St. Ann’s Warehouse, the Brooklyn theater whose versatile and cavernous playing space has become a magnet for New York and overseas acting troupes, is now confronting a likely fate that its leaders had worked years to avoid: homelessness.
Scheduled to lose its 14,000-square-foot home next May because of commercial development, St. Ann’s thought its long-term future was secure after the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation approved the theater’s plans to move across the street after renovating the old Tobacco Warehouse on the Dumbo neighborhood’s waterfront. But some Brooklyn civic groups oppose handing over that landmark ruin — a shell of a 19th-century building, mainly walls but no roof — to any single organization, and in April the groups won a court decision on a technical issue that probably will preserve the Tobacco Warehouse as an open neighborhood site for the next few years, at least.
All of this leaves St. Ann’s with little more than an inch-thick prospectus of ambitious artistic dreams: its submission to the park corporation, titled “The Future Tobacco Warehouse: Where Global, Regional and Local Communities Converge.” That appendices-stuffed proposal included maps for a 7,000-square-foot public garden and a 2,100-square-foot community hall intended to house some of the concerts and dance presentations that are now held intermittently at the Tobacco Warehouse.
The proposal’s centerpiece was a 10,250-square-foot theater that would have sustained St. Ann’s reputation as a rare New York City space that allows ensembles to configure a high-ceilinged, column-free and technically sophisticated room to their needs. Among the renowned companies that have played St. Ann’s in recent years are Kneehigh Theater from England (“Brief Encounter”), the National Theater of Scotland (the Iraq war play “Black Watch”) and the downtown Wooster Group (“The Emperor Jones”).
After the artistic staff and board members of St. Ann’s fixed their sights last year on the Tobacco Warehouse, they gave up developing a Plan B for a future home. Like other arts organizations in New York recently — the theater company Performance Space 122 and New York City Opera among them — St. Ann’s is facing a nomadic future until a permanent site can be found or a new home can be built, options that could take years.
“Our vision was to turn the Brooklyn waterfront into a cultural center by transforming the Tobacco Warehouse into both a theater and a public arts space,” said Susan Feldman, artistic director of St. Ann’s. “It leaves us maybe having to leave Dumbo. Perhaps even leaving Brooklyn. None of us want that, but the theater we do at St. Ann’s doesn’t easily fit into pre-existing spaces that we’ve seen, and we want to continue to do that work.”
Ms. Feldman founded Arts at St. Ann’s in 1979 at a historic church site in Brooklyn Heights, then opened its current home in an old spice-milling factory in 2001. The owner of the space is now developing it, with plans to construct an apartment complex and a middle school. Well known as a blunt-speaking, strong-willed artistic programmer, Ms. Feldman did not self-edit at first in discussing the opposition to St. Ann’s plans.
“When we won approval to move into the Tobacco Warehouse, you had a few people in Brooklyn who felt such defeat and anger that they are now fighting all-out to keep this space as a ruin, an urban ruin,” Ms. Feldman said. After a pause, she spoke a bit more diplomatically: “Well, I know everyone is fighting for what they believe in. I can respect that. We’re just heartbroken. And a little desperate.”
Jim Walden, a lawyer for the Brooklyn Heights Association and others fighting to keep the Tobacco Warehouse as is, said the neighborhood groups admired the work of St. Ann’s and supported keeping the theater in Dumbo. At the same time, the groups wanted to maintain the Tobacco Warehouse as the kind of site that has featured photo and art exhibitions, hip-hop and food festivals, and even a memorable “Macbeth,” presented by St. Ann’s in 2008 on a two-story, roofless set.
“We don’t think it’s a good idea for governments to just give away national landmarks to organizations that they like, if those are good organizations, because eventually there will be a person in charge who is giving landmarks to an organization that you don’t like,” Mr. Walden said. “What you need is the same standardized process that has integrity and is followed in all decisions like this.”
In April a federal judge ruled that the National Park Service broke the law when it redrew the lines of the old Empire Fulton Ferry State Park without public hearings — a process that led to the Tobacco Warehouse and another building’s being left outside of the park’s borders. (The Empire Fulton Ferry State Park has since been subsumed by Brooklyn Bridge Park.) The park service and New York City, defendants in the case, argued that the two buildings had been put within those borders by mistake, and that neither building was eligible for inclusion in the parkland, anyway, because they were not suitable for outdoor recreation.
But the judge, Eric N. Vitaliano, found evidence that the two structures were intentionally included in the park map early on, and ruled — in favor of Brooklyn neighborhood groups and others — that the proper process was not followed.
Regina Myer, president of Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation, said that the Tobacco Warehouse is now used less frequently for recreation than other parts of the park, and that St. Ann’s proposal “was far and away the most exciting we received, and had so many opportunities for neighborhood groups and arts organizations to continue using the space.”
During a recent interview Ms. Feldman leafed through her prospectus and read aloud from the two dozen letters of support from Brooklyn cultural and arts groups for St. Ann’s occupying the Tobacco Warehouse. Almost lovingly, she traced her fingers over the outlines of the maps for the renovated space, including diagrams of how different acting troupes had each reconfigured the open floor plan of the current theater.
“There is something so special, we found, in having this sort of warehouse space that can be refashioned with every production to suit a different artist’s dream,” she said. “We could have made that work at the Tobacco Warehouse. It would have worked so well. And now you just feel hopeless.”