Unfinished symphony

For an arts community that had battled through a decade of Ray Flynn's less-than-culture-obsessed administration, and been battered after the recession of the '80s gutted federal and state arts funding, Menino was a dream. Just before the primary, 19 prominent figures in Boston's cultural community signed an open letter endorsing Menino, calling him "one of the strongest advocates for the arts in Massachusetts."

Today it's hard to imagine that many of those cultural leaders feel the same way. That magic hotel tax, so vital to bolstering the arts in cities like San Francisco and New Orleans, never quite happened here, and it shows in the city's minuscule arts budget. This month, a national survey of municipal arts funding ranked Boston 35th out of the nation's 50 biggest cities. Even Las Vegas placed higher.

Five years after Menino promised the arts community he would be their champion, the outlook for the city's cultural institutions, though improved, is far from rosy. "When people are making money hand over fist," says artist and First Night founder Clara Wainright, "you'd think this would be the best time for the arts. Instead, money is as scarce as hens' teeth."

Certainly, as mayor, Menino has been supportive of the arts and seems genuinely mindful of their importance to his city. His cultural commissioner, Bruce Rossley, helps arts groups cut through municipal bureaucracy, puts in appearances at cultural events, and keeps Menino informed about arts issues. (While Menino was more than happy to talk about his arts initiatives, Rossley, the public face of city arts policy, declined many requests for an interview.)

Under Menino's tenure, the arts are slowly returning to the schools, public artworks are being commissioned, and Huntington Avenue is being made into the Avenue of the Arts. Menino talks about the city's cultural life far more than Flynn did, and that fact alone has raised the public profile of the arts in Boston.

But Menino has not kept his most important promise. Supportive rhetoric may be helpful, but it's no substitute for serious, steady city funding. Menino hasn't quite grasped what other cities in America -- San Francisco, Chicago, even Salt Lake City -- knew decades ago: without a steady source of financial support, art withers, as do the many benefits it brings.

A thriving arts scene does more than express culture and feed the intellect: it can build community; it can help educate kids, make them feel invested in the life of the city, and even improve their academic performance; and it can bring in pots of cash. If the mayor doesn't come up with more money to devote to them, his vocal support for the arts will be merely lip service, and the city's potential will not be realized. That tired old "Athens of America" moniker will be not only trite, but ironic, too.

"Unlike Athens, we do nothing to support that thing we say we admire so much," says outgoing Boston Ballet artistic director Bruce Marks. "Boston lives a lie."

"For so many years, people have bashed the arts and thought of them as frills," says Anna Faith Jones, director of the Boston Foundation, the largest nonprofit foundation in the region. "I really think we bought into that, too."

The foundation was long criticized for neglecting the city's arts institutions. But now, with the help of a $1.2 million Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest gift, it has begun a permanent endowment to help regenerate the arts in Boston.

"We've been a long time building this image of the arts as special activities for a privileged elite," says Jones. "We've allowed the belief that art is an important part of human development to be drained from our society."

When Proposition 2¹/₂ put a cap on property taxes and then the recession came, all kinds of funding dried up and the arts took a serious dive. The National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council were gutted. Art teachers were let go. Student choirs disappeared. Arts and social programs were treated as if they were mutually exclusive: kids in crack-choked projects didn't have the luxury of joining choirs or performing Shakespeare, but they could play in basketball leagues. Thousand of kids were sent through school without even basic arts literacy.

During the early '80s, housing projects like Roxbury's Orchard Park were overrun with aspiring musicians born of public-school music classes. They practiced in the development's playground and competed in school talent quests. Today, the Orchard Park singing groups are gone.

It is a mistake to think of the arts as expendable and frivolous, as somehow separate from the life of a city. They do much more than entertain snazzily dressed patrons for two hours on a Friday night. They help to sustain a city's economy. They bolster the lives of all its citizens. They are integral to education. In other words, the arts are indispensable.

In 1996 the cultural industry pumped $2.56 billion into the Massachusetts economy, according to the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Statewide, it provided 45,000 jobs, not just for artists, but for ushers, food vendors, cleaners, and builders, too.

