A Developer’s Plan Worries Preservationists and Theater Advocates
The fate of the dilapidated Artown Reno-owned Lear Theater, an iconic landmark nestled between West 1st Street and Riverside Drive, overlooking the Truckee River, remains uncertain, with preservationists and small theater advocates now fearful that current plans by a local developer to build apartment buildings around it will take away its character, historical value and community use.
The developer, Ken Krater, has a history of supporting the demolition of downtown vintage Reno motels, adding to the concerns of those in favor of reviving the classical Lear Theater as a place for local classes, performances and events.
In order to facilitate construction for a luxury complex adjacent to the theater as is Krater’s plan, he is asking for parts of Riverside Drive and Ralston Street to be abandoned by the city of Reno. In media appearances, Krater has defended his plan as one that will save the theater and provide new housing. Another group with the Sierra School for Performing Arts which was previously negotiating with Artown Reno doesn’t understand why its own bid was marred down in complexities and eventually dropped in favor of Krater’s.
Artown and Krater Consulting Group were contacted for comment, but referred Our Town Reno to already published press releases and statements. A Facebook page for The Lear Theater run by Artown has little in the way of updates, and still has as its About section this disclaimer: “As current custodians of The Lear, it is Artown’s goal to steer the future of the building in the most appropriate direction available.”
The area around the Lear Theater has a long public history as well, with some goals never realized.
Plans to Abandon Parts of the Street to a Private Endeavor
During his recent appearance on the local Face the State KTVN Channel 2 television program, Krater, a former traffic design engineer for the city of Reno, mentioned he’s been in contact with the current Public Works director and that street abandonment is in the discussions.
“We all know that the Truckee River floods on occasion...and there is a desire on the part of the city to put an additional earthen berm along the river to stop the floods,” Krater said. “And so I have been working with the city to see about abandoning Riverside Drive and Ralston Street around the theater. We would still retain bicycle traffic, pedestrian traffic, but all of a sudden the land to the east of the theater out into Ralston Street would be enough land to build an apartment building.”
Krater said he believes abandoning parts of Riverside Drive would also open up the opportunity for an outdoor theater area between the Truckee River and the Lear.
“By abandoning that street, you would also be able to have this awesome outdoor theater area where you could have theater events on the stage, up on the main entryway, and people sitting on the earthen berm protecting the Truckee River in an amphitheater setting,” Krater said. “So now you get this beautiful indoor community theater, but also an outdoor theater space where several hundred people can come and enjoy outdoor events.”
Alicia Barber, the editor of the Reno Historical website, is not only concerned that abandoning parts of Riverside Drive would be a poor decision, but also believes Bicentennial Park across the street would have to be compromised as well.
“As much as we all want the Lear renovated, everyone should be alarmed at what this proposal would do to the public streets around it,” she wrote to us in an email. “Back in 1973, the Fleischmann Foundation gave the City of Reno an emergency grant to purchase the triangle bounded by Ralston and First Streets and the Truckee River, specifically to prevent that area from ever being privately developed. And now this plan requires the City to permanently close the adjacent block of Ralston Street along with a major chunk of Riverside Drive, the most beautiful drive in downtown Reno, to build luxury apartments there? That’s outrageous.”
The area around the Lear Theater is also now being discussed.
A Theater with a Grandiose History and Recent Quagmire
The Lear Theater was completed in 1938 by the architect Paul R. Williams, the first Black member of the American Institute of Architects, for the First Church of Christ, Scientist. According to Reno historians, Luella Garvey, wealthy widow of a Cincinnati steel magnate, provided most of the money to build the church. Anna Loomis, another prominent local citizen, served as chairperson of the congregation’s building committee, selecting the architect.
The structure was recognized on the Nevada State Historic Register in 1982. Seventeen years later, in 1999, the Lear Theater was added to the City of Reno’s Historic Register and the National Register of Historic Places. Loomis family members have been occasionally mentioned as possibly interested in saving the building in their own way as well.
The building served as the primary worship center for the First Church of Christ, Scientist until 1998. When the congregation moved to a new church location south of the city in 1998, one of its members, Moya Lear, saw potential in the storied building to serve as a prominent community theater. Consequently, Lear pledged over $1 million that was matched by the community to support the purchase of the building.
