When one thinks of Birmingham, Alabama, theaters may not be the first thing to come to mind; instead, one is far more likely to think of its role in the civil rights movement, which is of course notable all by itself. But Birmingham is, like a growing number of cities across the country for something else that has a bearing on civil rights: the restoration of its remaining historic theaters to theatrical use, incorporating in the process references to the roles that these buildings played in enforcing legal segregation between whites and blacks. Thanks to the help of city government, and community members, some of these buildings have already come back to magnificent life, while others are slated to share their fate.
You can read about this in detail here, thanks to the BBC, which found the proverbial "local angle" in the name the Alabama city shares with its British counterpart. What was especially interesting to me was the story about the Lyric Theatre, in part because it had spent decades between its early glory days and its more recent restoration largely in a state of abandonment--that is, when it wasn't being employed as either retail space or as a porn theater.
To put it another way, the Lyric could easily be a distant real estate cousin of the similarly-named Lyric Theatre on West 42nd Street in New York, along with eight other theaters on the block. They too had their early days of glory. They too fell into alternative and frequently disreputable uses. And all of them have, thanks to the intervention of the city and state, been restored to their former theatrical glory, right?
Well, only partially right. Of the nine theaters on the block, five are now being reused for theatrical purposes, while another has found live as an event space frequently featuring performances, and yet another has become the lobby for a multiplex. As for the remaining two, one was largely torn down, with its facade incorporated into a branch of Madame Tussauds.
And the final one, appropriately enough named the Times Square Theatre? For literally years now, it has remained untenanted, because the New 42nd Street Corporation, the entity that controls all nine buildings, has been determined to turn it into retail space, on the grounds that its stage house is too close to the street for soundproofing purposes. Personally, I have always found this to be a highly dubious rationale: the building's architectural cousin, the Music Box Theatre on West 45th Street, should theoretically suffer from the same limitation, yet that hasn't stopped it from being used regularly for many of Broadway's most memorable productions. You can make your own judgment about the similarity of the buildings here and here.
And yet, in spite of this, the historic fabric of the building is about to be diced into pieces, thrown into an architectural blender with more modern (i.e., more "blah") elements, and resurrected as space for one or more transient retail tenants which will, presumably, fill the New 42nd Street's coffers. However, as an architectural and functional travesty, this almost pales in comparison to what is being done to the Palace Theater on West 47th Street, which is being jacked up 30 feat from its present location so that new retail space can be built underneath it.
I'm not kidding, folks. As New York Post columnist Cindy Adams might put it, only in New York, kids, only in New York. You can read about this dual travesty in stomach-churning detail here.
So what, you might say? The buildings will still exist, and the retail uses will add more economic vitality to New York's theater district, right?
Wrong. Somebody forgot to tell the geniuses who came up with these plans an important point: bricks-and-mortar real estate is dying. At all price points. Even at the discount level. Even the businesses that profit off of dying retail enterprises see no future in it. Take a look.
That's my point in partially titling this post about the death of innovation in real estate. Developers seem to have no ability to imagine how empty spaces can be reused. Artists, on the other hand, have always been able to come up with creative uses for abandoned spaces. I can think of one word, appropriately New York-related, that sums this up: Soho, a former industrial neighborhood in lower Manhattan where artists turned abandoned factories into lofts and gallery spaces. Now Soho has become a luxury neighborhood, one that includes high-end retail outlets.
It is not just the cultural future of cities that lies in the arts; it is their economic future as well. Empty spaces should be filled with artistic enterprises that create new value, especially in an era when retail has become almost entirely a virtual enterprise. This is all the more so when the space in question, like an abandoned theater, was designed for artistic purposes in the first place. That purpose should be celebrated and maximized, not shoehorned out of the way by real estate people lacking in vision and imagination. If only the Times Square Theater could have been reused in a way that truly celebrated its artistic past while providing creative opportunities for commerce, that would have been a win-win scenario.
I suspect that, in a few years, the theater will go back to being abandoned as reality-based retailing continues to decline. Perhaps then, the win-win scenario could become reality.
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