Residents Offer Ideas for Mohawk Theater Proposals
Mayor Jennifer Macksey explains the bidding process at Monday's community forum on the Mohawk Theater.
About 30 attendees offered their ideas and impressions on Monday of what they would like to see in the former movie house at the first of two public forums this week. Some were specific — a recreation space, a brewery or the Berkshire Carousel — but the major theme that emerged was a multi-use venue that could operate most of the year.
Mayor Jennifer Macksey said she wanted to "jazz up" the proposal with a section on community comments so bidders could have an idea of what the community would support. Clad in a Mohawk Theater embellished T-shirt, she said her role was to facilitate the forum and provide facts for participants.
"No idea is dumb. No idea won't go into the RFP," she said. "I just want to promote some dialogue, OK. And you may say something that I'll tuck away in my brain of a filing cabinet that maybe we can take to life on another project. So I want everybody to feel comfortable sharing. I want everybody to be respectful."
Macksey said her team was developing a list of architects who worked on other projects to alert them the building would be available and talking with other communities that had success in this area.
"We're taking a different approach than just posting it in the central register," she said.
Plans to sell the 80-year-old theater last year riled up residents who came out in force at City Council meetings to oppose the move. The former administration had recommended selling the gutted building to Veselko Buntic, the owner of the adjacent building at 103 Main St. that he plans to turn into a hotel. Buntic's proposal was to use the structure as an attached events venue with a restaurant.
Macksey rejected the bid her first month in office and promised to solicit community input before issuing another RFP. She held true to her word on Monday, soliciting ideas from residents who remembered the movie house and newcomers interested in preserving its history.
But it's not likely the long-closed theater could be restored to its former glory: little remains of the interior and the bulk of the building is just a shell. But there could be an art deco-inspired renovation for newer and more flexible purpose.
The vision has long been a performing arts center and city has invested $2,656,435 in public grants into the theater project with $889,000 used for varies studies and engineering, including a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant of $30,000 to look into connecting it to the Dowlin Block. Another $600,000 in borrowing approved by the City Council in 2009 was used as a "bridge" loan during stabilization work at that time, and the city still owes a total of $53,560 with the interest.
A number of people again brought up musical performances and touring companies, but Andy Hoar of Williamstown, who worked for many years as production director in the theater department at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, said the structure wasn't conducive to large acts because it was built as a single-screen movie theater.
"There are certain limitations to the building itself and how it's used. ... You're talking about bringing in touring events, or bringing in large music production, those sorts of things require a certain number of seats to be sold in order to make it profitable for those companies," he said. "In that space, it requires having not only the house, the lower part of the stage, but the balcony as well to get to that 1,000 or 1,200-seat minimum requirement."
Adding a stage means the sightlines for the balcony won't work, so in order to make it a performance space, the back wall would have to be pushed out into the parking lot. There's also no "backstage" for dressing rooms or equipment.
The price tag 20 years ago had been about $2 million but by the time the plugged was pulled nearly a decade later, the cost had jumped closer to $12 million.
Hoar's suggestion was to lean in on the movie aspect by considering a supersize or Imax screen. But a query on how many in the audience had gone to a move recently got barely a half-dozen show of hands. Plus, several people noted, reopening it as a movie theater could kill the struggling cinema on the other side of the street.
Resident Robert Cardimino said it would be the perfect place for the Berkshire Carousel, which closed in 2019 after only three years in operation. Moving it from Pittsfield would make Main Street an attraction, he said.
David Willette advocated for a recreational center with a climbing wall and virtual activities and Glenn Murray thought it a perfect place for a brewery and restaurant. City Councilor Keith Bona noted that the city had lost a lot of the halls where weddings, receptions and proms had been held.
Gail Grandchamp, who had come out strongly in opposition to letting the theater go, said the fact that it's a shell would allow other activities such as standup and small performances.
"You can set up chairs, or you can do different kinds of setting for that. We can also do movies, but just call it theater — if you look around theaters are dying. They're closing up. They're not making money," she said. "We need to have a performance center with all kinds of multi stuff. Because that is the focal group of downtown North Adams so let's keep it there."
Murray said all the options put forward were good ones but noted they wouldn't come cheap.
"It's gonna cost somebody a ton of money to open it up. To buy it, fix it, renovate it, whatever and get it going, it's gonna cost a ton of money," said Murray, adding a lot of the ideas thrown out were good, but "are the daily money making activities? I think that's what's going to be needed there."
Bona offered that it had been estimated to cost $600,000 a year just to keep the theater running.
Robert Smith said the cost was not something they should be concerned with — that would fall to whoever bought the building. But that brought up the topic of who should own the building — the community or a private developer.
"I'd like to see it privately owned but community owned will be fine as long as somebody does something with it," said Councilor Bryan Sapienza. "We've sat there with an empty building for how many years now and we need to do something with it. If we don't, something catastrophic could happen to the building."
Russ "When" Leggett, an artist and a founder of Citizen Steam, a young nonprofit seeking to empower communities in creative ways, said they would love to see the theater be community owned.
"If we could figure out a way of like being people that are helping steward that through, that's something we're actually really interested in," he said. "And doing more like this to restore the Mohawk Theater in a way that people would want and use it in the way that people would want and know that it's not going to get sold to someone who then takes it and does something in a way that can't build memories for generations."
The second forum is scheduled for Wednesday at 6 p.m. again in City Council Chambers.
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