Turning the August Wilson Center Into Hotel Would Be Grievous Loss

Every time I hear someone describe the proposal to hand the August Wilson Center over to private hotel developers as a “win-win,” I think of that famous line from the Vietnam War: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

Just to be clear, there is nothing “win-win” about this proposal, to the extent we know anything about it beyond vague outlines and promises. Here is what I believe we can safely say:

• The deal would throw away more than $35 million in government, foundation, corporate and private investment in what was always promised to be a charitable asset for the good of the whole community, and it would hand an architectural treasure off to a private developer for a fraction of what it cost to build.
• It would gut the core of the building to transform it into a lobby and conference rooms and shove the “cultural” spaces into pieces of the facility and parts of the calendar. And who decides what constitutes the building’s “cultural” space? The developers and, as they have shared with us, their definition doesn’t even include the rehearsal space that the center’s dancers used to practice their art.
• It would leave a for-profit company in charge of deciding what is artistically acceptable in its space. When was the last time you went to a hotel to see challenging or edgy art? There is a reason art like that happens in galleries and theaters and museums, and why hotels are famous for sales of “sofa art.”
• It would shatter the original intent of the center, which was for the whole building — not just pieces and parts — to be a grand celebration of this community’s unique and remarkable African-American culture and heritage, a place not just for performances and exhibits but also for meetings and lectures, gatherings and artistry, practice and reflection.
• It would, according to the plans described to us but never shared, deface the exterior of the building with massive pillars that would erase the center’s presence and transform its richly symbolic “sail” into a footnote.
• It would eviscerate Urban Redevelopment Authority covenants governing the use and preservation of the building that are the core of why government and foundations can reliably invest in challenging projects such as this. If these covenants can be so easily voided whenever they become inconvenient, then future funding for redevelopment projects will be impossible to secure.
• And, perhaps worst of all, it would make the pretense of preserving the “center” by leaving in place a nonprofit organization whose past stewardship of its charitable mission, according to our legal counsel, all but guarantees that foundations would not be able to fund it.