Albany

They want to do what exactly? And spend how much?

Those were just two of the many questions that greeted Wednesday's announcement of a public art project, funded by as much as $1 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies, that hopes to light up hundreds of vacant buildings in Albany, Schenectady and Troy.

Here was another question from some quarters of the region: Huh?

"I could think of many other things to do with that grant, like fixing up the buildings and putting homeless families in them," said Ron Bailey, an Albany councilman who represents an Arbor Hill district with more than its share of vacant homes.

The project is called "Breathing Lights," and it aims to fill the buildings, for two months late next year, with pulsating light that attempts to mimic the breathing of animals. The mayors of each of the three cities gathered Wednesday to celebrate that Bloomberg chose the local public art proposal over competitors from much larger cities.

(The money, by the way, is only available for art, so it isn't as if it can be put to other uses.)

No doubt, "Breathing Lights" is innovative and creative.

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And yes, there is a Capital Region tendency to view innovative and creative ideas too skeptically — if not to reject them outright. We should guard against that and be more welcoming of fresh thinking.

But nobody should have somebody else's idea of what's cool imposed on them. How do we know that residents of those neighborhoods want the vacant homes around them filled with light?

Say you had an empty house across the street from you. Would you want it pulsating like a breathing animal?

"I don't need to be reminded of vacant homes at night, when everyone knows that they're there and knows they're a detriment to the neighborhood," said Judd Krasher, also an Albany councilman. "What people want is something done with them."

I've also heard skeptics who worry that lighting vacant buildings will make them crime targets, or that the project might stigmatize poorer neighborhoods by advertising their struggles.

Barbara Nelson, an Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute architecture professor who dreamed up the project with University at Albany professor Adam Frelin, has also heard the concerns. She had expected there would be skeptics.

But she stressed that the project hopes to counteract urban disinvestment by drawing attention to it. The aim is to encourage the region to remember neighborhoods that are too often forgotten.

"We have trained ourselves not to look at these buildings," Nelson said. "We've trained ourselves to ignore them."

Nelson agreed that the project won't succeed without neighborhood acceptance. She said "Breathing Lights" will work with three groups — The Albany Barn in Arbor Hill; The Sanctuary for Independent Media in North Central Troy; and the Schenectady Boys and Girls Club in Hamilton Hill — to build support and identify suitable buildings.

As many as 300 homes could be lit, but the project, Nelson said, will aim for density rather than quantity.

Each building will have its own rate of breathing, almost as if every one is a different mammal. The idea, she said, is to highlight the dormant life within each structure and the untapped life within each of the neighborhoods.

Details still have to be determined, but Nelson expects that the lights will be on from 6 to 10 p.m. The gentle light won't bathe streets in glare.

The project is certainly ambitious. The work is daunting.

Consider that many of the region's vacant buildings are owned by out-of-town or absentee landlords and may not have an active power supply. So organizers will have to figure out how to access the buildings and get the lights on.

Nelson, who lives on Troy's East Side, hopes some of the people who view the pulsating lights will ultimately decide to invest in the neighborhoods.

That may be wishful thinking. "You can't just put up lights and hope it revitalizes a neighborhood," Krasher said. "We're not addressing the real problems."

Krasher said that true revitalization requires better enforcement of codes and other heavy lifting by the city. Neighborhoods affected by blight, he said, have been neglected for decades.

On that point, Nelson certainly agrees.

"There's disinvestment in our urban centers," she said. "We want to tell why and how that disinvestment occurred."

To its credit, "Breathing Lights" is already renewing a discussion about the struggling neighborhoods in our cities and how best to draw attention to their problems.

It's a start. But we're still searching for solutions.

cchurchill@timesunion.com • 518-454-5442 • @chris_churchill