The Playhouse is the Thing: Theaters and Community Revitalization

The March 11th issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (online access to paid subscribers only) has an interesting story "The Playhouse is the Thing" by Thomas Doherty. It is a review essay of six books on various aspects of "exhibition studies." "The scholars with an eye for design and structure tend to focus on the nuts, bolts, carpeting, and curtains of the physical edifice... The social historians prefer to inspect the folks who congregate around the motion-picture theater, subcultural groups bound together by ethnicity, age, or taste...."

"Given the need to be both architecturally sound and audience wise, neither perspective obeys strict property lines--think art-history major with a real-estate license."

Some of the books discussed are Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States, by Douglas Gomery, and Moviegoing in America: A Sourcebook in the Hisotry of Film Exhibition, by Gregory A. Waller.

Professor Waller is also author of an analysis of the movie theater history of Lexington, Kentucky, Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896-1930 (Smithsonian Studies in the History of Film & Television).

Most local libraries get a subscription to the Chronicle. It's worth looking up the article the next time you're there.

For resources for your own community, the League of Historic American Theaters is a good place to start. If you're going to the National Town Meeting of the National Main Street Network, there will be a pre-conference workshop on Theatre Rescue and Rehabilitation.

Here is the description of the workshop:

An active theatre is vital to a thriving “cool city” – it serves as a catalyst for businesses and encourages community cultural expression. This day-long workshop with Kennedy Smith, along with another representative of the League of Historic American Theatres and John Leith-Tetrault of the National Trust Community Investment Corporation offers a comprehensive overview of the process of rescuing and rehabilitating a historic theatre in a commercial district. Learn how to organize a campaign to save a theatre in your community and how to prepare for what comes next: conducting a feasibility analysis for rehabilitation; understanding the special rehabilitation needs of historic theatres; and determining best uses for a theatre. You’ll also learn how to evaluate financing options for theater rehabilitations, including conducting a capital campaign and converting federal and historic tax credits and New Market Tax Credits into equity for your theatre rehabilitation project.

The Washington DC area has a number of theaters that are community-managed including the Avalon and the Takoma Theater. The Silver Theatre in Silver Spring is now the home of the American Film Institute, after a $25 million rehabilitation paid for by Montgomery County, Maryland. (It pains me to think that had DC been equally inventive, this cultural development activity could have located in the Tivoli Theater, which does have the Gala Hispanic Theatre as part of a mixed-use retail and office development.)