FeedsTheater board ponders future of Wayne landmark
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If volunteers can't come up with about $50,000 within the next month, the Historic Wayne Theater on Michigan Avenue faces an uncertain future.For the past year, the clock has been ticking on efforts to preserve the Historic Wayne Theater.
Now it’s ticking a little louder.
The volunteers trying to restore the 80-year-old landmark were granted a one-month reprieve last week, but they may not need that long to decide to continue with their fundraising efforts.
“We’re going to push it, we’re going to keep trying,” said Don Nicholson, capital fundraising chairman for the preservation effort. “But we need to see some response pretty quick. We’d like to get a big push this week.”
The building was cited by the city under the dangerous and blighted building ordinance in 2006. The ordinance stipulates that buildings that have been vacant for longer than six months must be brought up to code and actively marketed—for sale or lease—or razed. The group requested a year to generate the funds to restore the theater, and offered to put the title to the building and the land in escrow.
Nicholson estimated that it would cost about $1.5 million to restore the theater and about $5 million to develop it into what he wanted to see—a regional arts center that would include a new front façade that would house a restaurant and other shops, as well as upper floor offices and classrooms where a variety of arts groups could meet. The theater itself would become a regional attraction for concerts and other events.
The Dangerous Hearing board offered a compromise last week—to bring the building up to code, essentially elevating it to the ‘white box’ condition required for a sale—and then boarding it up to develop addition time for more fundraisers and to seek out additional grants.
“It’s a good compromise solution,” said City Engineer Ramzi El-Gharib.
Nicholson estimated that would cost less than $100,000. He and the organization has put on fundraisers throughout the summer—notably the Beat the Bulldozer concert series—but generated less than $25,000. He guessed they needed another $50,000 to fix the bricks outside and the code violations inside.
“We still need the community to step up to the plate,” he said. “It’s not like we can just put up a couple of boards. It’s going to take some money.”
The theater board met on Sunday and decided to put on a final push this week, he said.
Peter McInerney, community development director for the City of Wayne, said the effort to the theater has taken on new life last year. The building has been vacant for about 20 years, and efforts to fix it have been sporadic, at best.
“There’s new people involved, and they seem to get it,” he said.
He said the city has not taken a hard line with the volunteers and that the annual expenses paid for the State Wayne Theater show that city officials support the concept of promoting arts in the community.
“The goal of the ordinance is to eliminate blight,” McInerney said. “That’s been the goal of the city all along.”
El-Gharib agreed.
“We’re not looking to tear it down,” he said. “If we could turn it into a magnet for our downtown, why not?”
Nicholson said that with the impending deadline and a general lack of interest from Wayne residents, that doesn’t look to likely, though.
“I’d love to see it happen, but we have to be honest,” he said. “I never expected the theater would operate with support solely from Wayne residents, but to make this happen Wayne residents have to want it to be here.”
