Grand opening: Atlas Performing Arts Center

For more than one decade, this building complex sat empty, mothballed by the H Street Community Development Corporation. The webpage on the CDC's real estate opportunities page mentioned how perhaps part of the building could be torn down for parking. In the late 1990s a proposal was made to build a roller rink inside.

The DC Preservation League filed a landmark nomination to prevent the building from being demolished. In maybe 1999 or 2000, Adele and Bruce Robey, then proprietors of the Voice of the Hill newspaper, and others came together to create the "Atlas Theater Project," in an attempt to get the building back into productive, arts-based, use.

In fact, I remember going to a meeting in the old Freeman Funeral Home, in November or December 2000, where this project was discussed (and where Karina Ricks and Derrick Woody then of DC's Office of Planning mentioned the draft RFP for the H Street planning study, which did not finally start until 2002...) and just before the launch of the neighborhood "Strategic Neighborhood Action Plan" process--this one time shot at neighborhood planning was launched in the H Street neighborhood.

(It takes a lot of meetings to make neighborhood revitalization!)

The Robeys and the Atlas Theater Project ended up not being able to go forward (instead the Robeys created the H Street Playhouse, which was one of the "first mover" new projects on H Street, in advance of the H Street Strategic Development Plan), but this created the momentum necessary to extricate the building from remaining as a boarded up shell.

Jane Lang and the Sprenger-Lang Foundation stepped up in late 2001 and began the relatively quick about 5 year long process to restore and rehabilitate this building into what is now called the Atlas Performing Arts Center. Along the way, the cost of the project increased signficantly (from around $14 million to $24 million).

This week is the grand opening. The theater is spectacular. A resource not just for the neighborhood and for the city, but for the region!

Jane Lang is an incredible woman!

For more about the opening, see this blog entry, "Coming Home to the Atlas," from Frozen Tropics. Festivities on Sunday are open to the public.

The play specially commissioned for the opening, "Coming Home to H Street," is based on the history of the neighborhood (with some liberties). It's sweet and fun and worth your seeing.


Index Keywords: arts-culture; historic-preservation