“A Harlem Cultural Hub Is Threatened by Debt - New York Times” plus 1 more |
| A Harlem Cultural Hub Is Threatened by Debt - New York Times Posted: 31 Jan 2011 12:54 PM PST  Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times The National Black Theater, a cultural anchor of Harlem, may close because its building is facing foreclosure. Theirs was a partnership built on vision and pride and rooted in a building at the very heart of black America. In 2002 the National Black Theater, a cultural anchor of Harlem, invited the owners of Nubian Heritage, a growing beauty-care company with an African pedigree, to invest in its sprawling building at Fifth Avenue and 125th Street. The theater, created in the turmoil of the civil rights movement, had owned the building for 19 years. But now it faced foreclosure, as large construction loans remained unpaid. For the theater, its new partners held the promise of revenue and revival. For the businessmen, two former street vendors from Liberia, the building provided a flagship store in a historic neighborhood. Nine years later, though, the store is closed; the partnership owes nearly $1.8 million in unpaid property taxes; and the theater is facing foreclosure yet again, a plight it blames on its partners, men it once embraced as kindred spirits and now in court accuses of mismanagement and fraud. "This debt has placed the theater's home at risk like nothing else ever has," said Raymond N. Hannigan, the theater's lawyer. Founded in 1968 by Barbara Ann Teer, the theater was created to showcase productions by, and about, black Americans at a time when such stories rarely appeared on the mainstream stage. It has evolved into a cultural spawning ground, one that presents shows and workshops intended to foster respect for African ancestry and for black self-expression, and one graced over the years by artists like Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Nina Simone, Nikki Giovanni and Maya Angelou. But the theater's story is also a cautionary tale about what can happen when arts groups extend beyond their comfort zone to find revenue, as is increasingly popular in the poorly financed arts world. Ms. Teer was a pathfinder in such efforts. From the day in 1983 when she bought the building, a former jewelry factory, she hoped to finance her work with rent from the other tenants. "The real estate subsidizes the art," she liked to say. The men Ms. Teer later picked to be her lead partners in that effort, Richelieu Dennis and Nyema Tubman, began their careers on 125th Street, peddling organic shea-butter soaps, much like the ones Mr. Dennis's grandmother once sold at village markets in Africa. Today they operate several companies on Long Island that make skin and hair care products derived from African ingredients, which they market online and through major retailers like Target. Dun & Bradstreet estimated that the primary company has $6 million in annual gross sales. "My whole life has been about building community, building business in our community, empowering people in our community," Mr. Dennis said. But Ms. Teer's two children, who have run the theater since their mother died nearly three years ago, accuse their partners of leveraging the value of the theater's building to secure funds for their other businesses and saddling it with debt. And when the Harlem store closed, the children say their partners ignored the property taxes in an effort to force a sale of the building. "There are too many things happening at the same time to be a mistake," said Ms. Teer's son, Michael Lythcott, a business consultant who said the theater's very existence was threatened. Mr. Dennis denied the charges. As the manager of the building, the partnership led by Mr. Dennis and Mr. Tubman was responsible for its business affairs. But Mr. Dennis said he assumed the bank was paying the taxes. "I've never one day tried to do anything that would any way, shape or form jeopardize the theater," he said. In 1968, a year when the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ignited the tinder that was American race relations, Ms. Teer issued something of a cultural manifesto. In The New York Times, she wrote of the need to build cultural centers "where we can find out how talented we really are, where we can be what we were born to be, and not what we were brainwashed to be, where we can literally 'blow our minds' with blackness." Her theater in Harlem was the end product of that effort. At first she carved out space where she could find it: an Elks Lodge on West 127th Street, a loft on East 125th Street where she shared space with the Last Poets. Harlem Before the Boom It was a Harlem before gentrification, one where brownstones were often not coveted but abandoned. The theater was not just a place to see a show but also a forge where Ms. Teer worked to shape cultural identity. Art was supposed to uplift. Tickets were free or inexpensive. Ms. Teer gave up her acting career and until the mid-1980s she wrote for and directed the theater's repertory company, some of whose productions were broadcast on PBS and staged at national and international halls like Lincoln Center. "She felt that the arts were a key part of saving the soul of Harlem," said Geoffrey Canada, the educator whose Harlem Children's Zone rents space there. Ms. Teer could afford to buy the 64-000-square-foot building on Fifth Avenue because it had been damaged in a fire. She secured a state loan and other money to convert it partially into a theater, offices and stores. At the 1989 groundbreaking, presided over by Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, she compared her complex to the Tuskegee Institute, the Alabama college that Booker T. Washington helped found. It was the kind of grand, exuberant statement Ms. Teer was known for, and when she died years later in 2008, at 71, her family and friends gave her a grand, exuberant send-off: a march through Harlem with drummers to a packed funeral at Riverside Church. Her family placed a live elephant, her favorite animal, along the route; fireworks by Grucci burst in the sky that night. But financial problems were never far away, and they had become critical in 2002, when construction loans from the renovations came due. Mr. Lythcott said the theater expected government loans to settle the debt. When loans did not materialize, the theater began searching for a possible partner. