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Not to be confused with "The Great American Hammer Museum."
Posted on 01/31/2014 5:51:52 AM PST by raccoonradio
The bank has sued to foreclose. The city’s philanthropic groups, with names like Mellon and Heinz, have withdrawn support. The $42 million August Wilson Center for African American Culture, a bow-front building inspired by a Swahili sailing ship, is high and dry.
Named for the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who found a street-savvy poetry in the lives of poor Pittsburgh blacks, the culture center’s plight has been especially painful for those who had hoped it would enshrine the music, art and literature of the urban world he knew.
Instead, it appears to be a victim of mismanagement by its senior staff and board of directors, who borrowed to build a grand palace of culture, but failed to find a wide enough audience and donor base in the hometown of Wilson, whose plays are mostly set in the Hill District just blocks away.
... a state judge handed control of the cultural center to a conservator, usurping its board in a final effort to avoid liquidation. The bank that holds the mortgage, which has gone unpaid for months, is advancing $25,000 to pay the conservator. The culture center is flat broke.
Mark Clayton Southers, a former director of its theater program, said the Wilson center struggled to find an audience among the people Wilson portrayed: working-class blacks, many of whom feel unwelcome downtown with its skyscrapers and largely white-owned businesses, he added.
“You can’t build it and they will come,” Mr. Southers said. “Not when you’re trying to work with a community that is not traditional theatergoers or cultural consumers.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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Not to be confused with "The Great American Hammer Museum."
That right there is racist!
Come to think of it, so is your screen name.
Two decades later, donors wondering what happened to plans for slavery museum
They were bamboozled*. *Take that Spike Lee.
Depends.
Are you white and/or conservative?
To salvage this idiotic building, they should construct a big red sickle behind it and give it to Rich Fitzgerald for a new Agony County headquarters.
You mean that Oprah, JayZ, Spike Lee, Belefonte, Sharpton, Jackson, Freeman and the Obamas won’t save it? They don’t want to share the wealth?
“You can’t build it and they will come,” Mr. Southers said. “Not when you’re trying to work with a community that is not traditional theatergoers or cultural consumers.”
Hasn’t he called P Diddy, Kanye, Jay-Z, or Beyonce?
Or Oprah Winbag...
Black people have never supported Wilson’s plays. I’ve seen them all and the audience is always white with the exception of one or two people.
Now, part of the problem is that Mr. Wilson did not acknowledge Christianity as one of the savior’s of black people in the US. That got up the nose of one black theatrical friend that I have. He hated Wilson’s harping on African paganism that appears throughout the plays.
The other, I think, is that his plays were simply too difficult for the average theater goer. But then I never saw black audiences at black musicals, either.
Black people attend “black” theater - a semi-amateur tradition in which plays revolve around problems within the black community. No white person ever appears and they are never the focus of the problems. I actually have enjoyed the one or two that I’ve seen.
I always wondered if Wilson was white. I met him once - nice man! - and he looked completely Caucasian.
yes--this happened in a small city in the California Central Valley that i lived in for 12 years... there was an old abandoned theater down town... this man bought it... the city decided they wanted it and took it via eminent domain... they wanted to build a Theatre/Cultural Center... so they did... and nobody came... there was no market for it... and it is true that just because you build it, that does not mean that he/they will come...
this is how it is with people with no mind for business... look at Obamacare... they built it... nobody wants it enough to pay for it... you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink...
Ha, well we’re talking about the animal of course :)
Although I don’t think I’ll ever get to Missouri, I appreciate the link.
After reviewing what is available on Carver, most are politically correct and not work visiting.
He is one of the few people in history I would have like to have met. Don’t give a damn about the color of his skin.
WOW...what a blast from the past. It was so short lived, and I was 13 when it aired. Lasted like half a season...barely remember it.
The Andy Warhol museum would go nicely in that building. The homosexual commercial artist moved to NYC early in his career but that may be a fundraising plus.
All it needs is the sickle, and you have what it really stands for.
There is a market for theater in Pittsburgh, but the problem is, there isn’t a consistent market for high dollar African American theater.... We have a multitude of performing arts options within downtown and throughout the city.
They eminent domained an entire city block and tore everything down to build this thing, and it never ever had a chance of being successful.
The article blames mismanagement, and I don’t doubt it was likely managed poorly as well, but I don’t think best management in the city could have made this thing financially feasible.
This was one of those ideas that I really think no one wanted to say no to it for fear of looking racist, when in fact it was a piss poor plan from the get go. This thing didn’t fail from lack of people wanting it to work, it just was a poor concept and apparently even more poorly executed.
As to the NYT portraying downtown pittsburgh as anti-black, they are idiots who know nothing about the city, Downtown is not a place that intimindates African Americans at all, that is nothing more than the NYT playing race cards where none exist and looking down its nose at Pittsburgh. Anyone who would write something like that, has never spent 5 minutes downtown.
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