Most of that activity took place in Greater Boston. In 1996 cultural organizations in and around the city earned about a half a billion dollars in ticket sales. They pumped about a billion dollars out into jobs, goods and services, and other operating expenses, and paid almost $52 million in taxes. Much of that money came from cultural tourists, who bring in several times more money annually than do sports fans. Visitors who buy the Athens of America image spend money on more than just tickets; they drop plenty of cash on food and souvenirs and in the stores they pass on the way to the theaters.

The arts are also a powerful educational tool. Students beyond the reach of academic teachers may be transformed by music, which can help with science, math, and spatial relations. Those in theater classes learn how to analyze texts by performing them. Arts classes also encourage priceless skills and values: persistence, revision, practice, and, most important, creativity.

Kids involved in the arts are more likely to identify with and feel invested in their communities. ZUMIX, a community music program in East Boston, gives neighborhood kids technical training in music, matches them with musicians who act as mentors, and runs a songwriting program in which kids write about issues affecting their community. All of that helps kids express themselves, cooperate with each other, and connect with adults who share their interests.

ZUMIX has also been staging concerts in Maverick Square every July since 1993. "The whole atmosphere of the square changed," says program director Madeleine Steczynski. "Little old ladies who saw the neighborhood kids in our program as hoodlums were now sitting next to them for concerts and piling up chairs together afterwards."

Jerry Beck, director of the Revolving Museum, runs art programs for kids from Roxbury and Southie. "If you had 50 artists with a passion for collaboration in communities," Beck says, "and you had them working year-round, I bet the crime rate would plummet with time." One of the museum's projects is the I Scream Art truck, a converted ice cream truck that visits kids in neighborhoods and allows them to choose art projects from a menu. Kids can record their own six-minute songs or do silk-screen prints of local manhole covers or play games that test their coordination. Through outreach like this, Beck has collected a group of kids from Lower Roxbury who are now attached to the museum -- and each other -- because they wanted to continue making the art they began when he visited their neighborhood.

A vibrant artistic community raises a city's quality of life, not just for those who go to the theater and ballet, but for everyone who walks past neighborhood murals or stops to listen to street performers. Like good schools, a strong arts scene can prevent middle-class flight from the cities. It can unite people who would otherwise have nothing in common. A generation ago, a giant, red, whimsical Alexander Calder sculpture placed outside the Grand Rapids, Michigan, city hall evoked bitter conflict. Now it's one of the city's most enduring and beloved symbols, even appearing on municipal garbage trucks.

Yet in Boston, arts organizations don't seem to get much respect. They struggle more than cultural nonprofits do in many other regions. Members of the city's arts community often cite a recent survey that found that, despite the region's affluence, wealthy New England residents were among the least generous in the country. Similarly, they bemoan the woefully inadequate corporate support for the arts here.

"It's known as Yankee thrift here," says American Repertory Theater artistic director Robert Brustein. "Elsewhere, it's known as stinginess."

For a long time, the tour buses didn't even go down Huntington Avenue. Even though the stretch from Mass Ave to Brigham Circle is the artistic center of Boston, home to major institutions like Symphony Hall, the Museum of Fine Arts, and a host of arts colleges, it was as if they were all there by some coincidence, tucked away in a part of town whose best days were behind it.

Since Menino became mayor in 1994, the arts in general have become more visible than they've been in a decade. Menino has made it a point to put in personal appearances at arts events. He has been vocal about his support for the arts, not just among the cultural community but in his state-of-the-city addresses and in neighborhood gatherings, too, providing much-needed rhetorical support.

Perhaps the city's most significant arts initiative is its project to reinstate the arts in public schools. (See "Teaching Art," right.) In the past four years, 100 new arts teachers have been hired, and although there's still a long way to go, kids in every grade are at least now getting some exposure to art. And after several false starts, the much-anticipated Boston Arts Academy will finally open its doors this September. (See " Flying Solo," News, November 21, 1997.) "The city is moving in the right direction," says Linda Sevey of the Pro Arts Consortium, a coalition of Fenway arts institutions that are partners in the academy. "The arts academy won't be just a training ground for young artists but a center for art in the community."

