It was the Sam's Club of trash, a place where members could drop in to pick up the discards of a throwaway society and turn them into art.
But the Please Take Materials Exchange, launched nearly two years ago, closed its doors yesterday, done in by rising rents and a fruitless search for a permanent home.
A joint effort of the Creative Artists' Resource Project and the Dumpster Divers, a group of artists with a passion for trash-picking, Please Take M.E. had set up shop in the basement of the Wolf Building at 12th and Callowhill Streets. There, the volunteer organization took in donations that ranged from boxes of doorknobs to bins of crutches, from industrial-size spools of thread to discarded electronic equipment.
"It's a real loss," said Please Take member Randall Cleaver, an artist who makes lamps and clocks from found objects. Please Take treasures that have made their way into Cleaver's work include bicycle parts, plastic domes from light fixtures, and microscope lenses.
"My work definitely benefited from it," said sculptor Shelley Spector about Please Take. The whimsical figures Spector is exhibiting at Sande Webster Gallery are largely made of bits and pieces she picked up at the exchange, where an $80 membership bought a year of unlimited access to the once-packed shelves. (Regular sales and auctions also were held for the public.)
Spector outfitted the art gallery she opened at Fifth and Bainbridge Streets last year with help from the exchange, using pedestals and halogen lights discarded by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
As members sorted through the remaining items in the dark and dusty Please Take storeroom yesterday, cdavid cottrill, the project's coordinator, acknowledged that the 12th Street location had always been temporary. "We knew the landlord wanted to get commercial rates eventually," said cottrill (who pronounces his first name "see david").
Inspired by New York's Materials for the Arts, a more than 20-year-old partnership of that city's Departments of Cultural Affairs and Sanitation, cottrill said, he believed that Please Take could enlist the help of Philadelphia officials in finding a permanent space.
But despite many meetings and a few promises, no city department or politician seemed willing or able to help in the end, cottrill said.
"We were looking for an abandoned building in a neighborhood that was less than viable for a traditional business," he said. "Our program is all about reuse. What better way to encourage that than to bring it into a community that needs it?"
That his organization could find no place to land after two years of trying surprised cottrill. "It's kind of incredible, with all the recent news about how there are 54,000 abandoned buildings in the city," he said.
Still, cottrill said, Please Take was by no means finished. He said he had been working with a new organization called the Reuse Collaborative, which brings together local nonprofit organizations dealing in everything from used computers to surplus building materials.
"We're all facing the same dilemma. We're all trying to find the space to do good work," he said. Among the ideas being pursued: creating one big reuse center that could house all of them.
Please Take also has a bigger ambition than just providing materials for artists, cottrill said. He sees job opportunities in those discards.
Cottrill envisions a think tank of artists and designers whose ideas for decorative objects made from recycled materials could fuel a cottage industry. "It would be really easy to train workers, and we could have skilled craftspeople putting together lamps or furniture."
But to do that, Please Take needs a home. It has to be cheap or free, and it has to be big.
"What we need is at least 15,000 square feet," cottrill said. "And we're looking for a space that has street-level access, that can at least house the Materials Exchange and the other parts of the puzzle, like a gallery and a workshop."
Eils Lotozo's e-mail address is elotozo@philllynews.com
Please Take Materials Exchange can be contacted at 215-739-2583 or by e-mail at pandiva@earthlink.net
Copyright 2000 Philadelphia Inquirer