Starving Artistes

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That was never more obvious than during the 2004 season. The company had just taken the dicey step of relocating from the 900-seat Athenaeum in Lakeview to the Harris’s 1,400-seat venue on the north edge of what was becoming Millennium Park. But the park was still a hard-hat zone, people didn’t know where the theater was, and the company had its own identity issues. (“There are still a lot of people in Chicago, even among those who love opera, who don’t know about COT,” Walton says.) Ticket sales fell short of expectations, and expenses at the Harris, where the rent was $4,000 a day and union labor was mandated, were 30 percent higher than in the old location. They’d barely completed their season opener–an acclaimed production of L’incoronazione di Poppea–when they ran out of money.

COT racked up a $290,000 deficit over its $3.2 million budget that year and was able to stay alive only because several board members came to the rescue with loans–and it didn’t get easier in 2005. While the product continued to knock everybody’s socks off, attendance, which had risen from about 10,000 at the Athenaeum to more than 14,000 the first year at the Harris, dropped slightly. Determined not to have another deficit, Walton says, they took a knife to the budget and managed to close out the year in the black–though “just barely.”

A former securities lawyer with a reputation as a fund-raiser, and the first nonhistorian to head the museum, Johnson has been on the job since August. So far $22 million has been raised in a capital campaign with a goal that equals the rehab cost, $2 million of it under his watch. The cash-strapped museum has been drawing money from its $70 million endowment to cover construction bills, and Johnson says all of the donated funds will go to replenish and build the endowment. The Chicago History Museum will open September 30 with a new costume and textile gallery, a children’s gallery, and twice as much space for the Chicago history galleries, which will thereafter be known as the Exelon Chicago History Galleries.

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Carlos J. Ortiz, Liz Lauren.