Picture the architects' AutoCAD image, the sweeping monumental structure, its glass facade agleam, tuxedoed and begowned figures stepping from cars, strolling the plaza, striking poses in the lobby. The newspapers, as newspapers always do, call it the "artist's rendering." And some art is involved, for these drawings tend to blur the background into a bland setting for the architects' brilliant-cut diamond. You won't see the Spaghetti Bowl, for instance, lacing the sky behind any rendering of the Downtown performing arts center—nor, for that matter, whatever else is slotted for the dusty barrens that compose Mayor Oscar Goodman's prized 61-acre redevelopment parcel. Medical center, shopping center, center field—other architects can fill in those blanks.
At the moment, there is no rendering of the proposed performance center. But this glittery prospect is certainly the wish of the mayor and a group of influential citizens eager for Las Vegas to take its place as a "world-class" city. No longer the jet-set playground, the loser-trap, the glitzy harlot slung along the highway but a real metropolis, its swelling cadres of sophisticates craving the kind of culture you can't get in tribute shows and magic acts.
Are they right? Let's break it down:
1.) IS THE CENTER REALLY NEEDED?
After all, it's not as though Las Vegas lacks performance opportunities.
True, says Myron Martin, director of the Las Vegas Performing Arts Center Foundation, the group spearheading the drive. You can catch Broadway shows at the Aladdin, he acknowledges, but "they're not doing first-run stuff, not getting the big shows."
Besides, says Martin, two separate feasibility studies, one conducted in 1998 by John Von Szeliski and Associates of Newport Beach, California, and another prepared by the City of Las Vegas two years ago, found "that A) this is a city that's ripe for a world-class performing arts center; and B) going Downtown [to build it] makes a lot of sense."
A more recent survey done last year for the LVPACF by The Luntz Research Companies of Washington, D.C., found strong popular support for building a performing arts center. A series of questions weighed pros and cons, then the final question asked yea or nay, and 71 percent said "build it." Interestingly, though, 56 percent said they never "attend the theater, opera, ballet or Broadway-style shows." Asked if they were likely to attend operas in a new facility, 64 percent said no, and 52 percent said the same about symphonic performances. And 72 percent agreed that "taxpayers always wind up footing the bill." Martin stresses that the county tax that would pay for part of the $185 million project would be a "tourist surcharge" on automobile rentals, from which locals would be exempt.
"We're the largest city in North America without a world-class performing arts center," Martin says. "Should having a world-class performing arts center be a priority for our community? Absolutely."
Local performing groups say the new center is needed, and Jeff Koep, dean of UNLV's College of Fine Arts, sees their point. "It may provide a well-needed home for the Las Vegas Philharmonic and the Nevada Ballet," he says. (Koep says the university's fine arts complex is plenty busy, hosting an average of 4.3 events a week.)
Richard Beckman, a UNLV architecture professor whose areas of specialization include the urban design and the Las Vegas Strip, agrees. "I think it is something that is needed," says Beckman. "I don't think it's competing at all. I think it provides diversity."
The performing arts center might be needed, and it could spur both Downtown development and a cultural efflorescence, but is it what the Valley needs most? Wouldn't, for instance, affordable housing be a better use of any new tax, given the thousands of homeless in the Valley, and the neighborhoods where two and three families live in one apartment?
Or, if you want to restrict the debate to cultural facilities, doesn't the Valley need a real art museum? Other cities build performing arts centers to bring in Blue Man Group and Cirque de Soleil; they're here full-time. Meanwhile, what's made all the news in the last decade about Las Vegas' burgeoning culture? A gallery at the Bellagio, the Guggenheim at the Venetian, galleries opening Downtown, that's what. This Valley needs an art museum.
No doubt the mayor and other civic leaders, eager for Las Vegas to assume its new role, would like to build what other cities have, but is that the wisest choice? "Taking the path of other cities might not make the most sense because Vegas is not like other cities," says Jose Gamez, a former architecture professor at UNLV, now at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He suggests looking for "what Downtown can offer that the Strip cannot." Perhaps Downtown could be "Off-the-Strip," a corollary of New York's Off-Broadway, a site of more informal or adventuresome cultural experiences, says Gamez.
2.) HOW EFFECTIVE WOULD IT BE AS A REDEVELOPMENT ENGINE?
Certainly, the anecdotal evidence for performing arts centers is positive. "Performing arts centers are nearly always a good idea," says Peter Batchelor, professor of urban design at North Carolina State University's College of Design, by e-mail. "Arts centers bring people downtown and use urban spaces at night when offices are shut down. These centers activate streets and sidewalks and create a whole subculture of restaurants and bars for pre- and post-performance entertainment."
That arts groups and their facilities are generators of economic activity has been a central theme of the arts community for the last 20 years, and its leaders have pounded the theme in wake of the culture wars that resulted in slashed government support. And often they have a point. Bill Byers, a geography professor at the University of Washington, has conducted economic impact studies for ArtsFund, the umbrella arts-support group in the Seattle area, and has found significant employment gains related to the nonprofit arts. "The economic impact study as been a tool for them to show these activities generate jobs just like Starbucks does," says Byers.
