entire building for a gallery that he plans to turn into a destination on the national art circuit.
He keeps his pulse on the art scene in New York, San Francisco, and Miami, but says, "My heart is in Tucson, where I've had galleries since I was 22."
Firestone is excited to have what he describes as dramatic space, expansive enough for large canvases, sculpture, and other Modernist Contemporary media and plans to open in early November.
He's kept space on Congress continuously for about fifteen years, but in recent years the space has been used for storage and private appointments; the more accessible Eric Firestone Gallery has been at Joesler Village at River and Campbell.
Schwabe converted the old Firestone Building (as in tires, not Eric) at 6th and 6th into gallery and retail space over twenty years ago, and about ten years ago, he owned, redeveloped, and sold the building just north of the Old Market to Jim and Sarah DeWitt, who opened the stylish DeWitt Design. Schwabe has almost single-handedly saved an entire historic block.
Meanwhile, at the southwest corner of Scott and Broadway, Schwabe has put a City faade grant to good use, renovating the exterior and interior of a century-old building that was non-descript with Tucson beige stucco into a potential restaurant destination (two such spaces on the ground floor), with executive office suites upstairs.
