Performing Arts Center: Who’s Paying? Who’s Buying?
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At a meeting last week of the committee, headed by Sara Lee Corporation chairman John Bryan, fund-raising consultant Charles R. Feldstein reported that the funding support needed to build a performing arts center does exist in the community, but he wouldn’t name names. According to sources present at the meeting, his report was purposely vague to prevent the funders he surveyed from being approached by other groups looking for money and to keep potential donors safe from possible attack by the project’s detractors. (Feldstein declined to discuss his findings.) Richard Franke of John Nuveen & Company, chairman of the committee’s financial feasibility subcommittee, said he was confident that Feldstein’s report reflects the support available. Franke said the kind of sizable contributions Feldstein was targeting generally would not be available for cultural projects of lesser magnitude.
Before the project can move very far forward, its proponents are going to have to do a persuasive sales job on at least a couple of key fronts, the most important being the Daley administration. David Mosena, the mayor’s planning commissioner and a member of Bryan’s committee, says Daley wants to be absolutely certain the current Lyric and CSO venues are unworkable before giving a new performing arts center his full support. Mosena also expressed concern about the need to find a site that would keep the CSO and the Lyric in the general vicinity of the Loop. The arts center idea faces strong objections from the Tribune editorial board, which ran its second editorial condemning the project on the day Bryan’s committee met to hear Feldstein’s report. Lyric and CSO sources panned the piece for its ridiculous suggestion that the opera company might somehow be able to use the Auditorium Theatre, a site with many more limitations than the Lyric’s current home, the Civic Opera House.
Phantom Phenomenon
