“For more than a century, the Brooklyn Academy of Music was just one theater,” writes Robin Pogrebin in Friday’s (7/31) New York Times. “Then the academy added the BAM Harvey Theater in 1987. And a decade later, it turned a playhouse in the Lafayette Avenue building into a cinema complex…. A few years ago, the academy opened another theater, the BAM Fisher…. [Its] growth has mirrored and … helped drive the real estate and cultural boom in Downtown Brooklyn…. The academy will announce on Friday a $25 million building project to link three of its spaces, create permanent visual art galleries and provide new patron amenities…. Work is to begin shortly … with completion scheduled for September 2017. The project calls for new balcony seating in the Harvey and a one-story structure at 653 Fulton Street between BAM’s sites at 651 Fulton Street and 230 Ashland Place, which will have a cafe on the ground floor…. The institution has also secured space on the second and third floors of a residential tower currently under construction.” Karen Brooks Hopkins, who stepped down in June as BAM’s president, says the most important thing is “to keep the district from turning into a bunch of chain stores and Anywhere, U.S.A.”
Posted July 31, 2015
