I am writing to strongly protest the Zoning Board's order to kill performances at Cambridge’s Zeitgeist Gallery. Let me elucidate why this is a major issue in our community.

The Zeitgeist is one of the last spaces in the entire Boston Metro area where community-based art performances - experimental, young, or non-commercial - are allowed to take place. The space is run entirely by volunteers, and makes not a penny of profit. The gallery is a state non-profit organization, and is in the process of filing to become a 401c3 non-profit organization. Thus, the Zeitgeist is a far cry from being an "entertainment venue"- it is, rather, a Community Cultural Center, or Art Space. The Gallery has had many battles with the City of Cambridge over the years, and has consistently, overwhelming, and officially established this fact. Recently it seemed things had finally taken a turn for the better in the Gallery’s relationship with the city. This year the Zeitgeist has been funded by the Arts Council twice. Once directly to our organization, and once indirectly, with a grant to Jorrit Dykstra, who was to perform his funded project there next month. This further demonstrates that it is a cultural institution, not an "entertainment venue". How is it that the city takes with one hand and gives with the other? Are you really that disorganized, that corrupt?

In a city where experimental performers and their audiences are suffocating for spaces to do what they need and love to do, the Zeitgeist is a rare oasis. Astronomical rents, stringent licensing procedures and over-zealous building inspectors have all but destroyed most of the places where performing artists who were not paying thousands of dollars in college tuition could play, even for free! This has resulted in a "brain drain" from the local arts community, which in turn degrades the quality of life in the city. Indeed, I myself am planning on moving somewhere more arts-friendly next summer, despite the years of constant work I have put in to build and keep alive the arts community here. The zoning and licensing laws in Cambridge- indeed all over the area- have criminalized music and performances everywhere from venues to private homes to the streets, making it pretty much impossible for me and many I know to continue living here as performers. Doesn't the city have better things to do than to make life miserable for its artists?

I have witnessed a history of ONE neighbor destroying a beautiful community thing for hundreds of others in this area. The Carberry's Film Festival, the Scrapstock Festival, music series’ at countless local venues, even the venues themselves - all gone because ONE person complained. Indeed in an area where performances at the Oni, Berwick, Mobius, the Bookseller Café, Gallery FX, Phoenix Coffee House, Little White Box, Jimaize, Mama Gaias, and Revolving Museum art spaces have all shut or been shut down, the Zeitgeist is providing a vital and desperately needed service in the community. And this in the face of a rental climate that makes it all but impossible to operate a non-profit art space to begin with! Doesn't the city consider the value of twenty or fifty or hundreds people voicing their obvious support for these venues and events by their continued presence? Wouldn't that be a truer way to serve the community at large? If I am correct about which neighbor made this complaint, then he is also the fellow who calls the children of some of the Gallery’s other business neighbors "sand niggers"(something I witnessed), has had a retraining order taken out against him by a local restaurant, and propositioned me personally for paid sex one evening last fall in a parking lot. There is also good reason to believe that he is manipulating city ordinances in the service of a personal vendetta against local shop owners to remedy an old property dispute we had nothing to do with. Are you seriously going to allow this depraved individual (property owner or no) to destroy something everyone else in the neighborhood loves, something, indeed, of great cultural and economic value to the whole area, and with a growing national and global reputation?

I have been a volunteer and performer at the Zeitgeist for five years. As someone who has been in the Gallery pretty much every day since we moved to Inman Square two years ago (after a devastating fire destroyed our old space), I can tell you: not a day goes by when someone from the neighborhood hasn't come by Zeitgeist to thank us for our presence here! I certainly hope the city will realize how incredibly valuable spaces like these are. We are a vital part of the last lifeblood of this city’s Arts Community. It is imperative for musicians, performers, artists, and all the hundreds of people who like to hear and watch them that the Gallery stay open as a venue for these events. And it is the Gallery's right to do so. Some of the gallery’s volunteer organizers now own the building it is housed in, so they, too, are property owners. And I do not need to remind you that we, and all the other property owners, and all the renters in the neighborhood are also voters.

Sincerely yours,

Katt Hernandez