Buffalo's City Hall Savages the BardThe City of Buffalo recently decided to cut all its support to arts organizations. The thinking around Niagara Square seems to be that the arts are easily dispensible because they have no visible use (you can't park a truck on a painting, or shouldn't, at least not on good paintings) and the arts aren't as good as most other fields of endeavor for patronage (people working in the arts have to, well, be able to do it).
Somebody should tell Mayor Masiello and the Common Council that it was during the worst of the Nazi air raids in WWII that Great Britain set up its Council for the Arts. The Brits said it's when things are really bad that you need the arts most of all, because they're the place we get to express what makes us human. The arts aren't just frills; they really matter. Buffalo's pols seem to take the opposite view: when money gets tight, you toss the arts overboard first. Don't they know you're supposed to toss the rats, not the arts?
Consider the double hit City Hall delivered to Shakespeare in Delaware Park.
Buffalo's Shakespeare in Delaware Park, started by U.B. Distinguished Service Professor Saul Elkin 27 years ago, is the second most popular Shakespeare in the Park in the United States. The only one that draws more people is the original, put on by the Public Theater in New York City's Central Park.
It has long been one of Buffalo's great summer features. Even Buffalonians who don't go and spend a summer evening watching one of those performances in Delaware Park benefit from it. It's like the concerts on the Albright-Knox steps and downtown at Lafayette Square, the fireworks in Delaware Park in the middle of winter and all over town on the Fourth of July. All those free and open and easy things that make this a good place to live.
Financially, SIP has always been a marginal operation. It depends on grants and contributions from the audience—and a large staff mostly working for free and out of love. Like many arts organizations, it was dealt a brutal blow in the wake of 9/11: many public and private dollars that previously went to supporting cultural organizations are now going to various kinds of relief and rehabilititation, and other sources of revenue have disappeared entirely because of what happened to the economy. This latest cut from the City exacerbates a situation that was already difficult.
After City Hall cut its support for Shakespeare in Delaware Park, the Erie County Legislature stepped in to replace the missing $25,000. Sometimes the County seems to have far better sense about how the City ought to maintain itself than the City does. Maybe regionalism really is a good idea.
Then the City, not to be outdone, decided to tax Shakespeare in Delaware Park! This is like working in an important public service job, being fired by a boss who doesn't have the foggiest idea why your work matters, then being told by that boss that you can continue work—but only if you pay him off for the privilege of doing it. Shakespeare in Delaware Park, which does the City of Buffalo enormous good, now has to send a check to City Hall every time its players mount the stage. Most cities around the country are happy to put money into an enterprise like this; Buffalo is trying to suck it out. A vulgar person might conclude that Buffalo's City Hall is overrun by arts-suckers. This is, as that well-known commentator on civic affairs Tony Soprano is wont to say, an infamia.
If you'd like to help, please send a check in whatever amount to
And write your Common Councilperson and the Mayor to let them know how dumb you think this policy is. Organizations that make vital contributions to the life of the city shouldn't have to pay the city for the privilege of doing it.Shakespeare in Delaware Park
Box 716
Buffalo, New York 14205—Bruce Jackson©2002 Buffalo Report, Inc.