Theater aims to save facade

Posted on Wednesday, October 05, 2005

COCONUT GROVE PLAYHOUSE

Theater aims to save facade

After some initial resistance, the Coconut Grove Playhouse board appears ready to accept a historic designation for the landmark theater -- but only for its front walls.

Patrick Farrell/Herald Staff

Bowing to preservationists, the Coconut Grove Playhouse will accept historic designation for its fabled building -- but in an unusual twist, the theater's board is asking that only the front walls and its grand rococo entranceway be preserved.

As the city's Historic and Environmental Preservation Board takes up the long-delayed designation of the Playhouse today, it may have to wrestle with a hard question: How much of the landmark 1926 building is worth saving?

The nonprofit Playhouse says the building's interior, designed as a movie house and largely stripped of its original Mediterranean Revival detailing in a 1950s modernization, is antiquated, deteriorated and thoroughly unsuited to modern live performance.

Its board of directors has long been pursuing a plan to build one or two new theaters, financing the project by adding shops, a parking garage and condos on its prominent corner property in the picturesque Grove -- although a developer recently backed out of an $8 million deal with the Playhouse amid controversy over the building's future.

In an evaluation submitted to the city's preservation office, Arthur Marcus, a Miami Beach architect and preservationist hired by the Playhouse, contends that only the main entrance and the flanking walls along Main Highway and Charles Avenue retain the ''character-defining elements'' worthy of historic designation.

As part of a redevelopment, Marcus said, the facade could be restored to its original 1920s glory -- reopening shop fronts that were long ago blocked off and recreating a fanciful parapet that once crowned the entranceway but was removed in the modernization.

''It would also enable any new development to incorporate real good live theaters that serve the community, with the right development and the right developer, of course,'' Marcus said. ``It's a building that needs to be brought up to the 21st century.''

But the Playhouse request seems likely to receive tough scrutiny from the board, which has been loath to designate only portions of historic buildings.

SIGNIFICANT PLACE

Few dispute the Playhouse is one of the most significant buildings in Miami: Designed by one of Miami's most important early architects, Richard Kiehnel, it's among the earliest local Mediterranean Revival structures and a milestone in the development of Coconut Grove. In the 1950s, it was converted from movie house into Miami's first live theater by another noted Miami architect, Robert Browning Parker, and hosted the U.S. premiere of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

Under the city preservation ordinance, historic designation is generally meant to cover an entire building or site. If in the future, owners want to demolish part of it, renovate or build an addition, the plan then requires preservation board approval.

That approach is meant to ensure that any redevelopment preserves the historically or architecturally significant elements of a building and that new construction is compatible with the old. Designating only the Playhouse facades, some preservationists fear, could ease the way to demolition of the rest of the building by removing the preservation board's authority to review redevelopment plans.

''It's an effort to circumvent the process of evaluation,'' said Richard Heisenbottle, an architect and president of Dade Heritage Trust, the county's largest preservation group. ``It's absolutely ludicrous to go around designating little portions of buildings. That's not the way it's done.''

Some preservationists deride the approach of saving facades only as a ''facadectomy,'' in which new and sometimes incompatible buildings rise up behind the skin of a historic structure.

OLD AND NEW

If not done sensitively, such marriages of old and new can have unhappy results. Preservationists cite the old Salvation Army building in downtown Miami: The Gothic arched entranceway along Fifth Street was saved but is overwhelmed by a glass office building behind it that reduces the original to what critics say is a sad remnant. ''The entire Playhouse building should be designated so they can't do what they did to the Salvation Army building,'' said Grove activist Barbara Lange. ``That's a glaring example of what happens when you keep only the facade.''

Preservationists and Grove activists also worry about the potential scale of the Playhouse redevelopment. The now-dead deal with developer Henry Pino called for 100 condos, raising concerns the Playhouse would attempt to exceed the downtown Grove's five-story limit.

''My concern is a big building over it,'' said Becky Matkov, executive director of Dade Heritage Trust, who said she would be open to a new, compatible building behind the historic facade. ``It would depend upon how it's done. If they restored the facade the way it was originally, I would be happy.''

But Heisenbottle believes there is much worth saving on the inside, too, including the original proscenium over the stage.

Marcus, the Playhouse's architect, said elements of the interior could be incorporated into a new theater, but are now scattered in odd places -- like the twisted Spanish columns that he believes once graced the sides of the theater and are now incongruously found in the men's room.

''You almost have to be an archaeologist,'' said Marcus, a former member of the Miami Beach historic preservation board. ``You find pieces of the old theater in the men's room.''

Copyright 2005 Knight Ridder