Just as important as city initiatives, say many people in arts nonprofits, is the simple fact that Menino talks about them publicly at all. He seems to understand that culture can, along with good schools and community policing, help sustain a city. "A city without culture is a city without character," says Menino. "It gives young people an insight into a world they wouldn't normally see. It's character building." As a city councilor, Menino had been chair of the council's committee on the arts and humanities, where he'd worked closely with Bruce Rossley. "And I've been a staunch supporter of the arts since then," says the mayor.

"We have a mayor who talks about and supports the arts," says Dance Umbrella artistic director Jeremy Alliger. "You can't underestimate the value of that. It raises our visibility and public consciousness."

Ah, but talk is cheap. "We get no cash support from the city," says the Boston Ballet's Bruce Marks, who had to freeze or reduce most salaries last year. "Salt Lake City, where I used to work, now has a hotel tax and delivers a check each year to its ballet company of $1 million. Menino gives lip service to the arts, but that's about the only service he gives them."

Dance Umbrella, with a total budget of $1.2 million, got just $2000 from the city of Boston last year. "We get less from our city than a colleague of mine gets in Helena, Montana," says Alliger. "The Pittsburgh Dance Council, which is a similar organization to ours, gets about $60,000 from the city. . . . When I talk to my colleagues around the country and they hear the support we get from the city, it's embarrassing."

There's a yawning gap between the mayor's supportive rhetoric and the city's arts budget. The Office of Cultural Affairs has a budget of only $800,000. Half of that goes to operating expenses, which leaves less than $400,000 for direct grants to cultural nonprofits. Because they pour so much money into them, other cities have far more vibrant -- and edgy -- arts scenes. In cities like Chicago and San Francisco, residents are surrounded by art, from painted park benches to opera events. In Boston, a 1 percent hotel-tax increase would generate millions of dollars for the arts, dragging the city out of its humiliating national ranking without costing City Hall a penny.

Ralph Dart, the city's deputy commissioner of cultural affairs, has a quibble or two with the survey that puts Boston 35th in arts spending (other cities' arts budgets pay for things -- cleaning services, for example -- that are not included in Boston's), but he concedes that this city, which hangs its tourist identity largely on its cultural life, should be doing much better.

"There's no question that the funding is low and should be higher," says Dart. "Although it has improved dramatically [Boston climbed from 41st place since last year], we should try to get into the top 10. Other cities are moving now. It will be hard to hold artists if they see they can do better somewhere else."

They can certainly do better in San Francisco. In 1961, San Francisco introduced a tax on hotel rooms specifically for the arts. At the time, it was bitterly contested by hoteliers, who thought it would kill the tourist industry. They were wrong. Today, tourism is San Francisco's biggest industry, and the city is the top urban destination in the country. And that's partly because of the depth and quality of its cultural offerings. This year San Francisco's hotel tax is 14 percent (Boston's is 12.45 percent), and 16 percent of that -- a whopping $12 million annually -- goes to fund discretionary grants made directly to private nonprofits and performing arts organizations, from the San Francisco Opera to small, community-based dance companies. The only prerequisites for funding are that the organization's performances be open to the public and advertised for tourists. All told, the city spends $16 per person per year on the arts, compared to what the Urban Arts Federation says is Boston's 67 cents. "Tourism is San Francisco's largest industry, and it's very much considered an investment," says Kary Schulman, director of hotel-tax-fund grants.

In addition to the tax-fund grants, the city budget dedicates $2 million to the arts annually, for the symphony (which got $800,000 last year), museums, community arts, and education, among other things.

Other cities also levy hotel taxes for the arts: New Orleans, Fort Lauderdale, San Antonio, and Columbus, among others. And many cities find other sources of revenue: Chicago, Seattle, and again, San Francisco, require that 1 or 2 percent of every city capital project budget be spent on public art. Hell, even Deadwood, South Dakota, a town with 2000 people and 2500 slot machines, raises $7 million a year for culture and historic preservation from a gambling tax.

But no. Hoteliers were a powerful force, one that legislators -- whose approval was required for the tax -- were unwilling to fight in 1994. The Boston delegation was supportive of Menino's proposal, but other state reps refused to consider it, arguing that it would be bad for Massachusetts. "The legislature will not sign onto any new taxes," says Menino simply. "No chance."

