Denver voters who are still undecided about the city’s upcoming bond elections should either take a tour of the Denver Symphony Orchestra’s quarters – or view an old Harry Potter movie that shows the neglected orphan boy hunched in his bedroom in a cramped closet under the stairway in the baleful Dursley household.
To be sure, Boettcher Hall, home to the Symphony, is bigger than the Dursley closet. But there are a lot more people crammed into Boettcher, so the balance of squalor is about the same in either venue.
Happily for Harry, he went on to find more suitable quarters at Hogwarts. Whether the DSO, its thousands of fans, and some of the nation’s top performing artists can do likewise depends on whether issues 1G and 1H pass on the mail ballots that will start arriving in Denver households as early as today.
Issue 1G has $60.5 million for desperately needed repairs to the Botanic Gardens, the hugely popular Denver Museum of Nature & Science, and bedraggled old Boettcher Concert Hall. Issue 1H will pay for $70 million in new construction, including $30 million in classrooms, labs, a new exhibit hall and other facilities at the Museum of Nature & Science and $40 million for reconstruction and expansion of Boettcher.
To assess the need for these improvements, Editorial Page Editor Dan Haley recently toured the museum while I went to Boettcher. Dan found both the repairs and new construction at the museum to be crucial for one of the region’s top educational and cultural centers. For my part, after savoring Boettcher’s troll-friendly ambience, I can only report that the Symphony’s current quarters border on a disgrace.
The actual concert hall itself is a sound design, but after 29 years, it needs a facelift and some acoustical improvements. But the real problem at Boettcher isn’t in what it has, but what it doesn’t have.
What passes for a lobby is hopelessly small and the sardined patrons can only stare at the “what were they thinking?” spectacle of bare pipes and ductwork overhead.
But the worst problems are backstage, where the only practice room – serving, among others, a 200-member chorus – is jammed in under the bare concrete beneath the concert hall’s west seats.
You have to see – or, worse, hear – this room to believe it. I tested it with a few notes from the “Hallelujah Chorus.” The trapezoidal concrete cavern was actually fairly flattering to my foghorn profundo voice. But my unamplified solo was all but overwhelming on its own. Imagine the agony of a director trying to coordinate 200 separate voices in what has to be the choral equivalent of the battle of Armageddon.
Worst of all, from the simple standpoint of bringing tourist dollars into Denver, Boettcher has no meeting rooms to accommodate the many business groups and schools that would like to book the facility. The $40 million in item 1H will not only provide all these amenities, it will create a spectacular public face to the entire Denver Center for the Performing Arts complex – the nation’s second-largest such facility, behind New York’s Lincoln Center. Viewed from Speer Boulevard, Boettcher Hall now looks like the loading dock at Wal-Mart.
Passing 1H will cost the typical homeowner in Denver about $1 a month in higher taxes. But it will also trigger $145 million in private and federal matching funds, creating new jobs and luring new tourist dollars into the city. In a day of scarce public dollars, such private- sector leverage is crucial.
For his part, Harry Potter told me he intends to vote for all nine ballot issues, 1A through 1I. Only He Who Must Not Be Named likes Boettcher Hall the way it is now.
Bob Ewegen bewegen@denverpost.com is deputy editorial page editor of The Denver Post.
