Desperately seeking WOW

Remember
the Performing Arts Center?

            At one time, the center was to be
the next big capital project to revitalize Rochester. Committees formed.
Surveys were taken. Studies were completed.

            While it’s impossible to determine
precisely how much public money has been spent on the PAC process up to this
point — mainly because several public officials have logged countless hours
sitting on various PAC committees — a good starting point would be $350,000.
That figure includes the $100,000 in city and county money for the 30-member
committee that initially studied the need for a PAC. It also includes $250,000
for Flaum Management Company to conduct a study that proposes building a $45
million theater followed by two smaller community theaters.

            But ever since Flaum’s study was
submitted in January 2001, the PAC seems to have completely disappeared from
the local radar screen.

            Politicians involved in the process
direct their blame in any number of directions: a disinterested county
executive, a sluggish economy, a lack of city-county unity, a dysfunctional
Albany delegation.

            In the meantime, several local arts
organizations — the very groups whose needs seemed to form the demand for a
PAC in the first place — started to go off on their own.

            The Eastman School of Music plans to
begin the first phase of its Eastman Theatre renovations this summer.

            Garth Fagan Dance Company, thanks a
large private donation from philanthropist Jim Gleason and $370,000 in state
and federal funds, is planning to build a combined dance studio and performance
space downtown, possibly at the northwest corner of Main and Gibbs streets. (An
economic impact study of that site is underway and should be finished within
the next 100 days, says Ruby Lockhart, acting general manager.)

            The Rochester Broadway Theatre
League hopes to purchase the Auditorium Theatre, and is in negotiations with
the building’s owners, Raymond and William Saucke. If a deal is struck, RBTL
will embark on a $2.5 million theater renovation project — which will include
new seats, refurbished bathrooms, and the installation of air conditioning — that
will make the venue a viable option for Broadway shows while the PAC process
continues.

            Downstairs Cabaret Theatre, now
operating out of three downtown locations, is “moving forward with our own
theater center,” says Chris Kawolsky, producing director. “We are in the middle
of a capital campaign to make that happen. A theater center is something we
need immediately.” If the funding is procured, DCT plans to renovate the
99-seat theater it occupies at 540 East Main Street and add a 200-seat theater
to the same location.

            It’s smaller arts groups like the
DCT — groups that would have used the small “black box” theater discussed in
the initial proposals for a downtown PAC — “that are really getting screwed,”
says Deputy Mayor Jeff Carlson. These same groups were concerned at the very
beginning of the PAC process that their needs would be overlooked while
officials focused on building a large roadhouse.

            Carlson is a PAC insider. He served
on the 30-member blue-ribbon commission that began the studies for the PAC —
a group that included public officials, representatives from arts
organizations, and developers. When that group was dissolved, Mayor Bill
Johnson and County Executive Jack Doyle appointed a five-member committee —
including two representatives from City Hall, two from the county, and a
Wegmans representative — to continue, and hopefully refine, the PAC
discussions.

            As far as Carlson’s concerned, small
performing arts groups lack the resources to secure funding for their own
buildings.

            “How many times have you seen the
Rochester Ballet, or Shipping Dock Theatre, or Blackfriars talking about how
they all want their own building? And it’s a disaster. They can’t raise the
money. They can’t do the building,” Carlson says. “So what we want to do is use
the revenue from a major performance hall to fund a really versatile small
theater with plenty of rehearsal rooms to accommodate a lot of these smaller
groups. And that’s just gotten completely lost sight of.”

So where do we
stand in the PAC process? And who’s in charge? Not the five-member committee, which
Carlson refers to as “a total waste of time.”

            In the later stages of this group’s
meetings, Carlson says, “it became abundantly clear that Doyle had no interest
in [the PAC] other than to use it to leverage money for his juvenile justice
center. He’s paid some lip service to it, but he was always gonna use it as a
trump card for something he wanted. If he would have gotten the juvenile
justice center, he might have been cooperative about something.”

            Still, this group did make some headway. Mainly, it managed to
receive $250,000 from Albany for Flaum’s study. And that’s where things start
to get fuzzy.

            Assemblymember Susan John recalls
several scattered approaches to Albany for funding.

            “At one time the county had
lobbyists talk to us in Albany about it. And then a couple of years ago those
folks were no longer authorized to talk about it. The county just stopped
talking about it,” John says. She recalls the delegation being approached for
money and, one year, coming through with state funding for Flaum’s study. But
the delegation was approached the next year, John says, with a request for yet
more money to conduct yet more studies.

            “We sort of balked at that notion,”
she says. “And as far as I know, they haven’t come back to us.”

            Carlson and John seem to agree that
the Doyle administration became, in John’s words, “completely uninterested” in
the PAC project. However, they disagree on the nature of the funding requests
made in Albany.

            “It wasn’t 10 times that for more
studies,” Carlson says. “There’s a lot of engineering work that goes into this.
There’s a lot of pre-development work. There’s a ton of pre-development money
that’s going to be expended if you build a $60 million facility. A good chunk
of that has to be used beforehand to get the ground elevations, to lay your
pipes out. What had been asked was ‘Look, this justifies us moving forward.
Give us money to put this at least to some engineering shop draws.’ And then
they said ‘Well, we’re not using our money first.’ I think Susan does not have
quite the memory or attention span on that one.”

            At least one thing is clear: The
state is reluctant to provide more funding for the project without some signs
of financial support from the private sector. And those signs never seemed to
materialize, even before the economy hit the tank.

            “The state delegation has always
indicated a strong level of support for the [PAC] concept,” says Mayor Bill
Johnson. “But they have constantly implored us to identify where the local
money is going to come from. If we don’t answer that question, we’ll continue
to come up short.”

            In many senses, Johnson says, we
already have.

            “With no private funding
identified,” he says, “that’s where we blew it.”

            The current estimate to build a
roadhouse at the McCurdy’s-Midtown Plaza site is $60 million. “The state says
half of that is the best you’ll get from us,” Johnson says. So the plan now is
to let the public sector step aside while the search for angel investors continues.
“We need an angel for this project,” he says before mentioning that he recently
received a call from Arts & Cultural Council for
Greater Rochester Executive Director Sarah Lentini, who “has an idea she wants
to pursue.” (Lentini did not return calls seeking her comments.)

So what’s it
gonna be? A 2,000-seat roadhouse in Midtown? A flexible 1,200-seat theater built
somewhere else downtown? A downtown “campus” that includes several arts
centers, each serving a distinct need?

            At this point, nobody seems to know.

            Still, Carlson has some
less-specific goals. “It’s always been our contention that this needed a WOW
factor,” he says. “Anything in absence of a WOW factor may be culturally
superb, but from a marketing point of view, it’s something that doesn’t really
jumpstart the downtown economy.”

            If it’s done right, a PAC could be
just the thing to begin downtown’s revitalization, Johnson says. “For the
performing arts, we need it,” he says. “To jumpstart downtown, it’s absolutely
essential.”

            But it’s going to take an angel or
two. And even when the economy is in good shape, those angels can be hard to
find in Rochester.

Erica Curtis
contributed to this report.

This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2003.