CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR
Artists vs. the homeless
(reprinted, with permission, from Everybody's News, Issue 560, June 11, 1999)
by Michael Blankenship
Imagine a beautiful new multi million-dollar campus to house an expanded School for the Creative and Performing Arts. Imagine a high-tech video billboard at the west end of Central Parkway to tout the cultural offerings on the campus, tied in to the existing Music Hall/Memorial Hall institutions. Imagine tree-lined streets, empty parking lots transferred into academic halls and performance venues, clustered around beautiful old Washington Park. Sounds pretty nice, doesn't it? Imagine the Race, Elm, 12th Street and Central Parkway neighborhood cleansed of all the homeless people, poor people, drunks and other undesirables. Imagine the area populated instead by upper-middle-class professionals in new condos, patrons of art and culture, the progenitors of a downtown showplace neighborhood.
Basically what we're talking about here is not neighborhood renovation or reclamation, but neighborhood substitution. Removing one neighborhood so it can be replaced with another. Neighborhoods are based upon neighbors, and if those neighbors are eliminated, an entirely new neighborhood can be devised to take its place. No need for Slobodan Milosevic and his Serbian nationals when we've got Maestro Erich Kunzel of the Cincinnati Pops and his board of the Greater Cincinnati Art and Education Center (GCAEC).
Mr. Kunzel's "Dream Plan," as it's called, seems to have rapidly grown from the initial idea of an SCPA connected to Music Hall, into a plot to seize and reoccupy land and buildings neglected for the past half century. The cost of this pretty sizable chunk of ethnic/economic cleansing and forced relocation is already more than $100 million. And, as was the case with the construction of the Aronoff Center in 1992, it seems that these plans have less to do with art or education and more to do with money, prosperity and privilege. And like the construction of the Aronoff, some people are not willing to just let them have their way.
Videographer Barbara Wolf, actor Dale Hodges and dancer Shawn Womack have boldly stepped forward to challenge the assumptions of Kunzel and his associates. These same three women (as well as yours truly) were instrumental in opposition to the Aronoff's construction through participation in the efforts of Advocates for Responsible Theatre Spending (ARTS) in 1992. They do not believe it is necessary to push the Drop Inn Center, the city's largest homeless shelter and a neighborhood institution for the past 21 years, aside to accommodate Kunzel's dream. Three of the four plans being considered call for just that. The fourth would knock out the WCET/WGUC complex and District 1 Police. (Fat chance that is going to happen!)
"They say there's no decision made, that there's no cause for alarm, but every (serious) plan they have involves taking out the DIC," says Wolf.
She and I share concerns that this is just another example of people using the arts or education as a mask for some other unspoken agenda, just as was the case with the Aronoff. At that time, Aronoff proponents kept touting how that facility would benefit the local arts, yet its greatest beneficiary has been an organization based in Louisville that brings in road shows out of New York. The real driving force behind such efforts is corporate profits. Arts, when carefully controlled, have boosted such profits significantly and proven to be valuable tools for marketing corporate images.
"It seems to me that this has grown into an unspoken agenda, a clear attempt to push low-income people out of Over-the-Rhine. They want to make OTR more attractive for upper-income professionals to live, or at least send their kids to school," Wolf adds, going on to describe some recent meetings of the GCAEC Board, which includes two representatives from the DIC, Bonnie Neumeier and Pat Clifford, and the amount of hostility, resistance, contrivance and just plain rudeness directed at the two from the rest of Kunzel's board.
Dale Hodges adds, "It was a display of impatience and ill humor, sarcasm and scowling that was quite extraordinary, the kind of spoiled, bad manners that we might expect to find in children who have been denied their own way, but which, if we were good parents, we would certainly refuse to tolerate."
Tolerating such behavior on the part of self-appointed cultural oracles is something that none of these artists is very good at, and they don't think the arts, and by extension, artists, should be used to promote an elitist social agenda. Gods bless them! They called one meeting on May 13 to start brainstorming for creative responses to the threat against the DIC, and have called another for Mon., June 21, to begin at 5:30 p.m. at the Drop Inn Center (217 West 12th St.). They are determined to be flies in what they see as Kunzel's unsavory ointment.
There are strong indicators that the trio's suspicions regarding Kunzel's motives are justified, as I found myself with more questions than answers regarding the "Dream Plan." Why does SCPA need to move? What happens to that building if it does move? Why not utilize the Emery Theatre and the old College of Applied Sciences as part of an expanded SCPA? Why not promote the DIC's status as one of the nation's model shelters while simultaneously spiffing up the neighborhood? And since the DIC moved to its present location 21 years ago precisely because it was near neither homes nor bars, why would anyone want to force it to relocate near such places again?
Why does this city persist in grand designs based upon the narrowest of views? Something smells in this summer heat, and the flies are gathering.