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Santa Clara: Community rallies to fund school cultural exchange program - San Jose Mercury News Posted: 01 Feb 2011 06:55 AM PST Click photo to enlarge Cabrillo Middle School student Marisa Pinero, 13, plays a hand game with a Chinese exchange student,Ming Jingziyi, 12, right, during dinner before a basketball game at Wilcox High School in Santa Clara, California on Friday, January 28, 2011. Pinero's family is hosting Jingziyi and Lu Li, 12, (background).    Participating in a foreign-exchange program would ordinarily be out of reach for students such as Tomas Mier. The 12-year-old Santa Clara middle school student comes from a working-class family whose parents can't afford such a luxury as sending him to another country. And his family's small apartment doesn't have room to host a visitor. But a program at Juan Cabrillo Middle School is giving Tomas and other schoolmates an opportunity to participate in a cross-Pacific cultural exchange. Families, with help from community members and businesses, are rallying to raise money to send about a dozen students to China, and they are coming up with alternative ways for students here to host their Chinese guests who arrived earlier this month. For two weeks ending Feb. 7, Tomas is "day buddy" to Difei "Frank" Zhao, who is visiting with about 20 peers from Changsha, China. While Frank sleeps at someone else's home, Tomas escorts Frank to class and is his new Chinese friend's guide to discussing weather, class size, history and anything else that interests the sixth- and seventh-graders. "I love everything about it," Tomas said. "You get to meet a person from another culture and learn how people eat and the kinds of buildings they have. Later on, when I get older, I'll need to know these things so I can grow and adapt." Cross-cultural student exchanges are nothing new. But the 3-year-old program with a school in the capital city of Hunan Province is especially meaningful for the nearly 900 students at Cabrillo, where 59 percent of the kids qualify for free or reduced-price lunch."Most of the time, when you don't have money, you stay in your small town, and you think that's your whole world," said Santa Clara Unified School District spokeswoman Tabitha Kappeler-Hurley. "This exchange and travel takes them outside their community and lets them realize how much more there is to life." While the Chinese students are in Santa Clara, school leaders have arranged all sorts of American activities for them, including a hamburger and hot dog dinner and a high school basketball game at Wilcox High. This week, they'll dine Italian and attend a Sharks hockey game. They'll also celebrate the Lunar New Year together on Thursday and say goodbye the following day at China Stix restaurant in Santa Clara, whose owner has helped tremendously with financial support and who led last year's trip to China, when Cabrillo students took their first trip to Changsha. Funding the trip last April was a financial challenge for many of the families. But many dug in, and pieced together money to pay for their children's $2,500 share of the trip. One father's employer ended up pitching in $1,000. "When we heard the cost was $2,500, that was like $25 million to us," said Karen Stalker-Alves, a preschool teacher whose husband had been laid off for nearly three years. But the couple was determined to give their daughter, Kaleigh, then 13, an experience of a lifetime. Her relatives contributed what they could: Instead of Christmas and birthday gifts, they sent in money so Kaleigh could go on the trip. They even sent some money so that Stalker-Alves could go, too. But Stalker-Alves didn't just want to accept charity. She volunteered to lead the trip's fundraising efforts. Knowing that she wasn't the only one with money problems, she enlisted the help of all the travel-bound students. The 12 children sold candy, beef jerky, China Stix coupons, refreshments at school movie nights and a Valentine's Day dance. At Santa Clara's Art & Wine festival, the students sold caramel apples and frozen yogurt. In the end, each child got a $300 refund, and there was even enough money raised to share on extras in China, such as tickets to Hong Kong Disneyland. To this day, those students are talking about their adventures along the Great Wall and telling their families the precise way to boil Chinese tea. A fresh group of Cabrillo students hopes to begin fundraising this summer and travel to China on spring break in 2012. Mary Anne Bowles, the P.E. and leadership teacher who chaperoned the trip, was amazed at how the Cabrillo community pulled together to expand the horizons of children, many who had never taken a trip out of California before. "This was something extra special," she said. "Kids may not even realize the financial hardship their parents are in. So, for the parents to give their kids this experience to see the world, I'm just so impressed they seized it." Contact Lisa Fernandez at 408-920-5002. If you'd like to contribute to next year's trip to China You can make checks out to "Cabrillo Middle School China Trip" and send them to Cabrillo Middle School, 2550 Cabrillo Ave., Santa Clara, CA 95051. For more information, call the school at 408-983-2660. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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