Special Bd. of Aldermen — 5/2/17 Page 5
Again, it has this great presence on Main Street, a nice canopy, glass fagade along Main Street. You turn the
corner, and it already has a secondary entrance on Pearl. The ability of developing a project that has more
than one entrance on the street and is very welcoming and dynamic on the street front is all there waiting to
take advantage of. The site, itself, is well placed. It’s within easy walking distance of the Garden Street
parking garage. There’s a landscaped pedestrian alley from the garage to what we would propose to be the
entrance to the new theatre on Pearl Street. There’s a loading dock towards the back of the furniture store and
that’s essential to the theatre operations and obviously the connection to what’s happening on Main Street and
the pedestrian access to Main Street is all very apparent.
These are broad concept plans. We developed this model program of the different pieces that would probably
be required to support a theatre event space. We applied them to the existing building. What we are proposing
is the front along Main Street, at the street level would be maintained as retail, primarily, with very little change.
That’s leasable, that could be income stream. The street level of the 1910 building, which has smaller spaces,
tighter column spacing could be the entrance to the theatre area where we could develop restrooms,
concessions, ticketing. We have indicated a restaurant or a function space on the ground floor. That’s the
150-seat multi-purpose space that Duncan articulated in his plan.
A new stairway, you come up the elevator, and that’s where you find this new theatre event space. It’s
overlooking Main Street. We developed the support spaces around it. How might this be developed and what
might it look like. First of all, a nice big square room about 97 by almost 180, a nice big footprint for a lot of
different capacity for a formal theatre setting, maybe 500 seats but different events would have different
capacities. On the upper left is a picture of what it looks like today. To the right is a precedent of a
commercial building in Brooklyn, New York, that was recently renovated. What they did to that building is they
basically raised the roof. We would need to create higher ceilings on that second floor to be able to create a
viable theatre and event venue. You need the height for lighting, scenery. Here’s a view of the second floor of
Alec’s Shoe Store before it closed. Again, we would be reframing the roof with some trusses and open up the
floor space to develop it and give ourselves the height that we needed.
Downstairs, minimal changes, but it could be a very open, glassy lobby arts center and/or retail. A little
investment to make that something that would work. In all, 30,000 square feet, on two floors. There would be
interior and exterior renovation. A new theatre, support facilities, entry lobby, event space as | showed you on
the ground floor and then maintaining quite a bit of retail on the street level as well. We worked with a cost
estimator and a local contractor and we came up with a budget of about $15.5 million total project cost to
develop this property for a new venue.
Mr. Webb
With that physical plan developed, we came back and wrote a business plan. |’m referring to it as an arts and
events center because | want to stress that functionality. | want us to think of it as a functional, flexible place
for a much broad range of programming from traditional performing arts program to more contemporary
entertainment to a range of different meeting and events because that’s the thing that’s going to make it very
busy and make it sustainable on an ongoing basis.
To start the business plan, we have written some goals which are about providing high-quality arts and
entertainment for the community. We think it is important to support local businesses, government and
citizens with professional meeting and event facilities. WWe want to stress the importance of affordable access
to good facilities for local arts organizations. Contribute to the economic vitality of Nashua and the wider
region. Each one of those separately is not such a big deal, it’s doing them all together in such a way that you
have a sustainable business model which driven by earned income as opposed to contributing.
We looked at various ways it could be operated, and our recommendation is that the City of Nashua should be
the owner and the operator of this building. At the same time, there are two important groups that should be
brought along. First, a private foundation to represent the interests of the private sector. Secondly, a
