City arts district's future is unclear

» April 4,2005 - Orlando

Go out looking for Orlando's Downtown Arts District on a random Saturday night, and chances are you'll have a hard time finding it.

Maybe you'll stumble onto Mad Cow Theatre, where most weekends the Magnolia Avenue theater offers you a choice of two plays. Maybe you'll wander into the gallery at OVAL on Orange, where members of the Orlando Visual Artists' League create and hang their work.

Could be you'll make the trek seven or eight blocks uptown to Amelia Street, where Sak Comedy Lab and a variety of tiny theater companies ply their trade in performance spaces carved out of a city parking garage.

Or maybe you'll knock about downtown Orlando all evening without uncovering any art at all.

That's the reality for the Downtown Arts District, a 7-year-old concept that hasn't quite turned into a place.

While the arts district's few success stories struggle to keep a toehold on their downtown homes, the district's supporters have had struggles of their own: creating a presence, finding a leader and adapting to the economics and politics that have changed downtown Orlando radically since the idea of an arts district first came up.

"There are a lot of cities that are doing a lot better than we are but a lot of cities that would kill to have what we do," said developer Craig Ustler, a longtime member of the Downtown Arts District's volunteer board. "It's a half-empty-, half-full-glass kind of thing."

Ron Legler, who runs the Broadway in Orlando series at the Bob Carr Performing Arts Centre and is president of the arts-district board, admits that the group has recently been "treading water."

"It's been a process of reinventing ourselves," he said.

Legler and his board are looking for a candidate to replace Eric Ercole, who was hired as the arts district's first executive director a year ago but fired six months later when, board members say, he didn't live up to the task. But while that search has put the board in a holding pattern, the need for an arts district downtown has not gone away.

"We wouldn't be here without them [the Downtown Arts District]," said Mitzi Maxwell, general manager of Mad Cow Theatre, which moved half a dozen times before it settled downtown. "We love being downtown. We just can't imagine that someone wouldn't want this to continue."

Dyer reduced funding

Realities have changed since a downtown arts district first began forming seven years ago after a series of Orlando Sentinel columns calling for such a place. Once-vacant and affordable storefronts have been knocked down to make way for a multitude of high-rise offices and condominiums. At the same time, then-Mayor Glenda Hood, who supported the newborn district with funding and staff, gave way to Mayor Buddy Dyer, who withdrew the staff support and, because of newly discovered deficits, had to scale back on the funding.

Now, with Dyer suspended from office and the city's political future uncertain, the arts district, Legler said, will have to "reintroduce itself" all over again.

Meanwhile, the arts district's chief successes all face an uphill battle to stay where they are. Mad Cow, which occupies a small two-theater complex, is in the second year of a five-year agreement in which the Downtown Arts District board and the city's Downtown Development Board are helping to pay its rent. At this point, Maxwell said, the theater doesn't know what will become of it in year six.

The artists who make up OVAL have had a hard time organizing themselves to raise money, and they owe the arts-district board, which subsidizes their rent, more than $40,000. Their lease is up this fall.

And the organizations that use the city-owned Theatre Garage -- including the Central Florida Performing Arts Alliance, the Orlando International Fringe Festival, Sak and all the small groups that rent there from time to time -- may be priced out of their home because of the city's rent structure, which started at $1 a year and has now risen to $1 a square foot, or more than $10,000 a year. That rent is set to go to $3 a square foot next year and $5 a square foot in 2008 -- at which time the groups that have settled there will have no choice but to leave.

Loss of a strong booster

Through the years, the Downtown Arts District's board has been stymied by the lack of suitable, affordable space downtown. And since Dyer fired Brenda Robinson, Hood's executive director of arts and cultural affairs, the district has had no one who could spend most of her time running it.

Robinson shepherded the LizArt public-art project, which raised more than $230,000 for the arts district and other local arts groups in early 2002. She corralled hundreds of thousands of dollars for the district from the city and private sources. She greased the path for arts groups to move into the Theatre Garage and other spaces. And she made a highly visible presence for the arts downtown.

