Post by Ken Nagele on Mar 29, 2004 19:22:38 GMT -8
Campus Plans Go West? This item from the Pasadena Star News.
Auditorium can reopen: ALONG with Ann Hassett, the accomplished show-business veteran recently hired to promote the saving of Ambassador Auditorium, we fully believe that goal not only should be achieved but that it can be.
Easy for us to believe. Harder for the entire community to achieve. Because this monumental task is the kind of effort that is going to take the efforts all of those in Pasadena and surrounding communities who say they love the old '70s-Modernist war horse and then some.
It's simple and cheap to laud the Ambassador's fine acoustics, to call it "the Carnegie Hall of the West,' to moon over the fancy purple Persian rugs and shimmering chandeliers. It will be complicated and expensive to reopen its doors.
For the two decades during which those doors were open, the Worldwide Church of God heavily subsidized every single concert held there. Thanks to the generous check-writing of tens of thousands of little old ladies and little old men around the country who believed in Herbert W. Armstrong's call to tithe a genuine 10 percent for their church, Southern Californians got to see Horowitz and Benny Goodman, Ella and Arthur Rubenstein.
After the church changed its doctrine, the money stopped flowing, and the Ambassador has been shuttered since 1994.
Fancy as the building and its fine fixtures are, we see Mayor Bill Bogaard's system for assessing its true market value as the economic key to its being available again to the community. Sure, there's a lot of lovely rosewood inside, a lot of crystal. But that doesn't mean the building is "worth' the absurd $20 million figure some come up with. It's worth what someone would pay for it. And since no one would pay a quarter of that sum for a money-losing arts hall, Bogaard's proposition that the land should actually be valued at what it could be sold as for the housing that will surround it when the former campus is developed is absolutely spot-on.
That figure would be more in the neighborhood of $2 million than $20 million. That's still a lot of scratch. But at least we're now talking an amount that a community campaign could raise. And with Hassett, who successfully helped open the Levitt Pavilion in Memorial Park, at the helm, and with the incredible and practical arts expertise of Alice Coulombe, Carol Henry and their Ambassador Hall Board spearheading the drive, the fact is that it could really happen.
If we all tithe just a little bit, that is. We wish the Ambassador and its backers all the best in their cultural quest.
Ann Hanna, commenting on the story on JLF, writes: My personal suggestion would be a sign put on the front of the building saying... "FREE TO A GOOD HOME".
Auditorium can reopen: ALONG with Ann Hassett, the accomplished show-business veteran recently hired to promote the saving of Ambassador Auditorium, we fully believe that goal not only should be achieved but that it can be.
Easy for us to believe. Harder for the entire community to achieve. Because this monumental task is the kind of effort that is going to take the efforts all of those in Pasadena and surrounding communities who say they love the old '70s-Modernist war horse and then some.
It's simple and cheap to laud the Ambassador's fine acoustics, to call it "the Carnegie Hall of the West,' to moon over the fancy purple Persian rugs and shimmering chandeliers. It will be complicated and expensive to reopen its doors.
For the two decades during which those doors were open, the Worldwide Church of God heavily subsidized every single concert held there. Thanks to the generous check-writing of tens of thousands of little old ladies and little old men around the country who believed in Herbert W. Armstrong's call to tithe a genuine 10 percent for their church, Southern Californians got to see Horowitz and Benny Goodman, Ella and Arthur Rubenstein.
After the church changed its doctrine, the money stopped flowing, and the Ambassador has been shuttered since 1994.
Fancy as the building and its fine fixtures are, we see Mayor Bill Bogaard's system for assessing its true market value as the economic key to its being available again to the community. Sure, there's a lot of lovely rosewood inside, a lot of crystal. But that doesn't mean the building is "worth' the absurd $20 million figure some come up with. It's worth what someone would pay for it. And since no one would pay a quarter of that sum for a money-losing arts hall, Bogaard's proposition that the land should actually be valued at what it could be sold as for the housing that will surround it when the former campus is developed is absolutely spot-on.
That figure would be more in the neighborhood of $2 million than $20 million. That's still a lot of scratch. But at least we're now talking an amount that a community campaign could raise. And with Hassett, who successfully helped open the Levitt Pavilion in Memorial Park, at the helm, and with the incredible and practical arts expertise of Alice Coulombe, Carol Henry and their Ambassador Hall Board spearheading the drive, the fact is that it could really happen.
If we all tithe just a little bit, that is. We wish the Ambassador and its backers all the best in their cultural quest.
Ann Hanna, commenting on the story on JLF, writes: My personal suggestion would be a sign put on the front of the building saying... "FREE TO A GOOD HOME".