SEVENTH REGENT ARMORY RENTS TO BE RAISED DRAMATICALLY

Organizers of the many art, antiques, and crafts fairs at the Seventh Regiment Armory just received the news that they’ve been dreading, reports Carol Vogel in the New York Times: Their rent is being doubled, to twenty thousand dollars a day, effective immediately. By the fall, it will be raised to thirty thousand a day. Two annual shows that donate their admission fees to charity, the Winter Antiques Show and the Art Dealers Association Art Fair, will be charged a special rate of fiften thousand dollars a day. The new landlord is a nonprofit organization called the Seventh Regiment Armory Conservancy, which formally acquired the management of the building from New York State on December 14. The rent increase is not an effort to push out the fairs, insisted Rebecca Robertson, president and CEO of the conservancy. But in the wake of the news, fair organizers are now trying to decide whether to raise admission or booth rentals, or both.