A flagship for the arts

When San Diego still had a Navy boot camp, shouts startled the barracks awake at daybreak.

“Reveille, reveille, reveille, all hands hit the deck!” With that, the petty officers -- the base’s taskmasters -- would rouse their recruits.

“There was no liberty to be had,” says retired Capt. Jack Ensch, who commanded the Naval Training Center, or NTC, from 1993 to 1995. “You had 16 weeks to take your raw civilian off the streets and turn him into a sailor.”

Now a gentler reveille is sounding. The recruits are theater companies and dance troupes, artists and museums, who are being invited to till with artistic plowshares the same ground once ruled by the military sword. The new taskmasters are giving themselves about 15 months to turn 25 acres of the abandoned Navy base into a thriving arts mecca.

The development, dubbed Promenade Centre, has been carved out of the old boot camp five miles northwest of downtown San Diego. Its historic Spanish Colonial Revival buildings, with red tile roofs and masonry walls, lent a grace note to the grunt work of turning out sailors; now they will be the architectural signature for San Diego’s new flagship for arts and culture.

The private, nonprofit NTC Foundation was formed to manage the project. Its complex assignment: raise $25 million to $30 million for renovations, generate buzz about the district, attract creative -- but fiscally sound -- tenants, and then keep the whole operation in the black while charging below-market rents.

The NTC Foundation has spent more than three years on below-deck planning; now it’s poised to go topside. As the push begins to open 13 of Promenade Centre’s 26 buildings by spring 2005 -- the rest by early 2007 -- the group faces myriad questions.

San Diego already is well-stocked with major cultural draws, including the Old Globe Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, Copley Symphony Hall and more than a dozen museums in Balboa Park. So where’s the demand for an additional 300,000 square feet of teaching, exhibition and performance space? Will this stretch the city’s arts-donor base too far? Can small and midsize nonprofits -- the district’s likely core constituency -- afford the rent and maintenance fees?

What’s more, the San Diego Airport sends an outbound jetliner roaring over Promenade Centre every few minutes. What will that mean for performances under the flight path?

A champion

Many in San Diego’s arts community were skeptical about Promenade Centre, says Debra Owen, a gallery owner who chairs the arts and cultural committee of San Diego’s downtown business association. One assumption was that the arts district would play second fiddle to the site’s overall commercial development, called Liberty Station. Of the 361 acres -- devoted mainly to homes, offices, hotels and shopping -- Promenade Centre is but a slice.

But in early November the NTC Foundation named a new president and CEO, veteran arts advocate Alan Ziter. That created loftier expectations.

For 18 years, Ziter led the San Diego Performing Arts League, an umbrella organization for 144 music, theater and dance groups. With him on board, Owen says, Promenade Centre “has gone from a phantom project, which I don’t think anybody took seriously, to something real with all sorts of potential.”

Ziter is a small, tousled-haired man from Massachusetts who speaks at a staccato clip and has a mind that seems perpetually set on “brainstorm.” His supporters say his visionary side is balanced by solid practicality and business know-how.

The stature of the NTC Foundation’s board bodes well for Promenade Centre, Ziter says. The treasurer is Gary Jacobs, a son of Irwin Jacobs, the Qualcomm chief executive who two years ago donated $120 million to the San Diego Symphony and is also a key donor to the La Jolla Playhouse. The NTC chairman, Murray Galinson, also is chairman of the board of San Diego National Bank, a $1.9 billion institution.

“I know they can pull,” Ziter says.

The first evidence of that pulling power is the San Diego City Council’s decision to funnel a $5.85-million federal loan to the project, to be repaid from taxes generated by the residential and commercial developments elsewhere in Liberty Station.

Ziter acknowledges that many among the local arts constituency have felt under-informed about Promenade Centre; he says one of his foremost tasks when he assumes the NTC directorship on Monday will be to make the game plan clear and keep information flowing.

An inspiration

The model for Promenade Centre is Fort Mason Center, a former military base on the San Francisco waterfront that was transformed into a cultural center housing 40 nonprofit groups and drawing 1.5 million people annually.

