Cultural center's loss draws support, fires imaginations

Since the news this winter that Newton's 1 1/2-year-old cultural center would be closing, with its Newtonville building returned to the School Depart ment next year, arts and cultural leaders in the city have been dealing with both administrative and emotional fallout.

First, there are the tangible issues created by the decision. More than a dozen organizations -- including the New Philharmonia Orchestra, the Suzuki School of Music, Newton Open Studios, and the Newton Pride Committee -- will now have to find new homes. Also, the center was considered such a success that its demise has spawned a unified effort by arts leaders to find a permanent replacement.

Just as important, arts leaders say, is the need to address the sense of loss caused by the center's closing. By looking at the bright side, they hope to preserve the unity and momentum that the center generated as they make plans for a permanent replacement.

Instead of referring to the Newton Cultural Center, people in the city's arts community have begun talking about the Carr School. The center that was supposed to have launched a new era of culture in the city is also being called "our demonstration project."

"We're all talking about it all the time," Linda Plaut, the city's culture czar, said last week. "Then we feel sad about it for a while. Then we start talking again."

Plaut said that arts leaders are trying to see the cultural center's brief life as a learning experience, rather than a defeat.

Other leaders said they have discovered support they didn't know existed before news of the center's demise spread.

Adrienne Hartzell, executive director of the New Philharmonia Orchestra, for example, said the orchestra has already received two separate offers of rehearsal space, albeit both outside the city.

The effort to replace the physical center, meanwhile, "is still in its infancy," Plaut said.

An ad hoc committee spearheaded by state Representative Kay Khan has already raised $25,000 in pledges and applied for a $25,000 matching grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council to fund a feasibility study for a new arts and culture center.

The group has been scouring the city for possible locations and is considering several approaches, including building an arts center from scratch, including one as part of a new mixed-use development, or retrofitting an existing building.

Several people, for example, have raised the possibility of sinking the municipal parking lot in the middle of Newton Centre underground and building a new arts center on top of it. This idea is considered one of the most ambitious, and most unlikely, given the huge financial commitment the city is making to build a new Newton North High School, a project expected to cost a minimum of $141 million.

Others raised the possibility of building an arts center as part of a mixed residential and commercial development on Needham Street, or near the MBTA's Riverside Station, both locations where major development projects are a possibility in the near future.

Finally, the group is said to be looking at existing buildings, including the imposing brick Masonic Hall in Newtonville.

"What we found out here is that Newton really wants a cultural center," Plaut said.

"If anything, it's almost as if we had to go through this."