The Historic Wayne Theatre
April 2007
It’s now April 2007 and a lot of things have happened at the theatre. The city of Wayne has cited us with a Dangerous Building ordinance. They have been looking at the theatre for 20 years and have not seen any improvements to the building nor the front lawn area. The intent of the ordinance is to get the owners of property to either make improvements to the building to bring them up to code or to demolish the building so that it is no longer an eyesore and blight on the city.
We don’t want to demolish the building and we need to make improvements quickly, so, we have enlisted the help of Don Nicholson who was associated with the theatre in the early years and who has some expertise in raising money for different causes. The board of directors, along with Don, had started some fund raising events with local rock band during the summer of 2006. That, along with grant writing, bringing recognition of the theatres plight to the community, and in general a more public face for the theatre have given us a more positive outlook for the theatre.
After meeting with the city in on-going discussions from April 2006 to September 2006, we reached an agreement with them that we would have funding in place to fix all the item cited in the ordinance by September 2007 and continue with the restoration of the theatre or, failing that, we would turn over the keys to the property so they can demolish the building. We don’t want that to happen and the city really doesn’t want that either. The city realizes that demolishing the building would take more money than the property is worth and that they would go in the hole, money wise, to tear it down. They are helping us in whatever way they can, but it’s up to us to get it done.
While all the talks with the city were going on we started working on some of the items listed in the Dangerous building ordinance. We added a railing to one of the stairs on the back side of the build and extended the gutter run-off so that rain water reaches the street instead of draining right next to the building. We capped off one of the main electrical boxes outside and have take steps to clean out the sub basement area in front.
We have been writing grants and have also enlisted the help of the firm of Zachery and Associates whose business is raising money for groups. Zachery and the Garrison Company, who will be our builders, have worked together on many projects in the Detroit area including some high profile projects in downtown Detroit. As of now, May 2007, we have paid Zachery to get started with the fundraising and expect to hear from them soon on the progress they have made.
Currently we have fundraising events scheduled at the theatre for every Saturday night from May to September, from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM. We have a stage set up on the front lawn that we used last year for a couple of events and all the events this summer will be happening there, weather permitting. We will have various acts such as some local rock bands, a vocal chorus, music impersonators, acoustic acts and The Rocky Horror Show live. Benny and the Jets also will be playing at the theatre a couple of times. Check our schedule on our web site or you can find the schedules distributed throughout the community.
Our very first event was a dinner and a show at Genitti’s Restaurant in Northville on Sunday April 29th. We only had a medium size group come to the dinner but it turned out to be a success. There were some influential people from the community at the dinner and we think it went over well.
So, if you get a chance to get up to theater when we are there you will see that we have removed the flat floor that the music store installed and the concrete wall that had separated the current lobby area from the sloping theatre seating area. This has opened up the theatre quite a bit and allows a full view of the inside of the theatre.
We have preliminary plans for what we want to do with the theatre and the current lawn area in front. In addition to restoring the theatre inside and out, we will be adding a new lobby to replace the one torn down and building a new three story building out front to replace the one destroyed in the fire of 1985. We are going to build with the intent of having retail businesses on the first floor, a high end restaurant or coffee shop on the second floor, and devote the third floor for rehearsal space for plays, a banquet hall for the restaurant or anything else we can think of. Offices for the theatre will be on the second floor over the new lobby and the third floor over the lobby will be for conference rooms or used as a small rehearsal hall.
To accomplish all the fixing, restoration and building we have planned we are going to need lots of money. Our current estimate is about $100,000 to comply with the dangerous building complaints and about $2,000,000 to do the restoration in the theatre. Another $3,000,000 will be needed to build the new building out front. In total we are looking at a $5,000,000 bill to do it all. We don’t need it all in one check but it will have to come in large amounts. The fundraising we are doing during the summer will only cover