Not surprisingly, this argument has been integral to the successful funding of many performing arts complexes. Newark's New Jersey Performing Arts Center, which opened in 1997 after more than 10 years of planning, covered more than 60 percent of its $187 million price tag with federal and state economic development funds. Elizabeth Strom, a political science professor at Rutgers University, told the The New York Times that the notion of an investment in Newark was crucial to making the case for the center, which opened in 1997. She pointed to nearby Philadelphia, where plans for a performing arts center languished until Mayor Ed Rendell (now Pennsylvania's governor) cast it as an urban redevelopment project.
That argument might not sway many Clark County residents, but it could help shake the private money tree. And that composes a good argument for siting the center Downtown, aside from the central location near the junction of two highways. Neither the perceived needs of the orchestra and ballet nor the luster of "world-class" status alone will attract private dollars like the opportunity to support a scheme that could reshape Downtown and create new area of economic vitality.
3.) WHAT ABOUT FUNDING?
The Nevada Legislature last year granted Clark County authority to levy an auto-rental surcharge whose proceeds would build the center, in a public-private partnership. The county commission is likely to take up the matter after the consultant's report is finished.
A key component of the LVPACF plan is a $60 million endowment that not only would help operate the center annually but would pay for a raft of benefits, including reduced ticket prices for the needy, arts programs for county schools, and grants to various arts organizations. Martin says the foundation has imagined the tax surcharge accounting for the $125 million price tag, and private contributions for the $60 endowment, but it might not work out precisely that way.
The surcharge seems a handy source for a one-time need, but what about the county's other needs, cultural and otherwise? UNLV's Beckman, for one, questions the idea of the rental surcharge paying for the new performing arts center. "I think a room tax would generate a lot more money a lot faster," he says.
It's an idea often heard in the Valley, making its 130,000 hotel rooms and their 80 percent to 90 percent occupancy rate pay for more. Beckman points to San Francisco, which uses a room tax to build affordable housing. Such a tax here, he says, could launch a cultural fund and an affordable housing fund. "I think anything the casino industry can do to enrich or enhance the community is going to be that much better for them," Beckman asserts, making an argument that generally falls on deaf ears in the Valley.
4.) WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM OTHER CITIES?
Nothing says you've arrived like a performing arts center. All over the country, cities are building performance complexes in various configurations—concert hall alone, concert hall and theater, sometimes both with smaller chamber-performance facilities. Just last fall, Architectural Record observed something of a golden age in progress, with the opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; Carnegie Hall in New York adding Zankel Hall; and the new Tenerife Opera House in the Canary Islands.
Neither the architect for the proposed Downtown center nor a process for finding one has been determined yet, but Martin says he's inclined to find someone experienced in designing performing arts centers, as opposed to a "starchitect."
The program for a Las Vegas center will follow the consultant's report, but Martin envisages a large theater, perhaps 2,500 seats, that would double as a concert hall, with a smaller theater of under 1,000 seats for ballet, cabaret or more intimate performances. Given the results of the Luntz survey, big Broadway productions, rather than orchestral performances, appear to be primary, although Martin says the big hall would have the proper acoustics for music.
Other cities also offer models of a more comprehensive approach to metropolitan cultural development. Business leaders in Charlotte made all the expected noises about nurturing culture in advocating the Blumenthal Center for the Performing Arts, which opened in 1992. Now the city's Arts & Science Council's 25-year plan foresees a smaller facility to handle chamber performances that can't fit into the center's busy schedule, along with six regional arts centers in the county suburbs.
The council is key to Charlotte's cultural successes. On the scene since 1958, it is the nation's second-largest local arts agency. Like other cultural umbrella organizations of its kind, it studies, plans, funds and oversees the region's cultural development. Such organizations often take responsibility not only for raising the bulk of the funds needed by member groups, they study regional cultural needs and steer development of both groups and facilities.
5.) IS IT TIME FOR LAS VEGAS TO ENGAGE IN COMPREHENSIVE CULTURAL PLANNING?
The advocates of a performing arts center make a persuasive case that a such a facility would work as both a cultural and an economic stimulant. But the studies undertaken on its behalf have addressed only it. Perhaps a more comprehensive look at the Valley's cultural growth and promise would uncover more pressing needs, or guide programming of facilities in another direction.
Las Vegas is in a relative childhood of cultural development, but its gangly and unruly teen years are just ahead. Before we start pursuing piecemeal projects advocated by community leaders, we would do well to step back and study. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the various arts, and arts groups, in the Valley? What do we have and what do we need? And how can we set up a reliable public-private funding mechanism to get everything done?
In any event, this could be the time to start asking questions about Las Vegas' cultural development in a more coordinated manner, and to follow the lead of more culturally mature cities not necessarily by building what they've built, but by organizing a cultural planning and funding mechanism. This would not necessarily rule out the proposed performing arts center, but it might augment our picture of what it should be. And it would take cultural planning to the next level. That would be world-class.