NIAGARA FALLS
Grant to aid renovation of theater for concerts
NIAGARA FALLS — The owner of a 1,750-person theater on Main Street plans to open its doors to rock concerts by April with the help of a $250,000 grant to renovate the 1920s building.
Owner John Hutchins told a city development agency Wednesday that he plans to reopen the former Dome Theater as the Rapids Theater and offer concerts that will appeal to a regional audience once the $1.8 million renovation is complete.
“I need this grant to get going. I have to have this building rocking and rolling by April,” Hutchins told members of the city’s NFC Development Corp. “We’ve already got events booked.”
Hutchins told officials that the city grant — which will come from casino revenue — was needed to attract private financing.
NFC Development directors approved the grant during a meeting in which they also approved tighter standards for new loan and grant programs and debated what incentives are necessary to persuade new businesses to operate downtown.
The theater at 1711 Main St. has been closed since Hutchins bought it at a city tax-foreclosure auction last year. It operated for years under the name Shea’s Bellevue and later as the Late Show and Masquerades.
“That building does have a great reputation among the concert crowd,” Hutchins said. “We did a lot of market research before I started spending all this money, and people that attend concerts know that building.”
Hutchins completed a renovation of the 42-unit Yorkshire Apartments on Ninth Street in 2006. He told the board he also plans to develop two other buildings on north Main Street.
NFC board members also voted to create two new loan and grant programs they intend to fund with casino revenue.
One of the programs would provide “micro-enterprise” loans of up to $25,000 or grants of up to $10,000 to help small commercial, manufacturing and retail businesses throughout the city. It would mirror an existing program already in place for women-and minority-owned businesses.
The second new program would provide low-interest loans of up to $25,000 for business property owners to make “green” improvements by installing energy- efficient products and equipment.
Funding for both new programs must still be approved by the City Council.
Two other proposed loan programs — including one designed to entice new businesses to open on Third Street — were tabled after board members debated what incentives are necessary to spur development in struggling neighborhoods.
Mayor Paul A. Dyster said several of the proposed guidelines in the new loan and grant programs were intended to correct earlier casino revenue programs that required little investment.
“They had drifted in the direction of not requiring what we thought was an adequate amount of private investment,” Dyster said. “We thought that this was a program that had become essentially upside down, and we wanted to correct that.”
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