In the past few days I received an email petition asking the city to reopen Armstrong Park. I signed it, of course, as I’ve been a vocal proponent of the park’s reopening for many years, and we’ve had several features in our blogs about this subject.
I understand that there’s also a group of young people who call themselves “Friends of Municipal Auditorium” who gathered a neighborhood meeting in Treme to discuss the project.
From what I understand, this group, which apparently has some ties to previous plans drawn up for Municipal Auditorium by Stewart Juneau’s firm and developer Pres Kabacoff, wants the city to move fast to take advantage of FEMA monies and tax credits to reopen a revamped auditorium.
Every single day I pass Armstrong Park on my way home and I say to myself, in sort of a parody of the Louis Armstrong song, ”What A Stupid World.” The park is just so lovely, and at the same time derelict and closed to the local community. It just makes me ill.
The Municipal Auditorium was built in 1930.
The entrance to the park, which was totally botched by an inept concrete contractor who got the job at the tail-end of the Nagin administration, is in litigation with the city. Nothing can happen—the entrances and sidewalks cannot be repaired—until the lawsuit settled. How long do you think that will take? Years? Ah, the wheels of justice and city hall move very, very glacially. It could be years before Armstrong Park will even reopen again.
Even if the city does put the Municipal Auditorium back on its list of top priorities—and it needs to do it in a hurry, or risk losing FEMA money—there’s another serious question that needs answering regarding the auditorium redevelopment.
It’s not hard to come up with great ideas for both the auditorium and the park. And in some ways, given the accessibility of tax credits and FEMA monies, the rehab of both might be feasible.
But what happens after that?
In a recent article on the Lens, the writer (a member of the Friends of Municipal Auditorium) basically regurgitates the plans presented by Juneau in his earlier proposal. What this group needs to understand is that developers work for up-front money (PDF)… and then they usually go away. If the project is not financially feasible in the long run, the developer may have gotten his/her money, and the project goes belly-up if it contains an operation that doesn’t pay the bills. It may be a revamped pretty building, but it may not be self-supporting. There are numerous examples of similar efforts all over New Orleans. Case in point: Louisiana Artworks. Lovely idea, beautiful renovation. But the numbers just didn’t work.
Before you can have a feasible project in a building, the market has to be there. So my questions for Municipal Auditorium concern its ongoing use: are there enough patrons to fill an 8,000 square foot “state-of-the-art” venue? Are there enough arts-related businesses who will pay to rent space in the office space in the revamped auditorium?
It’s one thing to get the money to redo the Auditorium, make it pretty, change and enhance its uses, but can the building sustain itself? Remember, developers like Juneau and Kabacoff will have taken their development fees from the project costs long before the building reopens. I’m positive that, based on their development records, both Juneau and Kabacoff and the new group, the Friends of Municipal Auditorium, have very good intentions. But—is this a fantasy cooked up by developers (it happens a lot, believe me)? Or is this a project that can self-sustain in the long run?
I’ve seen the possibilities for developing the property and understand how money can be acquired to do just that. What I’d like to see are the numbers that show me that this project will contribute to the economy of New Orleans in the long run. I’m ready and certainly willing to help get the Auditorium project off the ground….someone show me the numbers. Let’s keep this idea going, but let’s also make sure it’s the best thing for one of New Orleans’ most beloved buildings and for the park that surrounds it.
