When Richard Lewis, executive producer and CEO of California Musical Theatre, saw the opportunity, it seemed like a no-brainer. Here was the revelation: The city’s four major performing arts organizations could occupy a single downtown building, enjoying a cooperative arrangement seen nowhere else in the country. Together, they could exemplify the sort of regional collaboration that Sacramento’s arts scene has long needed.
For years, the Musical Theatre — an organization comprising Music Circus and Broadway Sacramento — had rented a rehearsal facility from the Sacramento Ballet that was nearing the end of its lease. Working with ballet director Kerri Warner, Lewis scouted a building at the corner of 14th and H streets, and the pair soon sparked a collaboration with the Sacramento Philharmonic, the Sacramento Opera and the city.
It took months of haggling among the 80-odd members of four nonprofit boards. But in the end, they had a plan to buy the corner lot and replace its former athletic club with a performing arts center, a place that would help solidify Sacramento’s future in the arts scene.
“Really, a grander vision was called for,” says Lewis, whose father, Russell Lewis, established the Music Circus in 1951 with partner Howard Young. “Putting four arts organizations together in the same building seems so obvious. So how come it didn’t happen [before]?”
Of the estimated $25 million total cost, $2.9 million — part of a $9 million city grant — has paid for the property and demolition of its existing building. And now all parties are looking forward to the summer of 2010, when they expect to move into the four-story, 47,000-square-foot E. Claire Raley Studios for the Performing Arts.
Collaborative effort of this caliber may not be easy, but it’s a necessity. Without it, a region’s arts and cultural scene can never gain much significance as a whole, regardless of how impressive the comprising pieces may be.
The need for that significance, meanwhile, springs from a heightened competition for younger workers, which is often described as a “war” being waged nationally and internationally. It’s recently become an accepted axiom that, among those young professionals who represent the most desirable energy and creativity, a city’s civic amenities — the sum total of its arts and entertainment, the overall expression of its culture and character — play a strong role in deciding where to live and work.
As local business and civic leadership strives to make the region a green-industry hub, the region needs to appear desirable to the next generation of creative talent. That means nurturing the cultural vibrancy that locals often fear their city lacks. It means employing, on a region-wide basis, the sort of collaboration that produced the E. Claire Raley Studios. And the discussion of how to achieve those goals is just getting started.
“I think we have what we need,” says Carol Van Bruggen, a partner in Sacramento financial-planning firm Foord Van Bruggen Ebersole & Pajak Financial Services and incoming president of the Arts and Business Council of Sacramento. “I think [Sacramento’s arts scene] is the biggest secret in the world. But we don’t have a very effective way of communicating that because we haven’t come together as a community, particularly the business community, and said, ‘This is very valuable.’ We need to communicate this to the rest of the world.”
The current school of thought at the intersection of arts and business has an academic figurehead in Richard Florida, author of the best-selling “The Rise of the Creative Class.” Drawing on observations of the country’s creative work force during the late-’90s tech boom, Florida argues that cities with a vibrant cultural scene will often prevail in the struggle for creative talent. His work has been attacked as unsubstantiated by some and defended as visionary by others; either way, cities worldwide are listening.
One argument in Florida’s thesis that has drawn popular attention asserts that cities with healthy gay communities demonstrate tolerance and diversity, so they become more attractive to young, urban-oriented professionals. That’s why Sacramento’s midtown gay community, known as Lavender Heights, is often mentioned in local dialogue — and it so happens the district ranks easily among the city’s most lively nightlife centers.
At the intersection of K and 20th streets, which forms the epicenter of Lavender Heights, sits the recently completed Midtown Art Retail Restaurant Scene building. Also known as the MARRS building, it’s a project of developer Michael Heller, who spent $6 million turning the former warehouse into retail and restaurant space with a high-hip factor.
