By Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian, University at Buffalo Professors. Bruce and Diane conduct weekly Buffalo Film Seminars at the Market Arcade Theater downtown.
A lot of you have written us saying, “What can we do to help? How can we preserve the theater as a public resource?”
We are grateful for your concern and your interest. We share it.
If the sale of the property is already a done deal in City Hall, if the recent request for proposals (RFP) is just a sham, there is nothing any of us can do. It is already all over and done with and we’re just watching a charade work itself out. All of the community groups currently depending on that theater—the Buffalo Film Seminars, Road Less Traveled Productions, Black Film Fest, and all the others—will be kicked out over the coming summer.
That’s because the RFP has no teeth. Once the building is sold, the new owner can do whatever he or she wishes with it.
If the RFP and the city planners behind it are at all sincere, then we still have a shot at keeping this a People’s Theater, a perfect companion to Shea’s across the street, a serious arts complex in the heart of the city. All it requires is that the City sell the theater to someone who cares, not someone who just wants to make a buck.
If you care about the theater continuing as a public resource, a space serving many community groups, write Mayor Byron Brown and Common Council President Darius Pridgen telling them that you don’t want the theater sold to the developer who will offer the most money, but rather to the theater operator who cares most about the importance of that theater to the cultural life of the city.
Buffalo city government is lousy when it comes to support of cultural institutions. It is not at all sensitive to what all the Rustbelt cities on the rebound have figured out: that cultural institutions are our most profitable resource. We’re inexpensive, we don’t pollute, and we enhance the quality of urban life. Buffalo invests on bigbox fish and game stores and hockey rinks.
If you want the theater to survive, send Byron and Darius a note saying so. It might influence the way this deal is finally cut, if it has not been cut already. It might influence whether the Market Arcade Theater is, next fall, a theater or a disco.
Byron’s email is mayor@city-buffalo.com
Dairus’s email is dpridgen@city-buffalo.com