By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
In September 2018 The Toledo Alliance for the Performing Arts pulled together the Toledo Symphony orchestra and the Toledo Ballet under the same umbrella. Now that figurative covering will be an actual roof.
In late January, TAPA announced that it has purchased the 55-year-old Masonic Temple on Heatherdowns. That two-story 58,000-square foot facility will bring together the ballet, the youth orchestras, the symphony’s own school of music, and the administrative offices of TAPA.
The symphony will remain rooted at the Toledo Museum of Art Peristyle, for its performances and rehearsals, though as needed it will avail itself of the new facilities.
This has been “a strategic mission” for TAPA since it was formed, said Zak Vassar, the organization’s president and CEO. “We’re able to have our office directly surrounded by our mission and our educational programs.”
Jim Hartley, who works on special projects for TAPA, having previously worked for the ballet, said that “this is a great platform for us.”
“This is more than a building,” he continued. “This serves as foundation, a platform for everything TAPA envisions as its future.”
The move is long overdue. TAPA’s educational mission is growing. The youth orchestras, ballet, and school of music serve 670 students, and are still growing.
The ballet will be out of space by 2025 at its studio on Monroe Street in Sylvania. The youth orchestras now rehearse at Hull Prairie Elementary in Perrysburg. There’s no room to add a fourth youth orchestra.
The music school’s lessons are offered in the Professional Building, just across the street from the Toledo Museum’s Glass Pavilion. The building is not sound proofed. Vassar is treated to the sounds of a piano lesson upstairs from his office.
Also, in 2022, the Toledo Jazz Orchestra formed a strategic partnership with TAPA, which handles marketing, fundraising, and administrative for the TJO. Also, The symphony’s music director became the big band’s music director as well. The TJO rehearses in a space in the Professional Building.
[RELATED: Toledo Jazz Orchestra to partner with TAPA; Alain Trudel to become big band’s artistic director]
As with the ballet and orchestra, the TJO has experienced a growth in the money it takes in through fundraising since linking up with TAPA, as well as an increase in ticket sales.
Vassar said there’s been talk of forming a junior jazz orchestra. Now there will be room.
Not only are these spaces cramped, but they are all rentals. TAPA has no control over future facilities costs, Vassar said. TAPA will be responsible for upgrades to the mechanical systems for one facility. That will boost rent by 42 percent.
Back when the ballet first joined TAPA, there were plans to build a 9,000-square feet extension of the Monroe Street facility, Though it had been designed, the project ultimately fell through.
That was fortunate. “We’d already be out of space,” Vassar said.
But finding a home was difficult. TAPA formed a taskforce to look for space that did not to overextend the organization financially.
“We were looking for kind of bizarre series of rooms that we were expecting to have to retrofit,” Vassar said.
They looked at old barns, and properties in Toledo’s Old West End near the museum.
It was Realtor David Ball, who had showed them one property he was offering, but said that instead they should check out the Masonic Temple on Heathdowns.
The facility had been sitting vacant for about 30 years. Built in the late 1960s, the Masons eventually sold off its auditorium and adjoining space to the Stranahan Trust, which renamed the hall, the Stranahan, and used the office space next door. It did not want the temple itself.
The temple had large rooms with high ceilings. Not attractive to most tenants, but perfect for TAPA. Also, those rooms are sound proofed. The Masons he said valued secrecy and privacy for their ritual.
Now TAPA had the kind of space it expected to have to create already existing.
The purchase and renovation will cost $5.8 million. “That’s a fraction of what it would be in other space. It’s a remarkable alignment in what we needed in a building that was hiding there in plain sight.”
The space has six large rooms that can accommodate the orchestras and dancers.
The smallest, Vassar noted is larger than the ballet’s largest studio.
There are also 15-20 smaller rooms of various sizes, for individual studios of lessons or for small ensemble rehearsals.
A couple rooms are large enough and set up for small performances or movies.
There is a professional recording studio, which Vassar sees as a benefit for the professional musicians.
Vassar envisions this as a space where TAPA’s activities will overlap. The administrative functions occurring during the day with music and dance studios commencing in the afternoon, and those lessons continuing as musicians arrive for evening rehearsals.
“It gives us a ton of room to grow,” Vassar said. The rental spaces TAPA now occupies total 28,000 square feet, half the size of the Masonic Temple.
The Toledo Symphony, however, will continue to rehearse and perform at the Peristyle with some concerts at the Valentine in downtown. “The truth is our spiritual home for Toledo Symphony is the Peristyle,” Vassar said.
The Stranahan is the venue for TAPA’s largest performance, the Toledo Ballet’s “The Nutcracker.”
It is the longest running “Nutcracker” in the country performed on a scale by a pre-professional company that some professional companies envy.
It brings in international stars for featured roles, and it uses a live score performed by the Toledo Symphony. Fewer and fewer “Nutcracker” performances have live orchestra.
The ballet will move the facility in late fall to prepare for “The Nutcracker,” and stay with classes offered there in 2025.”
Given the many moving parts to stage “The Nutcracker, “ the proximity of the Stranahan will simplify our Decembers significantly,” he said.
The administrative operations and music school will move first this summer. The youth orchestras will be the last into the new space “because these rooms require some technological upgrades,” he said. They are scheduled to begin rehearsing on Heatherdowns in fall 2025.
The project also involves adding windows to the second floor.
The students come from different school districts in the Toledo area, Vassar noted. Now they will have “Class A” space to experiment, collaborate, and thrive.