Various sculptures protrude from the building, and Heller says he’s arranging for the current sign of the Crocker Art Museum to be transferred to MARRS upon completion of the museum’s expansion. “Everything I do, some way or another, is going to have art in it,” Heller says. “I really think we are an emerging arts city.”
Heller is a partner in Loftworks, a development firm known for its infill and renovation projects around midtown and downtown. Loftworks markets its mixed-use living spaces to a younger crowd, with liberal use of terms like “hip crib” and “modern pad.”
But it’s a market that is professional by necessity because Loftworks’ condos are not inexpensive, a fact that Heller laments. He professes support for the collaborative efforts that have produced artist live-work projects in lower-rent sections of town, like the Uptown district along Del Paso Boulevard. “I think we definitely have an affordability issue in the Sacramento area,” Heller says. “I’d love to figure out a better way to make our projects more affordable. I have a lot of empathy for the operations happening out on Del Paso.”
Opposite Heller’s MARRS stands the redbrick building of the Sacramento News & Review, the alternative weekly newspaper that slants young and liberal. For several years in the ’90s, journalist Rob Turner worked as SN&R’s entertainment editor, later leaving to pursue national publications in New York. He has since returned to co-found Sactown, a bi-monthly lifestyle magazine that Turner and his wife, Elyssa Lee, debuted in late 2006 with a focus on boosting the city’s culture and identity.
“We’re still not on the national cultural map in the way I’d like us to be,” Turner says. “Some individuals are, of course, like [painter] Wayne Thiebaud, composer Gregg Coffin, writer William T. Vollmann. But not as a city.
“We have dozens of great galleries, but there’s no association that brings them together and helps with marketing and raising awareness. Having the region being broken up into so many smaller cities also hurts us. We don’t speak with a unified voice. That said, the region’s most important cultural center is downtown-midtown Sacramento, which is booming right now. Once we have more residential projects in place there, I really do believe our city’s cultural vibrancy level will explode.”
Much of the current dialogue stems from the failure of measures Q and R in 2006, the public referenda on a downtown sports arena as the centerpiece of a redeveloped railyards. That episode stung civic leaders: Instead of moving forward, they were left to gather the pieces and start over.
So in late September, Partnership for Prosperity and the Sacramento chapter of the Urban Land Institute staged a downtown event to discuss how civic character and culture might be promoted. In an introductory address, West Sacramento Mayor Christopher Cabaldon laid out two “gospels.” First, the dialogue shouldn’t focus on downtown Sacramento — rather, a region-wide collaboration is key, a point on which other speakers agreed.
The second gospel: Don’t talk about a sports arena. A certain existential angst suffused the event, not only because the sports arena kept coming up anyway, but also because of a conundrum that became a central focus: The goal is to attract young professionals, but how can middle-aged civic and business leaders know what younger generations seek? And beyond that, isn’t it folly to attempt to strategize the soul of a city, as though it were a business plan?
Myra Millinger, president and CEO of the Maricopa Partnership for Arts and Culture, shared insights from her home city of Phoenix, in Arizona’s Maricopa County — a place with more than four million residents that suffers, like Sacramento, from a form of identity crisis. Despite its four pro sports franchises, the city lacks a widely recognizable quality-of-life reputation. And with MPAC only three years old, the region is just getting started.
“I think what’s exciting is that dialogue is beginning to happen,” Millinger says. “There is the [popular notion] that you need to partner across sectors to get things done. I hear it everywhere I go. And those weren’t things you were hearing five years ago.”
As one of its first endeavors, MPAC joined with the Greater Phoenix Economic Council to commission a report by Arizona State University and Forbes magazine. It concluded that a region’s cultural offerings ranked highly among 74 percent of companies and professionals in deciding where to live or relocate.
With that number, the category still fell below such traditional concerns as crime rates at 86 percent, advanced technology at 81 percent and competitive salaries at 75 percent. But there’s a war for talent out there, Millinger argues — which means that civic amenities easily carry weight.
