508 Melwood

I’ve had a lot of studios over the years. Some great, some not so great. But my studio at 508 Melwood in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood was special, almost magical in some ways.

I rented it in the mid-to-late 1990s. The street was a mix of residential and industrial. Exactly the kind of place you want if you're making art and films; quiet enough to work, rough enough to scare ya, to make you feel alive.

At the time I was searching all over Oakland for a space big enough to build stop-motion sets and make my large mixed-media paintings. One day I stumbled across a strange little building that looked like it might have been a storefront years ago but had since been turned into an apartment. In the window was a tiny “For Rent” sign.

I knocked.

A guy wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates hat answered the door and started showing me the place. His girlfriend explained that they had just moved from New York City because Pittsburgh was cheap and her boyfriend loved the Pirates.

The funny thing was—they had never actually been to Pittsburgh before.

But they were thrilled because they had just bought a house together in Regent Square for $80,000. They couldn’t believe their luck! “This place is cheap and cool” said the woman.

The place had a big open area downstairs with a bathroom and a few small rooms upstairs. Perfect studio bones. The basement was funky, graffiti on the walls and old jazz flyers taped to the ceiling.

Then the guy said something that made the hair on my neck stand up.

“This used to be a late-night jazz bar called the Crescendo.”

BOOM.

I had a flashback.

Back in the 80s when I was a student at Carnegie Mellon, a crazy buddy of mine, Monty, rest in peace, brought me there one night around 2 a.m. We went down into the basement so he could buy some cocaine. He didn’t tell me he was going to do that, but yeah, coke buying at 2am. Creepy gangster type stuff.

I remember standing there thinking:

Well… this is it. This is how I die.

Some guy was wailing on a trumpet upstairs while a drug deal was happening in a basement covered in graffiti. I was completely freaked out.

Luckily we got out of there.

Then the Pirates-hat guy casually pointed to the bathroom.

“Yeah,” he said, “Miles Davis took a piss in that bathroom.”

“Miles Davis pissed here? I’ll take it,” I said, before I even asked the price.

It felt like destiny.

Any place Miles Davis had pissed in seemed like a perfectly reasonable place to make art.

Over the next few years there were some challenges, a slightly crazy neighbor named Jeff and a few crumbling building issues, but overall it was incredible.

At 508 Melwood I made all my Nickelodeon projects:
segments for The Amanda Show, the Emmett Freedy short, stop-motion work for PBS, and a bunch of TV spots.

I even shot my television pilot there:

CRAB — Comedy, Rudness and Beyond.

The rent was cheap.
The vibe was right.
And Pittsburgh had this raw, hardworking energy that was perfect for what I was doing at the time.

Studios come and go.

But sometimes I still dream about that place on Melwood.

Some spaces hold more than tools and paint.

They hold time.