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In order to save manufacturing companies inside the building from moving out, Charles Lankford bought the '''Copycat Building''' in 1983 from a previous owner for the sum of $225,000. The building was nicknamed "the Copycat" due to a billboard advertising for the Copy Cat printing company that stood on its roof for years.<ref>Jensen, Brennen. [http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=3328 "Your Art Here: Will the Station North Arts District Paint a Brighter Future for The Baltimore Blast"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20040824123927/http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=3328 |date=2004-08-24 }}, "Baltimore City Paper", July 30, 2003. Accessed May 17, 2007.</ref> At the time, it housed a variety of light-industrial tenants.
{{quote|<nowiki>"</nowiki>After a while we decided, as an experiment, to take one floor and convert it into artist studios, since we were so close to [[Maryland Institute College of Art]]," Lankford says. "Over time, everybody started 'cheating'--instead of renting an apartment and a studio, they would save money by living in their studios."▼
▲"After a while we decided, as an experiment, to take one floor and convert it into artist studios, since we were so close to [[Maryland Institute College of Art]]," Lankford says. "Over time, everybody started 'cheating'--instead of renting an apartment and a studio, they would save money by living in their studios."
Lankford, who added a {{convert|40000|sqft|m2|sing=on}} industrial building at 419 E. Oliver St. that has also come to house artists to his portfolio in 1983, says he has "never hidden" from the city that artists have been working and living in his buildings. But he has had run-ins with various cities agencies over its legality. As a first step to getting his buildings "legit," he launched his own campaign to change the area's zoning from industrial to residential three years ago—only to be told that such a move was illegal. "There was no mechanism to allow this type of change," Lankford says. "You couldn't go from industrial to residential."
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