Since Robinson left, in March 2003, no city official has devoted the same attention to the arts district. And no one among the group's board members has been able to steer them in a clear path.

In the meantime, with no clear goals in sight, the group has languished.

"Definitely, it's not for a lack of good intentions or desires," said Jim Morris, a longtime board member who is the performing-arts alliance's executive director. "We've had leaders, but we haven't had an overall vision we've stuck with, with the leadership really pushing it. We've just sort of stumbled our way along."

Others in the arts business have been frustrated with the group's progress, or lack thereof.

"I think it is unclear whether their intention is to be in the awareness business, the events business or the space business," said Margot Knight, president of United Arts of Central Florida. "I personally come down on the side of the space business."

"Without a plan," said Mad Cow's Maxwell, "we're going to be in danger of not having a district at all."

Several ideas percolating

As the city has cut back on its financial commitment, and as suitable buildings have disappeared, the arts-district board has turned its attention elsewhere. Third Thursdays, an event that aims to attract people downtown one night a month to drink and look at art, has been an arts-district enterprise since it started in 2001, but the loosely woven concept still lacks a focus.

Now the arts-district board is considering several other projects. One would adopt developer Cameron Kuhn's idea of erecting bronze statues of famous Orlandoans -- names bandied about have included astronaut John Young, former Mayor Bob Carr, actress Delta Burke and pop singer Justin Timberlake -- in and around Kuhn's Premiere Trade Plaza development at Orange Avenue and Church Street.

Another would take over a grandiose Christmas-lighting program put forth by a private lighting designer and city staffers.

But observers question whether the Downtown Arts District has become the repository for anything remotely connected to entertainment and is spreading itself too thin.

United Arts' Knight is particularly critical of the sculpture-program idea, which she said promotes the interests of a private developer, not public art.

"A meaningful public-art project includes a large dose of creativity from artists," she said.

Terry Olson, Orange County's director of arts and cultural affairs, is one of the arts-district board members working on the project. He admits many arts lovers will look down on it.

"It's not exciting art," he said. "But is it an arts product that's going to give some excitement to downtown? Yes, I think so.

"It's not like putting a Calder in Signature Plaza. But having [a statue of] John Young climbing a ladder on a citrus tree would be fun."

Changing focus

During all of this, the Downtown Arts District board has worked on reinventing itself. Thanks to developer Ustler, the group has switched focus from buying buildings for the arts to trying to benefit from downtown development to come.

Frank Billingsley, executive director of the Downtown Development Board, negotiated 10,000 square feet in the huge 55 West project on Church Street to be handed over to the Downtown Arts District on a 99-year lease.

The idea, Ustler said, is for the city to grant higher densities and other concessions in exchange for long-term space for the arts. Ustler himself donated $10,000 from his Eola South project to the arts district in exchange for the city's allowing two more condo units on his site. Attorney Jim Lussier, the arts-district board's past president, is trying to negotiate gallery space on the ground floor of a house to be built in Thornton Park. And Billingsley is working on wrangling arts space from the developers of Tradition Towers, a development planned for the site of the University Club, at Magnolia and Central.

The city has agreed it's a good concept, Ustler said, and now the arts district should develop a policy that City Council could adopt.

If the district can't use those spaces because they're too far afield, supporters say, they could rent them out -- and use the proceeds to buy something more usable, such as the building where OVAL occupies the first floor, a building erected as a movie theater in 1916.

Observers have other ideas for the arts district, too, especially for it to act as an advocate for the arts downtown. United Arts' Knight wants the district to help the city overcome what she calls the obstacles its red tape presents for arts groups: rules about occupancy and signage, a ban on street performers, a tendency to schedule competing events.

Legler wants the group to be more visible, with an executive director occupying a window-front office at OVAL.

Many of them want the district to figure out its vision -- not a statement on a piece of paper, Morris said, but an idea its board members understand of what kind of arts district they want to see.

"They need a plan," Mad Cow's Maxwell said. "They just plain need to have a plan."

Elizabeth Maupin can be reachedat emaupin@orlandosentinel.comor 407-420-5426.

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