Author: Laura Collins Hughes

Seattle Symphony’s Sales Strong, But Deficit Grows

“The Seattle Symphony reports that nearly $11 million in concert tickets for the current season have been sold between September and March, surpassing the total ticket revenues for each of the last two seasons. Still, the Symphony projects that those strong sales won’t do enough to balance this year’s books. The Sympony will add to a deficit that has been with the organization since the 2001-02 season.”

It’s Unlovely But Influential. Should It Be Landmarked?

“As of this writing, a momentous question stands before the Landmarks Preservation Commission: Should it give its blessing and its protection to Manhattan House, the white-brick monolith that occupies an entire city block between Second and Third avenues and 65th and 66th streets? … (T)he case could be made, for better or worse, that it is the single most influential structure ever conceived in New York.”

For Your Birthday, Mr. Prime Minister, “Animal Farm”

“Yann Martel marked Stephen Harper’s 48th birthday yesterday by giving him a present, and a letter wishing him Happy Birthday. He knows the Prime Minister may not open them. Yesterday, the Booker Prize-winning author, who may fast be becoming Stephen Harper’s most annoying pest, dropped off the second volume in his supply-the-PM-with-good reading campaign – which more honestly should be described as a guerrilla campaign to affirm the importance of the arts and literature in the national discourse.”

Indianapolis’ Antiquities Moratorium, Explained

“The Indianapolis Museum of Art recently decided to impose a moratorium on acquiring antiquities that left their probable country of modern discovery after 1970, unless we can obtain documents establishing that they were exported legally,” writes Maxwell Anderson, the IMA’s director, who hopes others will follow suit. “A universal moratorium would seriously impact the clandestine trade in antiquities, which fuels the destruction of ancient sites.”

Without Founder, Ensemble’s Future In Question

“To everyone who knew him, Curt Dempster was the Ensemble Studio Theater. On Jan. 19, Dempster, 71, was found dead in the Greenwich Village studio apartment he shared with two dogs”; his death was a suicide. “Dempster left a note asking his superintendent to find a home for the dogs. More uncertain was what the future held for the off-Broadway theater he had founded some 35 years earlier in a condemned Manhattan building and turned into one of the country’s most prodigious developers of theater talent.”

In Their Buildings, San Franciscans Prize The Familiar

“Bay Area residents love new cuisines, edgy politics — and architecture that’s as familiar as an old shoe. That’s the unofficial but emphatic message that links the responses to my recent column on the ‘top 25’ buildings in San Francisco as defined by the Board of Directors of the city’s chapter of the American Institute of Architects. When I asked readers to send their own favorites my way, it was as though they were channeling Herb Caen.”

A Fire’s Damage Is More Than Architectural

“Yesterday’s horrendous damage to the 1873 Eastern Market building on Capitol Hill is a dynamic loss — a loss to the flow of space, the habits of people, the patterns of community. It is also an architectural loss, though there is hope that Adolf Cluss’s gravely eloquent brick building … can be returned to something like its former self. The sense among the people who gathered yesterday across the street from the building, gutted so badly that birds can now fly in through the front windows and out the back ones, was a profound concern that while the building may come back, its dynamic qualities may not.”