As the founding conductor of The Pennsylvania Chamber Orchestra, Douglas Meyer had to focus on much more than making beautiful music.
Meyer spent twenty-two years seeking suitable places to rehearse and perform in Centre County. The chamber orchestra’s plight is familiar among performing arts organizations in the region.
“It occurred to me that I wasn’t the only one having that problem,” Meyer says. “The Nittany Valley Symphony and the ballet and other people had the same problem. There just wasn’t a place for that to happen.”
In 2016, not long after retiring from the PCO, Meyer met with leaders of other performing arts organizations, including the symphony and the State College Choral Society, to address the issue by working together.
“Our philosophy is sort of, if we pull apart, we get less; if we pull together, we get better stuff,” he says.
As a result of those discussions, the nonprofit Nittany Performing Arts Centre was incorporated in September 2017 with Meyer as its executive director. Since then, NPAC has worked toward establishing a performing arts center in Happy Valley to better accommodate the community’s music, theater, and dance ensembles.
It’s a long, complex—and expensive—process.
After years of exploration about what and where the center should be, NPAC last summer unveiled a conceptual design by Wilson Butler Architects for a five-story arts center to be built on the site of the Pugh Street Garage at Pugh and Beaver Avenue in downtown State College. The 491-space garage, constructed in 1972, is near the end of its life and the borough plans to tear it down by the end of 2028.
The borough has supported NPAC in “doing due diligence in understanding whether it could be constructed and to the point of understanding what the cost might be,” says Ed LeClear, the borough planning director. “But any process by which the borough government would be involved in potentially partnering to develop the garage site is a very long way away.”
Under the conceptual design, a privately owned adjacent building on Beaver Avenue that houses several businesses, including Webster’s Bookstore Café and Uncle Eli’s, would also need to be acquired.
Meyer acknowledges there is a long road ahead, but he remains excited about the possibilities.
The conceptual design calls for an 800-seat multipurpose theater, a 200-seat studio theater, numerous educational and rehearsal spaces, offices for arts organizations, a rooftop terrace with a clear view of Old Main that could be used for private functions, and two street-level retail spaces.
To address a chunk of the downtown parking need, the design includes a 335-space garage and twenty additional spaces on Humes Alley.
Nuts-and-bolts issues like ownership and management of the facility would need to be addressed as the idea progresses.
In the center’s first year, NPAC projects attendance at 78,000 people and an economic impact of more than $3 million, including money spent in restaurants and other businesses.
Meyer says that when looking at other performing arts centers across the country, it typically takes ten to fifteen years for plans to gel. So, six years in, NPAC is on a steady course.
“I want it tomorrow,” he says with a laugh. “I’ve memorized Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and I’m ready to do it at any time.”
Here’s more from our conversation:
What’s happened over the past year since presenting the conceptual design for the arts center?
Meyer: We’re at the point now where we’re pretty sure about what we’re going to do; we have to figure out how to coordinate with the Pugh Street Garage coming down, when these things will happen. We have to price the thing. And then we have to do a major fundraising campaign. It’s not going to be an inexpensive building. It’s big and very complex. So, we’re doing that planning, searching for some capital campaign development experts to help us.
Do you have any ballpark estimate yet on how much money you’d be looking for?
Meyer: No. It’s big, it’s very expensive. And part of what we’re doing now is some cuts so that it’s more reasonable, especially since the cost of construction is very high these days. It’s in the tens of millions of dollars. And we’re trying to be as efficient about that as we can.
You mentioned last year that one of the next steps was developing a business plan for the center. Where does that stand?
Meyer: The business plan is almost finished, although it’s never finished until you actually start running the thing. The idea is to have a place for performing arts groups that will have offices and, let’s say, have preferential treatment when scheduling happens. For example, if the Nittany Valley Symphony is renting an office somewhere, renting rehearsal spaces, renting performance spaces, instead of going other places to do that, they will be resident in this building, and they’ll pay us rent and will benefit, of course, by being there with other groups. We can share ticketing and marketing and all that sort of thing. It’s just bringing the performing arts businesses, many of the groups, together into one building. No one beyond that is excluded, of course, because there still will be plenty of room for other things to happen. Education is a part of what we want to do.
With facilities in our community such as The State Theatre and Schwab and Eisenhower auditoriums on campus, why is this space needed?
Meyer: Well, first of all, I’m a big fan of The State Theatre. We all are; it’s a wonderful place. As conductor of The Pennsylvania Chamber Orchestra, we performed in there many times. The problem is, it’s a movie theater; it has great projection, it has acoustics appropriate to that kind of thing. And it’s a little bit limited in size of audience [591 seats]. We want something a little bit bigger, at least 800 seats. We need a bigger space for acoustics to develop; you need to have a reverberation time at least two seconds long and a little bit more than that if you can. You don’t want a cathedral, but you want it to ring a little bit. And you want to have a stage that works for many different things.
When we started to make this plan … we went through every performance space in State College and on campus, and even slightly out of town to see what there was. And basically, we came to the conclusion that there’s a building missing. There’s [nothing] quite right for an 800-seat audience, nothing quite right for acoustical music of many different sizes. And no real place for dramatic productions that have enough dressing rooms, enough space to fly scenery, and all the things that go along with that.
And the other problem is that all of those other places are owned by somebody else. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had difficulty with the chamber orchestra, wanting to have a rehearsal in a school in the area. We can’t do it because the band’s playing that night. This building will be available to the members and other people with no conflicts with the school district, or with Penn State, or other entities that own other buildings.
Do you feel it’s important to have this facility downtown?
Meyer: Over the years, we’ve looked in other places and you would think, just go and put this building out in the countryside somewhere. But you have to remember when you do that, even if you just have a field, you’re going to build the building and you have to have enough area for parking. That takes a lot of room. It’s almost as difficult to do in the countryside somewhere as it would be downtown because downtown will supply parking.
There’s a lot of stuff that goes on in downtown State College. You’re close to Penn State; you have students, alumni, visitors; downtown is a destination. And when you have The State Theatre, other performing venues downtown, and a brand-new concert hall, you’re going to attract even more people. And you’ve got restaurants, hotels, conveniences. There’s an advantage to being downtown.
What is the most exciting thing to you about this someday being a reality?
Meyer: From having performed in this community in several ways, mostly with the chamber orchestra, just having the quality of the space to do what you really want to do. It is going to make the experience much better. The local groups are going to blossom. I can’t wait. I think that’s the most important thing.
The next most important thing would be to have some guests come through. We’ve spoken to the Pittsburgh Symphony; there are many people we could speak to. I’m a classical music nut, but there are all kinds of acts that could be in a place like this. The whole range of what can happen in performances downtown will increase. So that’s what I’ll get excited about.
For more information, visit nittanypac.org. T&G
Mark Brackenbury is a former editor of Town&Gown.