New Downtown Site Proposed for Dance Gallery : Project Change Includes a Revised Timetable for Funding and Construction

The long-planned, oft-postponed Dance Gallery project downtown may be moving to a new site on Bunker Hill with a revised timetable for completion and proposed new funding.

A $6-million fund-raising shortfall caused a previously designated site at Fourth Street and Grand Avenue in the California Plaza development to be withdrawn and a new location, north of the Museum of Contemporary Art, fronting on Grand Avenue, to be proposed in its place. Exact location has yet to be determined.

More than $14 million has been raised for the facility, which was designed to include performance and studio spaces, a modern-dance teaching institute and a library, but Gallery fund raisers failed to meet a June 30 deadline imposed by the city and the developer to have $20 million of construction and equipment costs on deposit.

The developer, Bunker Hill Associates, is contractually obligated to build an office tower at Fourth and Grand. Because of access problems between the office tower entrance and upper Grand, the adjacent, subterranean Dance Gallery could not be added later, the developers say. Thus no extension of the June 30 deadline is possible.

“That was the longest we could wait to make our deadline (for construction of the office tower), “ said Susan Roberts, manager, Program and Development, Metropolitan Structures West (the managing general partner of Bunker Hill Associates).

“We needed adequate time to study design alternatives (to the Dance Gallery) to accommodate our need for access to the office tower on Grand Avenue,” she said.

The proposed Gallery site would place the facility in line with other major cultural institutions in the area (MOCA, the Music Center and the planned Walt Disney Hall). Barbara Bain, president of the Dance Gallery’s board of trustees indicated that fund raising for the original site had been frustrating, “because most buildings go up with some money (already) raised and some money raised while construction proceeds,” in contrast to the requirement that the Dance Gallery have all its funding up front.

But now, Bain said, the prospect of moving to “an absolutely beautiful site”--one unencumbered by the kind of deadline that had become so ominous at Fourth and Grand--is “very exciting . . . It’s getting close.”

At issue, however, is the Community Redevelopment Agency’s mandate that 750 residential units be included as part of California Plaza--in the site being studied for the Gallery.

“The current situation is in flux,” said Jim Wood, Chairman of the CRA. “We’re not going to agree to cut housing units (in exchange) for a Dance Gallery. But it would be the agency’s hope that we can fit the two together.”

Wood said he believes the proposed move “makes sense,” explaining that the original site had been picked before the Disney Hall announcement. But he doubted if the original design of the Dance Gallery would be appropriate to the new location. “It was designed to complement a multi-level, retail environment,” he said.

Fred Nicholas, a trustee of the Dance Gallery, said he expects “we will be able to preserve and maintain part of the plans--I’m not sure how much. We’ll have to examine the volume and dimensions of the new site to determine whether the plans can be kept or not.”

Nicholas, who chaired the building committee for MOCA and is chairman of the building committee for Disney Hall, said that the proposed new location for the Dance Gallery is “much superior. . . .a very logical site,” and that “there’s no timetable for construction that must be met there.”

“What’s going to be difficult now,” he warned, “is getting Bunker Hill Associates and the CRA to agree on how to get the site configured.” He estimated that once any necessary plan revisions and approvals are obtained for the new site, the Gallery could be actually built “in a couple of years.” He gave 1991 as the most likely point of completion.

In a new development, the Gallery is hoping to issue more than $10 million in tax-exempt bonds to finance construction of the facility while fund raising continues. According to Royce Diener, chairman of American Medical International and a member of the Dance Gallery Board of Trustees, “it’s a definite possibility. We just have some technicalities to work our way through.”