Lisbon Comes Alive

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A manufacturer of weapons during the dark years of dictatorship in Portugal , the long-disused facility was reborn as Lisbon s most ambitious new cultural venue. Guns and grenades werereplaced by concert rooms, exhibition spaces, a sprawlingbookstore, a cinema, a restaurant and various bars.
When the metamorphosis was complete, only one potentially troublingquestion lingered: Would Lisbonfolk actually drag themselves to thecitys outskirts to visit an old industrial space with sinisterassociations and an unusually eclectic booking policy encompassingeverything from electronic music to philosophical conferences to free-form jazz?
It was a big risk, said Michel de Roubaix, a resident artist whois the accordion-playing leader of a postmodern cabaret show at thecenter.
After all, this wasnt a metropolis with a well-establishedavant-garde tradition like Paris or Berlin , but dowdy old Lisbon, a small Catholic city that is best knownfor inexpensive seafood meals, throwback cable cars and fadedcolonial architecture from Portugals long-vanished international empire.
But on a balmy night in March, the throngs filing into the complexmade it clear that the city was more than ready for a bit ofprogressive bohemia in their remote corner of the Continent.Looking like the assembled listenership of some Portuguese versionof National Public Radio , a buzzing crowd of tweedy academics, tattooed cool kids,bourgeois couples and bespectacled grad-student types fanned out tosample F