Menino has not attempted to get any portion of the existing hotel tax redirected to the arts, either. Nor has his City Hall taken lessons from other US cities and imposed a capital projects percent-for-art program.

But the mayor bristles when asked about the survey that ranked his city 35th in arts funding. "When you look at a city's support for the arts," he says, "you can't just look at what city funds are. You have to look at what the outside funds are, too. Otherwise, how are we able to open six theaters? Look at how many more kids in the city are doing theater and summer art programs." Foundations and corporations give what the city does not, Menino says.

While Ralph Dart may admit the city's support for the arts is below what it should be, Menino cedes no such ground. The mayor says critics of the city are looking in the wrong place. "We have the [Edward Ingersoll] Browne fund for public art this year -- $1.2 million -- and we're very supportive of that. On September first, we'll open the arts academy, and when people gave up on buildings for that, I found one. These are positive things, not daydreaming things."

If arts institutions are looking for more financial support from government, maybe they should head for Beacon Hill instead of Government Center, the mayor says. "We have to get the state to support the arts more," he says. "They're the ones with the $800 million surplus. They should be thinking about using some of that for the arts."

Menino is right, of course. State funding for the arts has been abysmal for a long time. In 1988 the budget of the Massachusetts Cultural Council was $27 million. The next year it was slashed. By 1992 it had dropped to $12.6 million, which then-governor William Weld, with the legislature's help, kneecapped to $3.5 million. Its resources have climbed slowly since then, hovering at about $14 million for the past three years (although arts advocates are hoping, probably naively, that the legislature will see the light this year and bump their budget up to $21 million).

However, that does not mean the city shouldn't at least try to make up for the shortfall. The money needn't come directly out of municipal pockets, either, and City Hall knows it.

The city is capable of creative financing for its arts institutions, and it has proven that with the Boston Center for the Arts. The BCA, on four acres of Boston Redevelopment Authority-owned South End property that includes the Cyclorama, theaters, a gallery, Hamersley's Bistro, and the Boston Ballet's headquarters, was opened during the urban renewal of Mayor Kevin White's administration, in the late '60s. Because it's on city-owned land, the BCA gets serious support from City Hall: over the past seven years the public-facilities department has contributed more than $100,000 to its renovation and upkeep.

But this is the truly creative part: the parking lot beside the center, known as Parcel 8, will soon become a residential and retail complex. In their request for proposals, BCA director Susan Hartnett and the city together demanded that the developer also build new theater space for the BCA. The competitors were only too ready to comply, and the Druker Company, which won the contest with a $61 million proposal, will build two new small theaters and give the BCA $2 million for an endowment.

Why couldn't the city arrange for that kind of cultural linkage elsewhere? Dance Umbrella, for example, has current month-to-month digs downtown, on Washington Street. Indeed, the company headquarters is wedged between two much ballyhooed development projects, Millennium Place and Lafayette Place. Jeremy Alliger is certain his company will be homeless soon.

"It'll be the year 2000," he says, "our 20th anniversary -- and we'll be looking for a home." Alliger says there was talk of a creative development deal to get them a permanent space somewhere in the brave new downtown but that the moment seems to have passed.

Menino has shown he can push this kind of thing through when he really wants to. He wanted his convention center built and moved heaven and earth in the legislature and the city to do it. Not only did he get the project passed through the State House, but he also pulled off some creative funding flourishes: most notable among them is an increase in hotel taxes from 9.7 to 12.45 percent. And the state cleared the way for a further increase, up to 14 percent, if the city chooses. So much for the legislature not signing on to any new taxes. But there's more:that $10 car-rental surcharge that is the bane of every carless resident, and the sale of 260 new taxi medallions, which alone will raise $23 million for the convention center.

Talk to any of the city's artists long enough about how hard it is to do what they do in Boston and eventually they mention Providence. They will wistfully tell you that there, Mayor Buddy Cianci is trying his darnedest to attract artists to town, hoping that they'll regenerate the city. They will tell you that artists who live in the already affordable Providence downtown cultural empowerment zone pay no state income tax on art they sell (or income they earn to subsidize it), and their customers pay no sales tax, either. And they will tell you that, if Boston doesn't commit itself more convincingly to its artists, Cianci may have more luck luring Boston artists to Providence than he did trying to get the New England Patriots to pull up their stakes in Foxboro.

