Center in Red : Theaters on Renewal Site Ask Bailout

The Los Angeles Theatre Center, one of the most important features of Mayor Tom Bradley’s effort to restore the city’s old downtown financial district on Spring Street, expects a more than $1.87-million deficit this year and wants another bailout from the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency .

In a letter to the CRA on Monday, Bill Bushnell, the center’s artistic director, asked for enough money to cover the projected deficit. But on Wednesday, the CRA board voted to grant $500,000 for 34 days to pay salaries and bills, and told the center to come back with a tighter budget before it approves the full request.

“We want them to reduce costs,” said CRA Commissioner Daniel P. Horowitz.

Carol Baker Tharpe, the center’s general manager, said the board and staff are trying to cut expenses and will present a tightened spending program to the CRA next month.

The $16-million complex of theaters at 514 S. Spring St. was conceived by the mayor and his appointees on the CRA board as a way of bringing life back to the once-bustling stretch of the street between 4th and 7th streets where the stock exchange and financial institution headquarters were once located.

The redevelopment agency subsidized the construction and operation of the theater with funds that it has obtained from a huge downtown redevelopment project a few blocks west. Land there was taken over by the CRA and sold at comparatively low prices to developers, who built the new downtown high-rises. Ironically, many of the financial institutions abandoned Spring Street for offices in the new buildings.

The CRA gets large property tax revenues from the new buildings, creating a fund that provides the theater subsidy as well as money for rehabilitation of the downtown Central Library, construction of low-cost housing and other projects.

CRA assistance was instrumental in persuading the state to build a new office building near the theater as part of the campaign to restore the Spring Street area. Construction of that has just begun. In addition, a popular night club occupies the former stock exchange building, and old office buildings have been refurbished.

But, as CRA Commission President James Wood and Tharpe conceded, Spring Street still suffers from the presence of drifters from Skid Row, a block away.

“We are probably the only theater in Los Angeles which has subscribers who don’t renew because of the neighborhood,” Tharpe said.

Wood said, “They get their tires slashed . . . but they are getting fewer tires slashed.”

He stressed that the Bradley Administration continues to stand by the theater. “It is bringing people to Spring Street,” he said. “It is a redevelopment influence on Spring Street, not just a redevelopment project.”