Marc Kasky, who ran Fort Mason Center from 1978 to 1999, has been working on Promenade Centre, primarily as an arts and culture consultant to the NTC Foundation and the city’s private development partner, the Corky McMillin Companies. Fort Mason has operated stably and in the black, he says. What works in a nondescript collection of military buildings in San Francisco, he reasons, should succeed at least as well in an architecturally graced, park-like setting in San Diego.

And the jets? Each overflight nearly drowns out Kasky’s clear, even voice for five or 10 seconds as he sits chatting on a sofa in what used to be a spacious officers’ residence, now the NTC Foundation’s office. But it’s much better, he and some prospective tenants say, in the more thickly built structures that make up most of the arts district. Soundproofing, as needed, will be part of the renovation. But outdoor events, such as centerwide festivals, will have to coexist with the noise.

“It’s there. You deal with it,” Kasky says. “People who want to be here are aware of it, but it’s not something that discourages them.”

Kasky says 15 to 20 organizations are seriously considering tenancy at Promenade Centre, and the foundation expects to begin signing leases soon. The idea is to accommodate users ranging from visual artists who need just a small studio (for work only, because no live-in arrangements are allowed) to a few large anchor organizations.

The anchors have yet to be found. One that the NTC Foundation covets is the Immigration Museum of New Americans, a new venture that aspires to be the West Coast’s answer to Ellis Island. Rebecca Reichmann, executive vice president of the immigration museum, says it needs better access to public transportation than Promenade Centre affords; museum leaders are more interested in acquiring land from the ports of San Diego or Los Angeles. That didn’t stop Galinson, the NTC Foundation chairman, from sending a little courtship note recently, Reichmann said. “It said something like, ‘NTC is going to be fabulous and you need to be part of it.’ The little dance is still going on.”

Others are more eager. John Malashock, who has headed his own dance company in San Diego since 1988, is pushing to establish a multitroupe dance center in one 25,000-square-foot building. With a 200-seat theater as a centerpiece, he sees it as a secure home for small and midsized companies that are always scrambling to find places to rehearse and perform.

One selling point for small arts groups is that Promenade Centre will be a gentrification-free zone. Rents will be pegged to cover upkeep and security, rather than to what the market will bear.

At least three new museums are hoping to be born in the district. One, the California Art Museum, would be the nation’s first major museum devoted primarily to watercolor, founder Ann Walker says. It needs to raise $3 million to cover remodeling costs and three years of operating expenses. Joanne Tawfilis, leader of an international effort called the Art Miles Murals Project, wants to display on moving conveyers the mile-long canvas murals that her group has sponsored around the world. Collector Jaime Chaljon intends to display some of his large, contemporary Mexican and Latin American statuary outdoors on the Promenade Centre grounds, and establish a small indoor museum of Latin American art, says Jack Winer, a consultant to Chaljon.

Other prospective tenants include a new culinary institute to train chefs and servers in a working restaurant, and UnderSea Camp, which aims to convert one of the former barracks into a sleepover school immersing middle-school kids in ocean exploration.

Joann Sandlin, vice president of the San Diego Museum of Art’s artists guild, applauds Promenade Centre’s plan to distinguish itself as a place where the public can go not just to see finished works but to mix with artists and watch the creative process at work in the open studios, rehearsal halls and classrooms.

“It would be exciting and interactive and fun, not just a museum where you quietly view,” she says.

Not everyone is sold on the project, though. Timothy Field, executive director of San Diego Art Institute, a Balboa Park museum devoted to works by local living artists, worries that Promenade Centre may duplicate what already works elsewhere in the city. Then, he fears, there might not be enough dollars from arts philanthropists to go around, and the marketing push that spotlights the new venue could overshadow existing ones.

“Hopefully it becomes complementary to Balboa Park instead of competition,” Field says.

Ziter has his own nightmare scenario: In a rush to open on time, the NTC Foundation takes insufficient care in courting and choosing tenants. “You’ve got one major chance to get it off the ground right,” he says. “I’d rather see it open a bit at a time, make sure that the things we open are the right fit, rather than just quickly signing the leases for a mishmash of things that 12 months later close their doors. That would be awful.”

Questions will abound during the countdown to the new arts district’s birth. At least, Ziter promises, the San Diego arts community won’t have to complain any longer about feeling uninformed. Reveille is sounding.