September 27–October 4, 2001

naked city

First Look

Conduit

Trenton Makes, The World Takes: a great motto for urban industrialization, spread as it is across Jersey like a physical mantra. That the city’s industry is refocused from metallurgy to arts, entertainment and hotels is (like in Philly) part of a grand renaissance.

Trenton Makes is also the name for the trio of investors/ creators/ builders/ bookers/ managers — Roland Pott, John Hatch and David Henderson — at the heart of Trenton’s coolest arts venues. The four-Victorian-house structure containing the two-year-old coffeehouse/studio lab/ jazz and poetry center Urban Word Cafe and its three-house brother The Conduit — opening Saturday at 439 S. Broad, directly across from the Sovereign Bank Arena — places lively arts and human development in the heart of the city’s entertainment triangle.

With its 500-person live venue/dance club, two floors of artist studio space and individual book and record shops in one complex, The Conduit is an enclave of the arts; an Esalen in Trenton.

For Henderson, 41, and Hatch, 40 — New York architects who migrated to Trenton’s Mill Hill district 13 years ago — creating the Conduit and Urban Word was about redevelopment: as much for historic preservation and the redesign of urban life itself as for entrepreneurial risk.

"We wanted to see things we liked in respective cities," says Hatch, who, with roommate Henderson, created a company restoring Trenton’s wonderful old-brick Victorian rowhomes dating from the mid- to late-1800s. When they met Potts — a New Yorker who migrated to Portland, Ore., just in time for that city’s cafe-culture crush six years ago, they found fusion in the huge impact of coffeehouses, film houses and loft sessions among artists. "We wanted to make an an all-around arts spot that showed art, that spoke arts, that was a center for a community that had no cohesive community. We wanted to do this for Trenton and to Trenton, to offer something for artists here and for artists who wish to be here, play here, work here," says Hatch.

Years in the restaurant-management biz showed Potts, 28, that this small town had a demographic advantage: several million people about an hour away in NYC, a couple million people 45 minutes away in Philly. "People who lived and loved the alternative music scene back then are still here," says Potts. "They came into Urban Word all the time begging for a like-minded venue."

The trio bought the space that now hosts Urban Word Cafe in 1999, a three-story Victorian that had its two-top chopped in the ’60s, making UW’s restaubar literary boîte a mix of ’60s modernism done up in yellows and reds with tattered, exposed wood and broken column funk.

Last year they purchased UW’s neighbor, broken only by a small, lovely courtyard. "[The space] was a social hall with a ballroom and retail spaces, but it was a wreck, having been through fires and water damage," says Hatch. Now, the Conduit exists in all its funky shabby-chic glory, a Hammer Horror film mansion done up à la Limelight, borrowing a bit of Urban Word’s primary colors with shiny black concrete curvilinear bars and abstract fabric paneling. "It’s moody, but high-tech," says Hatch of the space, which has a record store and bookshop behind it. The Conduit contains not only top-o’-the-line sound (for live acts as diverse as pub rocker Graham Parker and salsa king Jimmy Bosch) and dance-ephemera (for their Saturday house party run by ex-Strictly Rhythm labelite Davey Gold, spun by NYC’s Hex Hector) but also (on floors two and three) 26 artist studios functioning as work space and display dock for Conduit’s First Friday Open Studio sessions.

"Artists here are as interconnected as they are separate: older artists who stayed here… Younger artists who wanted outlets," says Potts. "All they needed was outreach, to meet each other.… It’s not a question of whether artists are in Trenton. They’re here. It’s not about how they’re perceived outside of Trenton. It’s about how they perceive themselves." And for that, Urban Word Cafe and the burgeoning Conduit, offer the very best frame, one as lucid as the spirit that guides them and as solid as anything built within the borders of Trenton.

—A.D. Amorosi

Conduit, 439 S. Broad St., Trenton, N.J., 609-656-1199, www.conduitmusic.com.