But giving that kind of support to artists would require an investment Boston has so far been unable or unwilling to make. And until it makes it, even the city's current arts projects are handicapped. For example, critics of the Avenue of the Arts initiative agree that it must be more than a beautification project if it is really to help the institutions along it. "There needs to be public arts projects in the area," says one local. "So much could be done. It has to be more than cosmetic." And if the city does next to nothing to help artists themselves, its promise to spend millions of dollars on arts education for children will ring hollow. Why would kids believe that art is valuable, after all, if the city doesn't support its artists?

Without even moderate amounts of money to throw around, the city's Office of Cultural Affairs is seen by many in the arts community as a well-meaning bunch who deliver verbal support and occasional help navigating the city bureaucracy, but little else. Many artists see Rossley's as a purely institutional voice, a part of the city bureaucracy rather than an advocate for those it should serve.

"It's a constant that the city has not supported us," says a local artist. "Bruce Rossley has been in the system so long he believes what he's been told: that there's no money for the arts and you should stop asking for it. Artists are starting to believe that, too -- that the arts are not important."

If members of the arts community who work in the city's bigger institutions feel shortchanged by the city's lack of financial fortitude, individual artists in smaller nonprofits or on the fringes feel completely ripped off. They are concerned with different issues from the bigger institutions, issues with which the Office of Cultural Affairs is meant to help.

Housing, for example. Despite the gains of the past few years, artists' housing in Boston is still threatened. Artist Shannon Flattery and her Fort Point Channel neighbors, who happen to be living on the suddenly-lucrative edge of Boston's new frontier, just negotiated new leases with the major landlord in the area, Boston Wharf. They had help from pro bono lawyers, but none, they say, from the city. The process took two and a half years, and the current leases are for only five years.

"It was incredibly protracted and it shouldn't have been," Flattery says. "The city should have stepped in and said, 'The artists are important to us and you must strike a deal with them.' "

Artists are also worried about their housing at the Piano Factory in the South End, and the Fenway Studios, which may be ruined by a proposed development over the Mass Pike. Even the new artist housing being built on Washington Street in the South End may not be the boon the city says it is, they say, since there are no formal rules in place requiring that the housing be reserved in perpetuity for artists.

Flattery and others say they have tried to get staff at the Office of Cultural Affairs to engage with the housing problem, but that they seem to believe it's not their role to advocate for artists in their battles with the city's landlords.

If red tape is an annoyance to the city's larger cultural institutions, for smaller nonprofits and individual artists it can be crippling. Some artists feel that their lives are much harder than they would be if they were to get more help from City Hall. Bart Uchida, a Fort Point Channel artist, just hosted a delegation of artists from the city of Tainan, Taiwan. The city agreed to cosponsor the exchange, but it didn't put up any money for it, not even the cost of legally required police details at outdoor performances. Nor would the city help with the liability insurance required for all public installations. (No one from Rossley's office who'd worked on the exchange was available for comment.)

If city funding is important to bigger institutions, with budgets exceeding $1 million, it's absolutely vital to smaller groups like Uchida's. And if there's not enough money to go around, he says, then the Office of Cultural Affairs should be fighting that battle on artists' behalf, too.

"The whole cultural office should be more proactive in trying to increase the city's budget for the arts," says Uchida. "It's not fair for them to say, 'Oh well, that's all we've got.' If they truly believe the vitality of this city comes from the arts and culture, the city should be putting its best foot forward."

If the city doesn't step in and break the pattern of neglect for the arts at higher levels, much will be lost: the chance to use the arts to bolster education and a sense of community; the economic gains a strong cultural climate can bring; maybe even that "Athens of America" moniker. And, most important, it will lose the capacity to push and challenge its citizens.

"The city is really losing its edge as a place for art," says Brustein. "All of the institutions are in trouble, and they've gotten tame as a result, and the city's doing nothing to alleviate it. The [people in government] see the arts of this city as a photo op. I don't see much else happening."