Even a great edge city can't support museums and concert halls?

[ColDayMan]

Ohio has a legacy of core city arts (that's what happens when you're the 3rd largest state from 1840-1880) so suburban arts complexes like art museums and theaters are small and generally insignificant. One that comes to mind though, regionally, is Carmel, Indiana supporting two grand performing arts spaces successfully.

The Palladium was built in 2011 and seats 1,500 and isn't terrible for an edge city-type-of-thing.


https://thecenterpresents.org/


https://thecenterpresents.org/


Carmel's other theater (literally across the park) is the Booth Tarkington Civic Theatre, which visually looks terrible IMO but it exists and is always booked:


https://cloudinary-assets.dostuffmedia.com/

[dave8721]

Fort Lauderdale has a large concert hall and has an art museum but it would qualify more as a "twin city" than an "edge city". West Palm Beach as well.

If anything, I've always thought the reason why South Florida doesn't have 1 amazing anything is because we always have to have 3. For example 3 mediocre art museums (1 for Miami, 1 for Fort Lauderdale and 1 for West Palm) rather than 1 amazing one. Same for concert halls, science museums...everything. 3 pseudo-independent metro's next to each other rather than 1 dominant city with smaller suburbs.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by dave8721

Fort Lauderdale has a large concert hall and has an art museum but it would qualify more as a "twin city" than an "edge city". West Palm Beach as well.

If anything, I've always thought the reason why South Florida doesn't have 1 amazing anything is because we always have to have 3. For example 3 mediocre art museums (1 for Miami, 1 for Fort Lauderdale and 1 for West Palm) rather than 1 amazing one. Same for concert halls, science museums...everything. 3 pseudo-independent metro's next to each other rather than 1 dominant city with smaller suburbs.

Some of that's gotta be distance related too.


more than any other "twin city" pairs in the US, Minneapolis/St. Paul most fully embody the "twin" dynamic. neither one is a ring or satellite city for the other. they function much more as equalish dual nodes of one single continuous city.

for starters, they directly abut each other, sharing a 6 mile long municipal border.

their populations are fairly close; Minneapolis 429K vs. St. Paul 308K.

they were both incorporated very close in time. Minneapolis 1867 vs. St. Paul 1854.

the two downtown are only 8.5 miles apart, connected by an intra-city light rail line, not irregularly scheduled commuter rail.

they split major league sports. MLB, NFL, & NBA are in Minneapolis. NHL & MLS are in St. Paul. (and notice how all the major sports teams are named "Minnesota", never one city over the other).

the main art museums and convention center are in Minneapolis, the main science and history museums are in St. Paul.

Minneapolis has the major symphony orchestra, St. Paul has the major ballet company.

Minneapolis has the flagship University of Minnesota, St. Paul is Minnesota's state capital.

Minneapolis has the major airport and St. Paul serves as the main river port.

and on and on and on.

they really do function more like one single city with two major downtown nodes than any other large US city pair that i can think of.

[chris08876]

It must suck to be the guy or gal that literally lives on the edge of a city. One foot one way, another city. Maybe half the house sits on the edge of two cities or towns?

There is never closure in that... never closure... and the mental anguish must be profound. Especially with a 30 year mortgage. 30 years of being reminded that one lives on the edge where the border lines are drawn.

Living in the center of it all is a pipedream for those folks... condemned to an existence between imaginary lines.

Like is one really a Chicagoan if their house sits right next to the edge of the sprawl... right next to a cornfield across the street?

Aside from not supporting museums or concert halls, edge cities might not even be able to support a true urban living experience. Living on the edge of mundanity!

[tdawg]

Suburban Atlanta (Smyrna) has the popular Cobb Energy Center, which is near The Battery where the Braves play.

Photo: Johnny Crawford/AJC

[Cirrus]

The premise that edge cities can't support cultural amenities mistakes correlation for causation. Cultural amenities don't appear overnight; they appear only after there's enough surplus time, money, and people to create them.

Concert halls need a lot of government or philanthropic investment that only happens after a lot of wealth exists in a community. Arts centers need old buildings that can be affordably repurposed from their original intent, which only happens after buildings are old enough for adaptive reuse to begin happening.

Edge cities are not only new, but they're also by-definition competing with already-existing center city cultural amenities. This doesn't mean they can't support them, it just means the barrier to entry for them to start growing these amenities is pretty high.

But as the examples posted in this thread show, there are enough examples of cultural amenities in edge cities to know they can--and increasingly will--happen.

[ocman]

Originally Posted by Crawford

My aunt is on some boards at the Segerstrom Center in Orange County (CA) and my sense is that complex is extremely successful. I believe they get a lot of big touring groups that skip the rival LA complex.

