City Leaders Hope Arts Complex Brings New Life to Downtown Palmdale

From the window of her downtown office, Dea McAllister, the city’s new cultural arts and theater manager, can watch construction workers bring Palmdale’s long-awaited arts complex closer to completion.

Long before McAllister moved to the city two years ago, local arts advocates were raising money, seeking a site and working on a design for a community theater. She is anxious to see their dream realized.

“All I know is that they’ve had this project for almost 10 years,” McAllister said. “A lot of people have a lot of blood, sweat and tears poured into it.”

City officials say the $2.8-million project, which involves remodeling and expanding the former Maryott School auditorium, is on schedule and should be finished by late spring or early summer.

“It’s a lovely design, very well thought out,” said David Milligan, executive director of the Antelope Valley Cultural Foundation, which raised $500,000 toward construction of the theater. “We’re looking forward to the gala opening.”

When the foundation was formed in 1985, arts supporters considered renovation of the Maryott auditorium, which was sold to the city after the school closed in 1980. But Milligan said the initial design had “theatrical deficiencies.”

In 1989, the City Council switched course, agreeing to build a 750-seat theater on a vacant 5.7-acre site donated by a developer. A year later, the council opted to reduce the size to 400 seats, still on the donated site near the Antelope Valley Freeway, just south of Palmdale Boulevard.

But two years later, construction bids on the project came in more than $2 million higher than the city had planned to spend. That prompted the council to return the donated land and support the renovation of the Maryott auditorium as a 347-seat community theater.

Milligan said the current design has eliminated the drawbacks that worried arts supporters when they first considered the Maryott. City leaders hope the theater will bolster their efforts to revitalize Palmdale’s aging downtown.

The site, on 10th Street East, just south of Palmdale Boulevard, was the location of an elementary school built in 1917. The structure was damaged and rebuilt after an earthquake in 1933 and a fire in 1950.

The scaled-down theater will complement the 758-seat performing arts center in nearby Lancaster, arts supporters say, because the Palmdale facility will better accommodate smaller local productions.

“You can’t have enough of the arts in the community,” said McAllister, an actress and producer who is setting up programming for the Palmdale theater. “It gives everyone an opportunity to shine.”