No Longer a Parking Garage, Not Yet a Museum
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The odd thing is, if anyone is equipped to navigate the local political and bureaucratic terrain, it’s DuMont. He’s worked in public affairs broadcasting here since the 1960s, producing talk shows for the likes of Jim Conway, Howard Miller, Lee Phillip, and John Callaway. His own local show, Inside Politics, which started on WBEZ in 1980, morphed into a nationally syndicated weekly radio program, Beyond the Beltway, broadcast locally on WLS AM. (A TV version of the show airs on WYCC and Comcast Channel 3.) Until withdrawing last fall, he also hosted a long-running statewide public television series, Illinois Lawmakers, which covered the same folks ultimately responsible for MBC’s gifts from the state.
The total budget for the project, including land, construction, exhibits, and the first year of operation, has hit $31 million, and DuMont says the construction delay will add to the cost. What he’s waiting on now is a second promised infusion of government cash. Besides the $3.9 million that enabled the purchase, he says the governor told him a year ago that the state would chip in $8 million more, a promise that was reiterated by Chris Meister of the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, and which gave his board the confidence to begin construction last July. (Andrew Ross, spokesperson for DCEO, says this claim is “absolutely not true.”) But the money never materialized, and in January he says he got word that the bounty had shrunk to $6 million, half of which would come in the form of a loan. Then in late April, just days before Pepper’s shutdown deadline of May 1, DuMont got written notice from the state of conditions he says were new to him but had to be met. According to DuMont, the state had noticed a $3.8 million gap between the museum’s funding and its projected expenses and wanted to know exactly who would be covering the shortfall. “They never said before that you have to have every penny in place before they’d release any money,” he says.
Can Apple Tree Theatre survive a double transplant? The 23-year-old institution, which also runs classes and a children’s theater program on an annual budget of about $1 million, says The Winning Streak, which opens June 21 and runs through July 16, will be its last production in the space above a Highland Park strip mall that’s been its home for the last 18 years. That’s no surprise: Apple Tree’s lease expires at the end of July, and founder Eileen Boevers has long been talking about a move. But as recently as last weekend, no one with the theater could say where it was going. Official word has the board considering an interim space for next season, with the city committed to keeping the theater in Highland Park for the long run. Board president Bob Wieseneck says the board is “working with the city on what the future holds for us. We’re not planning to close.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Yvette Marie Dostatni.
