Deathtrap:
Former tenants of decrepit space make own places to live and work
Ousted residents, artists looking for a fresh start.
The Deathtrap family didn’t gather this year to eat leftover turkey legs, casseroles and pies.
The annual post-Thanksgiving gathering had been one of the best parties for years, because as many as 50 people would bring food to the West Oakland warehouse.
“The spread was always unbelievable,” Isaac Blackwood said. “More dishes than you’d see at a traditional Thanksgiving because it was a combination of the community’s family dinners combined into one massive Friendsgiving.”
Instead, the 6,600-squarefoot warehouse at Magnolia and 28th streets was dark, empty, a consequence of the horrendous fire at Ghost Ship that killed 36 people a year ago and brought intense scrutiny to unpermitted live-work dwellings.
Deathtrap was one of them. Not only did the warehouse at one time look similar inside to Ghost Ship — with its makeshift steps, rugs, tapestries, statues and dangling light strings, but also its name mocked the potentially unsafe nature of some of the illegally converted warehouses that were providing affordable housing and work spaces to artists throughout Oakland.
To the tenants, the name was a joke, bestowed, according to former residents, by a fire inspector who looked at the stacks of boxes and piles of metal and wood and quipped, “If there was a fire in here, within two minutes this would become a deathtrap.”
But, tenants say, those days were over. New tenants put work into the place, although still without permits.
Nonetheless, three days after the Ghost Ship tragedy, Deathtrap’s landlord sent eviction notices to the dozen or so tenants. The same day, a city fire inspector knocked on the door.
It was the beginning of the end not just for Deathtrap, but for other artist collaboratives that had long made industrial warehouses their homes. Suddenly, the warehouse community was under intense pressure from landlords and regulators who didn’t want to be held liable for the next deadly fire. Many artists were being told to clear out of their spaces.
“It fractured a community,” Tyler Pritchard, 35, a former Deathtrap resident, said.
At Deathtrap, tenants fought to keep their live-work space for six months, trying to hammer out deals with the city and their landlord. Tenants, feeling like they were being penalized for the Deathtrap name, immediately rebranded as Castle Von Trap, and residents scraped the Internet of references to the warehouse’s former name.
They brought in a structural engineer to assess the building. They added railings, more exit signs and more fire extinguishers.
They attended City Council meetings. They were too late. “We were the poster child for warehouses,” Pritchard said.
City inspectors found multiple problems at the building, including illegal construction of a kitchen, bathroom, lofts and stairs. They found water heaters installed without permits and electrical, plumbing and mechanical alterations made without permits. They ordered the landlords, Yeon and Sun Lee, to stop allowing people to live in the building and told them to remove everything that had been built without permits.
In July, the artists left the building, their lives irrevocably changed.
City officials, meanwhile, have chalked up the Deathtrap as a “resolved” property on their list of potentially problem buildings.
“The owner has removed the illegal construction and restored the warehouse to its original use as a warehouse,” city spokeswoman Karen Boyd said Friday.
The former tenants feel betrayed by a city that promoted itself as a tourist destination with a vibrant arts community.
“People have no idea what it is to be an artist warehouse, which is why it was so easy after Ghost Ship to paint a horrific picture about what they are,” said Brianna Sage, an off-and-on Deathtrap resident. “It wasn’t this crazy, cluttered place where you’re tripping over everything. It was more than a venue or practice studio. It was home.”
Each tenant had paid an average of $500 a month to lease a live-work space. For Chris Spiteri, a performance artist who couldn’t afford both an apartment and a rehearsal studio, Deathtrap was perfect.
“I could paint the walls. I could put up my art. I had space to create more art,” Spiteri, 29, said. “We had a dance floor. I could do my work in my living room, and that was spectacular.”
Deathtrap hosted classical music, circus, theater and dance performances. It also hosted spin jams for flow arts, the movement-based art form that incorporates dance and props like juggling, hooping and fire spinning.
“When I moved in there, I found family,” Spiteri said. “I found somewhere I felt safe and secure, which I hadn’t felt in a home for years.”
The landlords couldn’t be reached for comment. According to public records, they sold the building on Oct. 30 to Dig A Hole LLC for $1.7 million.
If there’s a silver lining to being forced from their home, it’s that some of the former Deathtrap residents formed 30 West, a nonprofit that hopes to build a live-work place that won’t be shut down because of code violations and zoning restrictions.
The 30 West collaborative began leasing an empty warehouse in Oakland in June.
“No underground, illegal anything,” Spiteri said. “That’s not what we want. We want a space that can be shared. We want to be able to run programs or host neighborhood events where families can come in and enjoy the artists’ work of this community.”
No more renting U-Haul trucks to load mattresses and park two blocks away on inspection day, a common practice for warehouse tenants. The 30 West group wants residences and events to be properly permitted and insured.
The plan is to build 14 rooms and five studios in the 7,840square-foot warehouse formerly used to store plastics and that is wrapped in colorful, poetic graffiti. Right now, it’s being used to store a metal-andstained glass sculpture that was installed at Burning Man, among other things.
It’s a gamble, because there’s no guarantee the city will give 30 West a live-work permit. The rent is $10,000 per month, and Spiteri estimates it will cost $1 million to renovate the warehouse. The 30 West group plans to launch fundraising efforts this month. “It’s terrifying,” she said. So why stay in Oakland? “All of the roots that we have made — this amazing group of people — we came together right here,” Sage, 24, said. “Oakland has some magic.”
Sage said 30 West wants to prove that warehouses are not all Ghost Ships.
“That is one example of something bad that can happen, and how it can be done wrong, and we want to do it right,” Sage said.
A few former residents of Deathtrap, however, aren’t sold on the costs of the new venture — $1,400 for a bedroom and $900 to $1,000 for a studio, which artists can’t sleep in. Pritchard balked at paying rent on a place that isn’t guaranteed to ever open.
“I don’t have that kind of money to throw at something like that,” he said. “And if I did, I’d put it toward a house. I’m done with warehouses, I think.”
The sawing whir of a laser cutter hummed over the conversation at another West Oakland warehouse. Blackwood, who typically works with wood and metal, was in the process of cutting thousands of mat board leaves that were part of a model for a Burning Man temple proposal.
He was joined by former Deathtrap roommates Pritchard, Mikhail Lapin and Shane Sischo. Cool air flowed into the second-floor space through an open window. They reminisced about their former home.
“I feel like my life was destroyed,” Lapin, 35, said. “Living in our warehouse, it was almost a spiritual thing.”
“It was a sanctuary,” Sischo, 38, said.
There’s not much left of the warehouse community, Blackwood, 31, said. That’s why he requested The Chronicle not reveal the location of his current studio.
Blackwood and Sischo have re-created parts of their former Deathtrap home. They both built studios in the new warehouse from salvaged wood. They also used parts from Deathtrap, like the red spiral staircase that leads to the roof of Blackwood’s studio where there’s a lounge area with a couch and coffee table.
Blackwood and Sischo, who said they didn’t live in their studios, also used lighting, flooring and doors from Deathtrap. They added that the studios were built to code using shear walls and proper stud spacing. But they did not seek city permits for the interior changes to the warehouse.
Laughter could be heard from random corners of the vast, two-story space filled with an assortment of projects in various sizes and stages. There were also pizza boxes, beer cans, bongs, computers, board games and books on tables, ledges and shelves in the common areas.
For Blackwood, it felt almost like home.