THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, September 11, 1996 TAG: 9609110001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A11 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: GLENN ALLEN SCOTT
LENGTH: 90 lines
Arts and culture generate more economic action than is generally understood or appreciated. When arts and cultural offerings are of high quality, they confer distinction and shower dollars upon the locales they grace.
Newark, N.J. - an urban wasteland even before the city was gutted by race rioting three decades ago - is looking to the $180 million New Jersey Performing Arts Center, scheduled to open 14 months hence, to make it blossom. Federal, state, local, corporate, foundation and individual funds are underwriting the project.
Asking arts and culture to save Newark may be asking too much. The city is a disaster - a ruin with seemingly intractable social, political and economic ills. There is no obvious reason to believe that the center will stimulate enough development to make the city presentable, much less prosperous.
Thirty years ago, Newark's population totaled 450,000. Middle-income residents, black and white, fled to safer suburbs after looting and fires destroyed vast chunks of the city. Newark's population now numbers 275,000.
But other statistics argue that the performing-arts center itself can succeed. Some 4.5 million people live within 25 miles of downtown Newark. And 90,000 commuters, including 35,000 students, come into the city each workday. At the performing-arts center's heart is a 2,750-seat theater, which will provide the New Jersey Symphony with a home. Filling the auditorium ought not to be difficult.
The New Jersey Performing Arts Center is rising on a desolate 12-acre urban-renewal tract in Newark's downtown. Commercial development is planned for adjacent empty acreage. The center's champions even dare hope for development beside the nearby Passaic River.
What's afoot in Newark should be of some interest in Norfolk, for at least three reasons:
Los Angeles-based Barton Myers, architect for the New Jersey Center for Performing Arts, was born and reared in Norfolk. His forebear Moses Myers, who built the Federal-period Myers house, was a leading Norfolk citizen in the 1700s. Architect Myers' paternal grandfather, Barton Myers, was Norfolk's mayor in the late 1800s.
Downtown Norfolk's ``performing-arts center'' is in place and thriving. The ``center's'' components include the 7,600-11,600-seat Scope arena, which is used for sports events as well as concerts, exhibitions and meetings; the 2,363-seat Chrysler Hall; the 1,650-seat Harrison Opera House; the 677-seat Wells Theater and the Chrysler Museum, which contains a 287-seat auditorium.
Counting the million-plus heads at Festevents-sponsored happenings in Town Point Park, and the hundreds of thousands who visit the National Maritime Center - Nauticus, the Chrysler Museum and the MacArthur Memorial, attendance at arts, cultural and sports activities (hockey, basketball, wrestling at Scope, baseball at Harbor Park) in downtown Norfolk totals about 3 million a year.
Norfolk's arts-cultural-sports complex is an enticement to investment.
Robert B. Claytor, now deceased, was Norfolk Southern's board chairman when the railroad holding company chose Norfolk for its headquarters. A generous patron of the arts (with a pronounced fondness for Virginia Opera), Claytor said repeatedly that he personally would have opposed Norfolk Southern's move to Norfolk if the city had lacked a lively arts scene.
Hampton Roads' economy and demographic profile can support only one superregional shopping center featuring upscale merchandise. Nordstrom, a first-rank department-store chain, and Taubman, the country's premier shopping-mall developer, could have elected to put the 1.1 million-square-foot MacArthur Center scheduled to open in downtown Norfolk in 1998 in Chesapeake, Virginia Beach, Suffolk or Portsmouth or on the Peninsula.
Norfolk City Hall labored long and hard to persuade a top-drawer developer to build on the city's 17 acres of vacant downtown land a retailing center that would serve all Hampton Roads. But any developer looking over Southeastern Virginia in response to Norfolk's entreaties could have opted for green pastures. The combination of the redeveloped downtown-Norfolk waterfront (including Waterside festival marketplace and the Omni and Marriott hotels and the Norfolk Waterside Convention Center), the financial district, the medical complex, close-by universities (and the soon-to-open Norfolk Campus of Tidewater Community College) and the existing arts-and-culture facilities settled the matter.
Thanks to the 54 sold-out performances of Andrew Lloyd Webber's ``Phantom of the Opera'' at Chrysler Hall last fall and winter, Norfolk turned a first-ever profit on its downtown cultural facilities in the fiscal year that ended June 30. Revenue brought in by events at Scope, Chrysler Hall, the Wells Theater and the Harrison Opera House in FY96 exceeded expenses by $825,000.
The windfall gratifies Norfolk taxpayers, of course. Gratification will increase if next year and all years thereafter are similarly profitable.
But Norfolk's investment in arts and culture - an investment made over many decades - had been ``profitable'' to the city as a whole for quite some time before FY96. It will continue to be so. Newark could wish to be half as lucky. The New Jersey Performing Arts Center is expected, probably unrealistically, to do some extremely heavy lifting. MEMO: Mr. Scott is associate editor of the editorial page of The
Virginian-Pilot. by CNB