WITH THE OPENING next Tuesday of 14 artists’ lofts and 10 work studios at the renovated Dreyfus Hotel, on Mathewson Street in downtown Providence, the AS220 artist cooperative proves again that art can charm power into housing those who bite the hand that feeds them.

The artists moving in on May 1 — three painters, two photographers, a poet, a playwright, a printer, a DJ, an actor-dancer-writer, a writer and performer of electronic music who is also a jeweler, a graphic artist-musician-writer, a writer-pastry artist, even a hot-air-balloon maker — are among the select, or shall we say the lucky, even though they are mostly early in their artistic careers and make little money. An income ceiling limits eligibility for the lofts, which rent from $410 to $850 a month, including the most expensive three at market rates. A guiding hand (assisted by the AS220 residential review panel) has drawn them to the Dreyfus, where they will live in a struggling artist’s version of the lap of luxury.

The revitalization of downtown Providence has always been considered a threat to the right of artists to occupy cheap space in the city center. In fact, no such right exists, nor should it. In many cities, the rich and successful occupy the center. It’s the market at work, natural selection so to speak, and while life is famously unfair, no fairer distributor of housing (or anything else) has yet been invented. That surely includes the AS220 review panel, whose procedures doubtless reflect market behaviors appropriate to boards that champion struggling artists.

Anyway, down the years, many artists have been known to make a pretty good living (just as some lawyers and accountants don’t). Artists occasionally live well, and snap up nice digs in central London, Paris, New York and elsewhere. Often, before they have “made it,” struggling artists (or let us say poor ones, since all artists struggle with their muse) manage to eek out a nook, a garret, where the action is, in the center, often at the sufferance of those with money. Rarely, however, do those with money offer to finance affordable housing for artists in the center, where the highest rents make the most sense.

AS220 is one such marvelous place. Maybe it just proves that the market works in mysterious ways. In any event, the original dozen artist lofts upstairs at its facility on Empire Street have provided an affordable place to live for 105 artists since 1993. Last Wednesday, AS220’s director of development, Lucie Searle, gave me a tour of the new Dreyfus.

The hotel was built in 1890. Originally, it had a mansard roof, which was replaced in 1917 by a flat roof with a heavily bracketed cornice. The elaborate frieze we know so well, with diamond tiles of green terra cotta around the window arches of the fourth floor, was also part of the renovation by William R. Walker & Son. By this time, Mathewson Street had become a theater district. The Emery went up next door in 1914; its successor, the Carlton, was demolished for a parking lot in 1954. The Dreyfus’s life as a hotel ended in the 1960s, though you could still get a drink there. Johnson & Wales University purchased it in 1975. In 2005, to buy it and convert it from dorms to lofts, Searle assembled $7.5 million in low-interest public and private loans, charitable grants and tax credits similar to the financing for the facility on Empire. AS220’s design team — Durkee, Brown, Viveiros & Werenfels — was pleased to discover that J&W’s renovations had left much of the hotel’s classical interior covered up but largely intact.

Uncovering its elegance, and creating artist lofts and studios on the top floors, with a gallery on the first, joined by a restaurant also on the first with an annex in the basement, was a challenge met by the artful artisans of Trac Builders, in Johnston. When Searle led me up to see the loft and studio spaces, I didn’t expect to find myself envying the artists moving in. “Affordable housing” often skimps on beauty. Not at the Dreyfus. Restoring such details as the wood floors, stairway balustrades, moldings, wainscoting, stained glass and the window arches must have taken an awful lot of patient dedication.

We ran into Josh Miller, a state senator and owner of Trinity Brewhouse, in the ornate space that once housed the French Restaurant at the Dreyfus, Café Shelter (with a speakeasy in the basement during Prohibition, and free “swell feeds” for the jobless during the Depression), the Mirror Lounge (lunch, 1955: “Business Man’s Club Plate: Choice of soup or juice, baked meat loaf, creole sauce, potato and vegetable, pudding or jello, tea, coffee or milk — 95¢”) and no doubt still later incarnations. The latest will be Local 121, to be run by Miller, soon to open, serving “local” fare. The restaurant features stained oak, extraordinarily preserved, brooding and romantic, and this is where you will come face to face with restoration at its best.

But take note: Some of your fellow patrons may be struggling artists — biting, as ever, the hand that feeds them, perhaps with a pinch of gratitude for whomever got them into the Dreyfus Hotel. May such servings of humility nourish their success, as their strivings enliven the city.

David Brussat is a member of The Journal’s editorial board. ( dbrussat@projo.com)