It was then transferred to the Reno-Sparks Theater Community Coalition, a group that was founded in 1993 by fellow congregation member Edda Morrison. The Coalition then took on the name of Lear Theater Inc. and very briefly operated as a functioning community theater.
Theater operations were short-lived, however, as renovation and construction efforts were never completed. Then in December 2011, the late former mayor Bob Cashell helped facilitate the transfer of the Lear Theater to Artown, the Reno arts and culture nonprofit, which essentially puts on July festivities in non COVID-19 years.
Unable to come up with a viable means of renovating the theater over the next six years, though, Artown turned to the community with a request for proposals in January of 2018 to sell the Lear for $1.
The Failed Bid by the Lear Development Group
In 2018, Randi Thompson, who at the time was on the board of the Sierra School for Performing Arts, helped put together a development team called the Lear Development Group which submitted a proposal to purchase the Lear from Artown. This bid however, as she remembers, kept running into moving hurdles and new complications, month after month.
“By April [2019], we finally got to a final meeting where we felt we got everything understood,” she said. “[However] the covenants [Artown] had were very restrictive things like if the project failed, they got it back for a dollar, even if we put $14 million into it.”
Thompson acknowledges that her team had no problem with a Right to First Refusal agreement with Artown. But the fact that Artown would get it back for a dollar, regardless of how much money was put into the project, to Thompson was simply unfair. So the Lear Development Group made revisions based on that meeting and sent the new draft of a purchase and sale agreement to Artown.
“Then we got a letter back rejecting our offer and saying, ‘We will never come to an agreement,’ and [Artown] stopped negotiating with us,” Thompson recalls. “We requested follow-up meetings and it took about a month before their board members met with our board members and they really gave us no significant explanation.” Thompson says Artown didn’t understand how her team was going to utilize new market tax credits to facilitate the Lear Theater’s renovation.
“They just didn't understand how we were going to build it,” Thompson said. “They didn't understand new market tax credits, so we walked away from the table very frustrated. We had invested over $12,000 in consultants to get us to that point. So now our development team has continued to meet as a group and we're all still very interested in it, frankly.”
The Sierra School for Performing Arts (SSPA) offers theater classes, primarily for Reno’s youth. They put on youth theater productions and a musical every year. They were hoping for the Lear Theater to become a sort of home-base for SSPA, by having an office downstairs and a props and costume repository that would also be available for other theater groups in Reno.
“We wanted [the Lear] to become the community repository for props, costumes, set-making and to make it available to all of the theater groups in the community,” Thompson said. “There's enough room downstairs with about 9,000 square feet that we would have adequate storage for set-making and to open it up to all the theater groups. So it would truly be a place that's available, just like the Pioneer Theater, in that anybody can rent it.”
Although the Pioneer Theater is available for groups to rent, the smaller community theater groups simply can’t afford it. Therefore, Thompson says, the Lear Theater would fill a much-needed niche in Reno’s performing arts community. According to Thompson, much like Krater’s current plan, abandoning part of Riverside Drive was a part of their proposal for the property as well.
“Part of our plans were to essentially abandon Riverside Drive and create an entire outside plaza from Bell Street to First Street where that Riverside just makes that turn and you could literally go down and get married by the river on a beautiful plaza,” Thompson said. “That could be an outdoor concert area. You have [Bicentennial Park] right there that could be tied right with it. So you'd have this beautiful walkway with a park, with a place to go pick up a coffee and go sit by the river. It would just make a really cool centerpiece of downtown.”
The Need for Community Theater Remains
Nettie Olliverio, a founder and board member of the Reno-Sparks Community Theater Coalition and Lear Theater Inc. for 11 years, was heavily involved with previous fundraising and renovation efforts for the Lear. She also still wants the Lear Theater to become a fully-functioning community theater and performing arts center.
“For such a long time, we needed a rental facility for performances that is not in the casinos and that is smaller than the 1,500 seats that are at the Pioneer Center,” Olliverio said. “Our other options are either University resources, which are University-centric and hard for outside performances not related to the University to get.”
