Report from Seattle Center

John Longenbaugh reports from last night's meeting about the future of the rehearsal rooms in the Center House:

An interesting meeting but not much in the way of big revelations. The Seattle Center development folks talked us through the four plans for the Center, and aside from the first one (the Do Nothing Plan) all of them included a radical re-think of Center House, breaking it up into an open-plan building with lots of easy East-West pedestrian traffic. This might mean the end of the Center House Theater (Book-It and Seattle Shakes) and would definitely mean that TPS would need to relocate.

TPS was well-represented; of the 15 people who talked during the Community Forum section 5 of them were TPSers and one of them was from the board of Seattle Shakes. I talked with Karen Lane (head of TPS) afterwards and she stressed to me that they aren't panicking and they aren't angry, they're just trying to raise awareness of the situation. She said she also believes that the Center is sincere in wanting to honor all of their existing relationships with the current residents and that includes TPS, but at the moment she's only heard one suggestion as to where they could go, which is that they'd relocate TPS's offices and rehearsal spaces to another building to the North that's oddly skinny (40 feet wide). It's hard to imagine that this wouldn't mean a significant downsizing in the square footage they currently offer for rehearsals.

She also says that a lot of this will depend on how much money the City decides it can get for remodeling Center House from a blocky converted Armory into some sort of glass and steel restaurant/retail extravaganza.

What do I think? I think that it's going to be hard for TPS to be able to make the argument that in the midst of all this architectural dreaming the City needs to make sure that they maintain several large dusty rooms that can be rented out for a few bucks an hour to a bunch of theater artists. I worry that TPS doesn't have the political or economic clout to ensure that they get a bunch of shiny new rehearsal rooms someplace else at Seattle Center, and while they offer a variety of other services, the rehearsal rooms are invaluable to a wide variety of companies, from the big Equity houses down to shoestring fringe operations.