The Englert (Part I) - In The Beginning

The Englert opened last weekend. If you have no connection to Iowa City, this means nothing to you. If you are in the Iowa City theatre scene, this is probably something that brings out a lot of mixed feelings in you. I know it does in me.

See, a lot of us have contributed a lot of time to making the dream of the Englert a reality. And now that it is, a lot of us feel betrayed. Betrayed because the dream we were working on is not the dream that the current Englert Board is pursuing.

Here’s the short back story. In 1999, the owners of the Englert, an old vaudeville theatre that had been converted to a movie theatre during the depression and then further butchered into two screens in the mid-80s, decided to shut down the movie theatre and sell the building. The original sale was to a bar owner from Chicago who planned to convert the space into yet another downtown Iowa City bar. Needless to say, many were unhappy with this course of events.

Among the people unhappy were a few who decided to do something about it. A group composed of some independent business owners, a fundraiser for the public Library, a banker, and representatives of some arts and historic building groups decided to see if they could purchase the building from the bar owner who had bought it. Those arts groups included the Iowa City Community Theatre (ICCT), of which I was then a board member (and within a few months, president). In fact, I was one of the ICCT people attending the meetings of the small group – my first meeting was in November 1999.

The dream of the group, the dream that fueled the early effort, was a dream of a community performance space. A place where community actors, dancers, singers, writers, and artists of all type could perform. A place where you could see your family, your friends, your neighbors, your co-workers onstage doing whatever arts they did. There was no space like this in Iowa City – hell, there’s probably few spaces like this anywhere – but we knew that, given the nature of this community, there would be support for a place like the place we envisioned.

Oh, we knew there would be a need for touring productions. For traveling stage shows, for touring dancers, for professional musicians. We knew productions like those were essential to keeping the building open. But they weren’t the first focus. After all, there was already a space for such productions in town – Hancher Auditorium, on the University of Iowa campus.

The group was able to reach a deal with the bar owner wherein he would sell the building to us for $750,000, and we began raising funds for the purchase. However, before the deal could be executed, someone had the bright idea to see if the city would purchase the building. The bar owner was receptive – I think he felt more confident of receiving full payment that way. He was so receptive that he was willing to sell the building to the city for less - $700,000 instead of $750,000. A proposal was worked up and agreed to in principle with the city council. The city would purchase the building for $700,000 and then resell the building to the group (now calling ourselves the Englert Civic Theatre Group) for $500,000, thus giving the city credit for a $250,000 donation to the cause, the $200,000 difference between what the city paid and what it sold the building to us for plus the $50,000 difference between the original purchase price offered us and the purchase price offered the city.

There were two catches: first, we had to cover the cost of issuing the bonds for the purchase, approximately $50,000. We had that money on hand from what we had already raised, including some $10,000 from ICCT. So that was no problem. The other condition was a bit of a problem – we had to raise the remaining $500,000 by November 1, 2000.

This proposal was approved by the City Council in early February 2000, giving us approximately eight and a half months to raise $500,000. To say it was a daunting task is an understatement – there were many who said we couldn’t do it. Hell, we were unsure if we could do it. But we knew we were going to try. (To Be Continued)