There are not many places to sit amid the jumble of metal tools, piles of maple and boxwood boards, and bassoons crowding — and even hanging from the ceiling of — Leslie Ross’s studio on the Lower East Side.

“This is only about half full,” Ms. Ross, 54, said recently while surveying the room, on the top floor of a small commercial building on Essex Street, where she has spent years building bassoons and inventing unusual instruments of her own.

Now, after nearly three decades in New York City, she is swapping her crammed studio for a sprawling former canning factory in the tiny coastal town of Penobscot, Me., population 1,263.

Like many others before her, Ms. Ross is being washed out of Manhattan by the great wave of rising rents. “My rent is over four times what it was 20 years ago,” said Ms. Ross, who pays $2,000 a month for half of a floor (she shares the space with a sculptor), where a thick dusting of cat hair covers most everything and a dozen canaries in bird cages provide a constant chirping chatter. “I know the rent is only going to go higher, so why wait until I absolutely can’t afford it and I’m at the point of having to scramble?”