Photo Gallery
Zack's Place Anniversary Party- June 2
Zack's Place Sports Bar celebrates its Anniversary with a costume party, games, prizes, free food and drink specials!
If the city of Chattanooga went strictly by the bottom line, it would probably close the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium and the Tivoli Theatre.
The downtown performance venues currently cost the city $1.5 million to operate but earn back only $750,000. That's a huge operating loss in anyone's book.
But since the two halls mean a lot more than the bottom line to the city, Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke is going a different route.
Read more
* Chattanooga plans to turn over Tivoli, Memorial Auditorium * Millions needed to renovate Chattanooga's Tivoli Theatre
It's a route fraught with some peril but rich with opportunity, too.
By leasing the city-owned spaces to a new nonprofit organization, the Tivoli Theatre Foundation, as he outlined last week, Berke believes they can attract even more entertainment acts and, ultimately, be used more often. The more often they're used, the more downtown coffee shops and restaurants are patronized, and the more attractive a downtown Chattanooga becomes to its populace.
The 1,750-seat Tivoli, which was nearly torn down and little used during the formative years of many of Chattanooga's younger baby boomers in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, would be an ideal space, many believe.
With its gold walls, two-story lobby and ornate 1920s-era beauty, it has the possibility to thrive as Knoxville's similarly-sized Historic Tennessee Theatre has since its operation was put in private hands in 1996. In the nearly 20 years since that theater has been privately managed, it has set attendance records, had a $25.5 million renovation and annually is booked more than 200 nights a year with more than $4 million in ticket sales.
The Memorial Auditorium, a lifelong touchstone for many Chattanoogans, is a bit more of a challenge, experts say.
Too small for arena-type acts and too big for more intimate performances, it nevertheless holds a place in the heart for many longtime area residents.
Its newly air conditioned and escalatored mid-1960s space may have been the first place then-elementary school baby boomers saw the Chattanooga Symphony Orchestra perform pieces such as Leroy Anderson's "Typewriter" and Edvard Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King." It may have been the first venue where they saw a rock concert, the likes of the Allman Brothers, the Doobie Brothers and Foghat coming through in the 1970s. It probably was the scene of their high school graduation.
Its versatility in the ensuing years may have have brought them to the 1991 performance of Red Skelton inaugurating the newly renovated interior, to Broadway touring musicals such as "Les Miserables" and "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," and to their own children's presence at "Sesame Street Live" and a high school graduation of the next generation.
Neither venue has been updated in nearly 25 years, but officials believe money for such work could be raised easier through the Tivoli Theatre Foundation than through the city itself.
While the city has vowed support for the performance halls in the short run, it naturally would expect to decrease that support if management continues successfully under the foundation over the long run.
Where that will leave some organizations, which may have individual deals with the city about their usage of the space, is not clear.
The transfer of Memorial Auditorium and the Tivoli to management by a nonprofit organization was one of the short-term recommendations by the Entertainment & Attractions Report that was a part of a Chattanooga Forward task force last year.
Wording in the report refers to the "avoidance of risk" the city must assume in booking tour plays and other acts. Such risk also might refer to the sale of alcohol, which has long been cited as one of the reasons the city doesn't do better with certain bookings. A nonprofit organization could assume that risk.
The report noted that the number of events at the two venues had increased for each of the last three years. That's probably due to a slightly improving economy and the improving reputation of the city's downtown as the place to be. But imagine a nonprofit organization recruiting many more -- and more widely diverse -- acts and spending the time and money it takes to promote them, ticket them and connect them to a lively downtown.
The City Council must approve the lease plan, and we urge them to ask as many questions as necessary to get a good handle on what Berke wants to do, but we believe the lease plan offers an opportunity to make two Chattanooga jewels glitter even brighter.