Will Reeves, an East Providence-based sculptor, works on cutting, grinding and welding a Steel Yard commission to design and fabricate three trash containers for the Town of Bristol. In the background is Lee Corley, a designer and fabricator.

The Providence Journal / Connie Grosch

PROVIDENCE — Few people get to build their field of dreams, but nearly seven years ago, two young dreamers began to create theirs out of a fully equipped steel and iron fabrication company on the Woonasquatucket River, one of the area’s brick relics of 20th-century industry.

Since then, Clay Rockefeller and Nicholas Bauta have turned the former Providence Steel & Iron Co. into the Steel Yard, a unique arts, education and job development collaborative at 27 Sims Ave. Mayor David N. Cicilline says the Steel Yard has become a model for reviving the city’s industrial heritage.

Rockefeller and Bauta say their aim is to show that a creative endeavor can pay the bills.

About 2,000 people a year pass through the Steel Yard, in the city’s industrial Valley district, just a half- mile upstream from Providence Place.

The Steel Yard uses its assets in real estate, machinery and talent to generate work for artists, support education and public interest in the arts and make money to pay its own bills.

The Steel Yard acts as a broker for artists seeking work, matching them with commissions for fencing, window grates and the like.

Its own public works division turns out amenities such as the powder-coated steel trash cans ubiquitous in downtown Providence.

And it offers classes to the public in welding and blacksmithing, as well as ceramics, glasswork and jewelry-making.

The Steel Yard has been hit by the recession. The annual budget has dropped from $600,000 to about $400,000 in the last couple of years. A handful of staff have agreed to take two unpaid furlough days a month for the foreseeable future.

At the same time, the organization is moving ahead with plans to make the site a destination spot on any cultural tour of the city.

There they will see people like sculptor Brower Hatcher, the creative force of Mid-Ocean Studio, which teamed with another tenant, a graphic design firm called Tellart, to create a three-dimensional matrix of lights that today stretches 50 feet over a subway platform in St. Louis and changes colors with the movement of trains and people.

Hatcher makes abstractions in steel that have been installed in public parks and memorials in the United States and abroad over the last 35 years or so.

“This is business,” he says of the Steel Yard. “It’s not just about people fooling around and doing their own thing.”

Also at the Steel Yard is 19-year-old Robert Renovales of Providence, who learned a trade — welding — while transforming a utilitarian section of fencing into a work of art.

A retired high school principal, 69-year-old Edward Lyman Rondeau of Cranston, was drawn to the opportunity to “create living things from cold steel.”

And Nathan Nadeau of Providence, 31, said the Steel Yard gave him the time to evolve a signature style as an artist without going broke.

Nadeau’s steel constructions evoke the style of 1950s signage. Drake Patten, the full-time executive director of the Steel Yard, said the high cost of metalworking equipment makes it very difficult for artists and businesses in the industrial arts to set up independent studios.

By renting them access to its facilities, the Steel Yard helps pay its own way and gives the artists time to launch.

“It’s almost like getting them out of the nest,” she said.

In 2003, Bauta and Rockefeller created a real estate holding company — Milhaus LLC — to buy the property for $1.4 million. The for-profit Milhaus advanced a line of credit to launch the Steel Yard. Since then, the nonprofit organization has paid off half its mortgage, Patten said.

Milhaus has retained ownership of a corner building — 1 Sims — which Rockefeller and Bauta have renovated into office and commercial space, with a restaurant planned for the ground floor.

Not just a tenant for Milhaus, the restaurant also would help draw traffic to the adjacent Steel Yard, where plans include retail space for crafts and a venue for outdoor movies.

Cicilline walked the site recently as workers neared completion on a $1.2-million soil remediation project that will lay the foundation for an overall makeover of the Steel Yard.

As he toured the site, Cicilline commented on the enthusiasm of the youth who participated in the 11-week work-force development program at the Steel Yard last summer, one of dozens in the city.

One graduate has stayed on as a teaching assistant for welding classes. The teaching assistant, and others in the program, also have gotten work on Steel Yard-sponsored commissions for items such as bike racks and fencing. Still others have moved on to other training programs or college.

Patten said one of her biggest joys is seeing teenagers realize that math and science are not just subjects in school but things they need to know in order to do what they want in the welding shop. As Patten hosted Cicilline’s tour, about a dozen high school students from The MET, the alternative high school, learned the metalworking skills for crafting jewelry.

Outdoors, workers finished the concrete footing for a cluster of artist studios that Patten said would be fashioned from shipping containers and recycled subway and train cars, with the artists themselves trained to do much of the work. Next to the studios will be an outdoor foundry for metal casting. Recession or no, Rockefeller said, “To keep an organization alive, you have to keep the blood flowing” — and the people coming.

Rockefeller, 30, is the great-great-grandson of the founder of Standard Oil. The Brown University graduate says the family name has been both a blessing and a curse for the fortunes of the Steel Yard.

Bauta, 33, is a Rhode Island School of Design graduate and the grandson of W. Garfield Weston, who parlayed a Toronto baking company into the largest food processing and distribution company in Canada.

“Some people think this place is made in the shade” because of his involvement, Rockefeller said, “but that’s just not true.”

“A lot of what got us through was pure bull-headedness,” he said. “It not happening was not an option.”

gmacris@projo.com