I've been to some shows and they always seem to have full turnouts. It's a monumental, very impressive complex. And it's in the middle of the craptastic, autohell South Coast Plaza edge city.

But maybe OC is a bit different in that it's a huge population center where the wealth is too far removed from LA and can't deal with the traffic times downtown anymore. In contrast, the rich residents east of Seattle can prolly still make it downtown for an evening show.

An arts institution needs a rich patron to spearhead the whole thing, which the Segerstroms are to Orange County. If it’s a community led endeavor, that’s more difficult because the money isn’t there for establishing and upkeep.

With dance, OC filled a niche that was lacking in LA which is traditional ballet.

But yes, edge cities have challenges that more popular anchor cities don’t have. People are willing to drive to the “central” city for arts but the same is not true the other way around.

Fort Worth might be considered an “edge” city of Dallas for some, but they have the more prestigious art museums.

[xzmattzx]

Originally Posted by Cirrus

The premise that edge cities can't support cultural amenities mistakes correlation for causation. Cultural amenities don't appear overnight; they appear only after there's enough surplus time, money, and people to create them.

Concert halls need a lot of government or philanthropic investment that only happens after a lot of wealth exists in a community. Arts centers need old buildings that can be affordably repurposed from their original intent, which only happens after buildings are old enough for adaptive reuse to begin happening.

Edge cities are not only new, but they're also by-definition competing with already-existing center city cultural amenities. This doesn't mean they can't support them, it just means the barrier to entry for them to start growing these amenities is pretty high.

But as the examples posted in this thread show, there are enough examples of cultural amenities in edge cities to know they can--and increasingly will--happen.

/end thread

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by ColDayMan

Ohio has a legacy of core city arts (that's what happens when you're the 3rd largest state from 1840-1880) so suburban arts complexes like art museums and theaters are small and generally insignificant.

Cleveland had the biggest company in the world for like 70 years which created many millionaires and is why it had and still has one of the best art museums and symphonies in the United States. But these cultural assets don't seem to attract new people in the 21st century to Cleveland or the other past-their-prime cities.

[jmecklenborg]

I'll add to this conversation the subject of Johnson County, KS, which is the wealthy suburban county on the Kansas side of Kansas City. It is home to Johnson County Community College, which is the most over-the-top decadent community college I know of. I'm sure that it beats the flagship campus of some of the smaller state universities. It is home to the Nerman Museum of Art, which is probably funded to a greater degree than almost any top university's art musuem:
http://www.nermanmuseum.com/about/index.html

What's crazy is that Kansas City, MO already has the Nelson-Adkins Museum of Art, which has a pretty spectacular permanent collection that is only a half-notch below Philadelphia or Cleveland or Chicago, plus the Kemper Museum. Also, the 700-student Kansas City Art Institute received an outrageous $125 million gift around 2012, which amounts to almost $200k per student.

I don't know if that stuff on the Missouri side of Kansas City is mostly getting Missouri benefactors or what. But I suspect that the big wigs in Kansas are more likely to give their money to the Johnson County Community College.

[mhays]

Thanks for all the responses. Some misc comments I'll add:

Rich donors are clearly a big factor. Bellevue and neighboring areas like Medina, Hunts Point, and Mercer Island have a lot of rich people, but nobody has given let's say $200m to a museum endowment or new concert hall.

School districts can fund 700-seat theaters, which Bellevue has. But it seems to typically require megadonors to build 2,000-3,000 seat concert halls suitable for visting symphonies and operas, with adaptable accoustics, vast back-of-house areas, and so on. Bellevue Art (later "Arts") Museum had donors for its creation but never developed an endowment.

In the Seattle area, gifts in the hundreds of millions are typically for health (to UW or Fred Hutch) or if arts-related to the Seattle Art Museum or Seattle University (someone pledged a $300m collection this year, which will kick off a new museum).

I agree that the population needs to be large and prosperous to support all this, but Bellevue and the Eastside have 500,000 people who are generally prosperous, including billionnaires.

Sometimes, big donations help *create* institutions (like at Seattle U) rather than building upon existing institutions/communities. A community can collect cool things as it ages, but if rich enough it can also pop out new ones even if it's a young area, right?

Maybe the edge city needs donors and visitors to see the location as separate and "theirs" vs. the main city. I think Bellevue and the Eastside have that, and despite the proximity to Seattle the lake is a significant barrier (though a rail connection next year will diminish that).

I'd separate the topic of out the old underused buildings that let artists thrive...art consumption doesn't seem to require local creation (outside of performance art), though it needs to happen somewhere. In this case, artists priced out of the Eastside or most of Seattle can more easily thrive somewhere else locally, such as Georgetown or Tacoma.

It's good to hear that some edge cities are doing better.