Last Thursday, responding to requests from the Actors Shakespeare Company and Arts at the Armory, I attended the Board of Zoning Appeals hearing. Testimony at that hearing was a revelation in several very different – and conflicting – ways.

1. The issues themselves were simple and there was a clear preponderance of support to extend the hours of the use of the Armory. The Shakespeare Company and other tenants want to involve kids and schools, and that involvement requires day time performances and workshops. In fact, the opposition was very limited, and largely ignored the real potential of the Armory as a community facility complementing schools and other community sites. It was clear that that expansion to daytime hours would have been inevitable, if the plan ever anticipated the kind of welcome that Arts at the Armory has found. With summer programming impending, $1million in summer youth employment due from the Stimulus Package, and other recreational and cultural resources pending, that specific request should have been made months ago.
2. The distrust which parts of the community expressed seemed more than justified. How in the world can the “go to person,” who is directly responsible for the use of the Armory, in the next breath claim no knowledge about the need for daytime use!?! How can someone charged with working with the schools pretend that every performance should be at night? That denial insulted everybody in the room!
3. When the Board – and some citizens – reminded the Armory that the agreement on which their zoning is based limits the maximum use of the building to 395 people, the maximum attendance at no more than ten performances per year at the auditorium itself, and that the regular maximum is the 325 agreed to several years ago, again there was lots of sidestepping, blaming, and denial. Clearly, the 41 terms of the initial agreement, framed almosts four years ago, ought to be revisited for a more active and productive site. Yet  the coordinator then prevaricated about the maximum number of people who could use all the facilities in the Armory, trying to “set up” inspectional services for a number still to be determined. Rather than begin a discussion on how many might make good use of a remarkably well renewed cultural center, she dodged and delayed.

That kind of behavior ain’t what we do in Somerville. It may work in Cambridge, and seems the standard in Boston, but here, it’s really important to say what you mean and mean what you say.  Changing the occupancy cap negotiated four years ago reflects changes in several very real world conditions: the building itself now has much more capacity for many more arts activities in many more hours; the city has sharp budget limits which will delay – for a very long time indeed – the kinds of renovations needed at the High School or other municipal facilities; and the public needs the community’s arts more than ever when there is only gloom and doom. With this kind of a facility, we can do much more with much less money, and, for that matter, there is already Stimulus money for much of what could there take place.

Many years ago I was on the team that founded the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, now in East Cambridge. Those meetings, and, earlier, in producing nonprofit theater in New York, in working with Actors Equity, I saw the kind of arts management that showed itself at this Zoning hearing. Dodging responsibility, blaming others, claiming ignorance of critical knowledge, only assures community distrust, and, for the Armory to succeed, that pattern should stop as soon as possible.

Finally, that mendacious pattern is usually associated with managers trying to control things that exceed their authority. Justifying closing the Armory to all but a few activities during the day, or limiting occupancy to a single room’s maximum, illustrate compromises that should never have been made. Looking back at the politics of a Neighborhood Advisory Committee, at the naivete with which “neighborhood” was defined in a city as dense and as diverse as Somerville, and at the narrow scope of both that involvement and its representation, it is not at all surprising that the “41 Agreements” – like Luther’s, stuck upon the door and scribed as if in stone – need be revisited, revised, and include a larger community of interest. It’s clear the planners of the Armory did not know Somerville. This is a very dense city, in both people per square mile and organizations per person. Everything from East to West Somerville, from Union to Teele Square reflects a “neighborhood” as it is defined in cities like Boston or even Cambridge. Somerville is only about the size of Jamaica Plain or West Cambridge, and a lot smaller than Back Bay. And arts groups ranging from the journalists at Somerville Voices to youth groups at Peabody House or Head Start, from students at Tufts, Somerville High, or Prospect Hill, or from Asian, Brazilian, Haitian, and Irish or church groups should all have some participation and sense of involvement. That is NOT achieved by dropping fliers. It is achieved by calling people, inviting key players, and building their groups into key activities.

Until there is that kind of participation, this Center will continue to run into serious problems.