Olliverio states that the size, structure and historical significance of the Lear suit it perfectly for community arts in Reno. “The size of the venue is so necessary for the continuing arts and culture in our area,” Olliverio said in an interview with Our Town Reno. “So with the historic aspect of the Lear, with the fact that it was created by a Black architect and is structurally sound, when our organization had it, we had an engineer do some core-testing of it. It was built to the old LA-earthquake standards, which were higher than ours at the point in time that it was built. So it's structurally very sound and it's just, it cries to be finished and have people in it.”
The Lear Development Group intended to have collapsible, fold-down seats in the theater, much like how things are done at the Little Reno Theater. “[Collapsible seats] is a very state-of-the-art way of doing theater seating to pull the seats out and then you could put down dinner tables for [patrons] while watching a theater production,” Thompson said. “So we were looking at a 300-350 seat venue to really host a broad range of events from plays to ballets, to film festivals, concerts, weddings, nonprofit fundraisers and corporate events. It would really be the heart of performing arts and the downtown area and truly follow through with what Moya Lear's vision, which was to have this great theater right downtown, while honoring Paul Revere Williams and his beautiful work.”
Thompson and her development team were also exploring the idea of a food and beverage operation within the theater, as well as an outdoor cafe along the Truckee River.
“But we knew that you couldn't just operate it like the Pioneer Theater and that you needed to have full amenities,” Thompson said. “Apparently, that's what Artown thought we were creating was a restaurant but no, we were creating a food operation to support special events and support the theater. We'd love to do a mystery dinner or actually be able to have dinner and watch the theater. So we wanted to truly make it a great dining and entertainment experience.”
More Details of the Krater Proposal
When Thompson heard of the possibility that Artown was in discussions with Ken Krater of the Krater Consulting Group, a developer who had visions for luxury apartments as a means of financially renovating the Lear, she penned an op-ed for This Is Reno in May of 2020 and brought to light the details of the sudden fall-out in discussions between SSPA and Artown.
A few weeks later in early June, Krater and Artown conducted a press conference announcing their new plans for renovating the Lear. It appears the apartments were originally proposed to be underneath the Lear Theater, with the theater itself above it. Those plans, however, seem to have shifted according to the more recent appearance by Krater on KTVN’s Face the State in September.
“A theater [alone] doesn’t generate enough revenue to be able to finance renovation of the theater and so I always thought in the back of my head that we need to figure out some sort of revenue-generating source that can complement the theater,” Krater said during his appearance. “So essentially what I came up with is the idea of building a beautiful apartment complex next to, but not attached to the theater, because obviously apartments are in high demand.”
Thompson, however, has multiple concerns regarding the idea of apartments at or next to the Lear Theater. One of which is that she’s concerned that by the time the proposed apartments generate enough revenue to finance the Lear’s renovation, it could be too late to save the Reno landmark.
“If we had been offered the ability to build this, we'd be mostly through construction by now and probably be opening by next spring, as our proposed deadline was by 2021,” Thompson said. “I don't know if the Lear can even survive this, ‘Let's wait until Ken Krater builds apartments.’ I'm just shocked at how there was such a role reversal and Artown put our feet to the fire to make sure that we built a community art center available to everybody, period.”
Dreams of a Revived Lear Theater Community Art Space Persist
What will eventually become of the Lear Theater remains to be seen, and dreams that would satisfy both preservationists and local culture proponents persist, but these seem to be fading away as the years tick on and restoration still isn’t happening.
“I know that there are a lot of people in our community who have invested both emotionally and financially in the building over the years in the chase to turn it into an entertainment resource,” Olliverio said. “I would love to see it become a performing arts center that has the commodities that one needs to be able to perform well for theater, for dance, for music: the appropriate lights, sound, stage and dressing rooms; but also flexible enough that it is a good resource for the community for weddings, lectures, a screening of an indie film or an orchid show or just those things that bring a community together.”
“The quality of your art only reflects the quality of your community and right now we're still struggling,” Thompson said. “This has proven that it is more important now than ever to provide a space that is affordable, but not just a place to go and do one thing. You could come in and have a cup of coffee and then go see a theater. You could go have dinner and watch live theater. We don't have anything like that in Reno.”