Over the past five years or so, Anne Rogers has labored to turn an old building in downtown Port Jervis into a future creative house for up-and-coming artists.
With the help of her custom motorcycle builder husband, Paul Cox, the old floors and ductwork were ripped, custom windows and doors were replaced, and a new staircase was built using wood from a closed business next to Mr. Cox’s former workshop in Brooklyn.
After investing about $1 million of their own money in the old storefront, the couple looks forward to a planned soft opening for the ground-level space in spring.
“It was truly a labor of love,” Ms. Rogers told The Epoch Times. “I want it to be a house of creation where future artists grow, and aspiring young people are exposed to all kinds of crafts.
“I think it is important, in this day and age, for people to get off their phones, communicate with each other, and get inspired from people who use their physical hands to create things,” she added.
About seven years ago, Ms. Rogers and her husband were looking for a weekend house within a two-hour driving radius of their Brooklyn home, and they found it in the Town of Deerpark in Orange County.
It was around the same time the nearby Port Jervis was experiencing one of its first waves of downtown revival, with several long vacated storefronts turned into new businesses, including the Fox N Hare brewery and Foundry42 cafe on Front Street.
Ms. Rogers had an urge to be part of the upward force and bought the four-story building at 22 Jersey Avenue.
With her home base still in New York City, Ms. Rogers and her husband would travel to the Port Jervis area over weekends and during her daughter’s summer breaks to work on the project.
“I was going to open a long time ago, but things just kept happening, and then the pandemic happened,” she said. “I have been constantly evolving and figuring out what works and what doesn’t work.”
Now, with the interior work of the first-level space nearing completion and a targeted soft opening in spring, she has planned an art show in April and another crafts festival likely in the following month.
A cafe, art studios, and retail sections will be added on the ground floor, and an art gallery and wellness room will be added on the mezzanine level.
A worktable is planned next to the staircase leading up to the mezzanine floor so that visitors can observe the making of handcrafts in real-time.
She will name the space “R.H. Smith Mercantile” after her great grandfather, a famed mechanical engineer.
“I welcome all artists who are passionate about their crafts into this space, and it is also a space where community members gather while getting exposed to different forms of arts,” she said.
“She has got a great vision, and we have tried to bring it to reality together,” Mr. Cox told The Epoch Times. “It is not easy, but we have enjoyed the process together.”
Ms. Rogers’s project is one of around a dozen recommended for the $10 million downtown revitalization grant, and, if awarded a share of the funding, she would use it to finish exterior work and start on the designing work for artist lofts on the third and fourth floors.
In June, following her daughter’s high school graduation, she plans to move to the Port Jervis area with her husband and focus on her arts entrepreneurship full-time.
“People ask me, ‘Are you going to be an empty nester soon?’ I am like, ‘Yes, I will miss my daughter terribly after she goes away to college,’” she said. “But it is almost like life is beginning for me as well.
“This is all going to be a brand-new baby for me.”
