This year’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas is getting an upgrade — a brand new stage, owned permanently by the city.
New Haven Mayor Toni Harp made that announcement Wednesday morning on the New Haven Green, where the stage will stand until the end of the two-week festival. After the festival has ended, city employees will fold the stage into a trailer and transport it to the city’s maintenance facility on Park Road, where it will remain until a public speech, concert or event requires its use. It takes a day to assemble.
The $473,000, 40-by-40 foot apparatus comes from last year’s $1 million dollar grant from the state’s Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD), a chunk of which has already gone toward electrical work, plumbing and water, and public wifi on the Green.
The addition of a stage — supervised and maintained by employees from the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Trees — is intended as a long-term cost-saving measure, said Harp at the event. In the past, both the city and the festival have had to rent stages for their events. The stage is expected to last for 30 years.
Harp cuts a blue ribbon to “welcome” the stage with Becky Bombero and City Engineer Giovanni Zinn.
Annually, Market New Haven was “budgeting over $15,000 for stage costs,” said Parks, Recreation and Trees director Becky Bombero in an exchange after the event. Arts & Ideas was spending between $150,000 and $180,000 annually, estimated Festival Co-Director Chad Herzog. Herzog added that a rented stage usually took five days to set up; this one is easily collapsable, and goes up in a 24-hour period.
Erection, management and maintenance of the stage will be overseen by four long-time employees of the parks department — electrician Jim Wankowicz, carpenter Jim Hatrick, heavy equipment operator Don Iannuzzi and mechanic Sean O’Grady.
With the stage, “we’ve doubled down to amplify the city’s role as a heart of the region,” said Harp at the event. “Now the stage is ours, and we can leave it [here] for as long as we like.”
“But we won’t do that,” she added to a smattering of laughter from the crowd.
“This is where arts converge with engineering and ideas,” said city arts czar Andy Wolf. “I don’t have words for how transformative this is.”
This isn't any sparkling news -- this is a scale down because of budget constraints.
Is A&I paying the city for use of this stage?
How much does it cost Joe Citizen to rent it?
Are there two sets of rules -- one for Ann Wooster, Market New Haven, and A&I,
and another set for everybody else?
The International Festival has been off to a striking start this year -- They Added a Week to the Schedule, after two full weekends, nothing has appeared in the public space known as The New Haven Green
I think A&I should have just started being honest with themselves a long time ago, and morphed this 'three week extravaganza' into a functional and well-programmed one week community festival....these pop-up festivals in the hood, while a good start, are really just a ploy to maintain state funding -- They didn't happen out of good will.
But who am I to give advice.....