Many observers consider Sacramento’s assets more than sufficient to get started. There’s the popularity of midtown; there are cooperatives creating artist-owned galleries and live-work space in lower-rent neighborhoods of the central city; there’s the ongoing expansion of downtown’s Crocker Art Museum, a $100 million public project that broke ground in July. And there’s the runaway success of Sacramento’s Second Saturday art walk, a concept that surrounding communities have emulated.
Beyond the central city, there’s a developing family-oriented arts scene in South Placer, and similar neighborhood efforts in Folsom and Elk Grove. There’s the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts in Davis, considered the region’s only world-class venue for the sophistication of its acoustic design. And there’s a restored theater in Woodland that serves a family- and youth-oriented performing-arts scene.
“It’s great to have iconic elements, but I think we really have to talk about depth,” says Rob Fong, vice mayor of Sacramento. “And we really need to figure out, from an arts and culture standpoint, what that means for Sacramento.” Fong’s foundation, Hemispheres Arts Academy, hands out local arts-education grants, with an expected $50,000 to $75,000 to give this year, he says — all of it from the private sector.
“To be able to nurture and hone creativity is a necessary part of helping us to move forward,” Fong says. “We’re talking about sustainable communities. We have really run to the end of business as usual. How do we do more with less, and how do we focus on our similarities, rather than focus on our differences? Just the fact that we’re having these discussions is exciting. It’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of money.”
The next generation of answers
by Ashley M. Wilborn
Today’s college students are tomorrow’s work force. Comstock’s asks them what it’ll take to make the Capital Region a bigger icon on the map.
What will keep graduates in the region?
“I think young graduates are looking for one of two things: a good, stable, well-paying job, or the next step in their academic lives. I believe Sacramento has some of the best jobs to offer newbies. If the job market would allow more college grads into their businesses, more graduates would stay.”
— Katrina Englehardt, criminal justice and deaf studies, Sacramento State
“Law students seem not to leave Sacramento for smaller areas unless they already have a connection with the smaller town. One clear difference is the availability of jobs in medium and large firms. While the Sacramento area has a tremendous legal community — which is on par with the big cities — it seems those larger firms are taking their time to move into the area.”
— Mario Zamora, McGeorge School of Law
Many outsiders associate our region with the Sacramento Kings and Arco Arena. What should we be known for?
“Sacramento should become more internationally recognized as a hub for modern-day politics. It’s the capital of a healthy, flourishing economy. It is often overlooked in the political sphere. It should become more comparable to Washington, D.C., revamping the way people view and think about politics.”
— Ann Marie Sanchez, international relations, UC Davis
“Before I moved from Riverside, I knew of the arena, but it is not the thing I think of when someone mentions Sacramento. It is not something that should define our city.”
— Katrina Englehardt, criminal justice and deaf studies, Sacramento State
How can we create a cultural identity for the metro area?
“The current trend seems to be moving the commercial center of the region toward Roseville. Without a viable meeting place downtown, with good transportation options and substantial commerce, Roseville will continue to take a lot of the growth away from Sacramento.”
— Joshua Rogers, MBA, Sacramento State; and McGeorge School of Law
What would make you stay in the metro area?
“We need to drive home the point that we are an affordable, livable city in our own right and within 90 minutes of everything. Several in urban development have argued that the class of up-and-coming knowledge workers is attracted to metropolitan areas by quality-of-life issues above and beyond considerations of career opportunities. That’s why cities like New York and Los Angeles are losing the competition for this demographic, when relatively smaller cities are winning by virtue of other factors, such as livability, availability of public transit, politically aware and active populations.”
— Ritchard Engelhardt, doctorate in urban planning, Sacramento State
“It would all come down to job availability, affordable housing and a good nightlife that includes clubs and bars with great ambience and the opportunity to network and wind down after a hard day’s work.”
— Ann Marie Sanchez, international relations, UC Davis