Brooklyn's Bushwick becoming arts hub

Brooklyn's old Bushwick neighborhood has quickly become a new, world-class arts hub -- with music, dance, sculpture and theater bursting from defunct warehouses and desolate streets where gangs still roam.

That hasn't kept artists away from the affordable, industrial spaces -- ever more rare in a pricey city.

"This was a ghost town, with tumbleweeds blowing down the street five years ago," says Jay Leritz, co-owner of Yummus Hummus, a Middle Eastern-style cafe on a street filled with musician rehearsal and recording spaces.

"The streets were empty," Leritz says, "and that was the big attraction -- the lack of rules, like your parents went away for the weekend and it's a free-for-all."

Born-in-Bushwick creations have reached Carnegie Hall, Madison Square Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other top venues in the United States and abroad -- even the tallest building on Earth, the 160-story Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

That's where four canvasses of Bushwick artist Kevork Mourad now hang.

The son of Armenian refugees in Syria is pioneering a special technique -- a counterpoint of art and music he's performed with cellist Yo-Yo Ma: Squeezing a tube of paint between thumb and forefinger, Mourad swipes his pinkie lightning-fast across paper to improvise images to sounds, projected on a screen. Then a computer unleashes his hand-painted animation, turning the visuals into yet newer forms.

Bushwick is "very private, and you can go into your bubble, your world, here without being interrupted by the fast stream of New York City," says the artist, whose abstract self-portrait sold for $20,000 in April at a Christie's auction, topping an estimate of up to $8,000.

Several blocks away from Mourad's studio is residential Bushwick, where families live in neatly kept homes or row houses. Smoke from barbecues fills the air in a part of New York that is slowly being resurrected from decades of burned-out destruction.

A dozen years ago, this urban turf still struggled with crime and poverty. There were few banks, schools or social services -- never mind the arts.

Then came help in the form of city money. Bushwick started to recover.

Still, pedestrians stay alert for teenage members of the Latin Kings and Crips gangs. One evening, a police cruiser stopped, beaming a flashlight into the faces of a group of friends walking past abandoned buildings.

Bushwick has emerged as the place where income-poor, up-and-coming artists are spreading their raw vibes through the debris-strewn streets and converted warehouses of the area's nonresidential industrial zone. On Saturday nights, "underground" parties come alive with high-tech lighting and unlicensed bars.

"There's so much happening here that it's just unbelievable," Mourad says.

Adam Johnson chisels inspired, artistic furniture at the 3rd Ward, a 20,000-square-foot building teeming with activity around the corner from Mourad's Meadow Street.

"For young artists coming to make it here, Bushwick is the gateway to New York City," says Johnson, eyeing a woodworking shop where he turns fallen city trees and discarded water towers into creative pieces. "They might have been big talents in small towns, but here they're just one of many; it's a real test."