Brian Hale is a man who doesn’t give up easily. He and the rest of the folks in Springfield’s The X Main Street Corporation bought Springfield’s Bing Theater in 2004, when the former moviehouse was a deteriorating mess. They intended to renovate the space and create a community arts center, an idea that required a singular stubborness of vision in light of the old theater’s condition—the screen hung in tatters, presiding over a dusty, glass-strewn space packed with dilapidated old seats.
Hale and company remained undaunted, navigating a bumpy road of grant-seeking and money-raising to get the work started. When I spoke to Hale for a story a while back (“The Once and Future Bing,” Feb. 19, 2009), the project had suffered a massive setback: a state grant of $75,000 was trimmed down to the $18,750 The X Main Street had already received. Work was well underway to get the large front lobby space open, a sort of smaller-scale realization of the overall project, but it had to stop.
True to form, Hale and X Main Street soldiered on, pursuing other grants and sources of funding. In the summer of 2010, they opened the doors of the Bing Arts Center. Things look pretty different now—a well-lit gallery space is filled with the paintings of Jeffrey Neumann; another room holds the leftovers from a recent haunted house; the main lobby is a functioning concert and event space.
Hale explains that programming has kicked into a higher gear—”It’s great to have so much going on,” he says with a smile. “But there’s also suddenly a lot more to do, with events happening weekly.”
It’s been a long time coming, and Hale’s unwavering belief in the Bing’s potential is hard not to admire. Amid all the new events, which have already included video classes for kids, art exhibits, musical performances and fundraisers, Hale has his restless eye on phase two of redevelopment. It seems clear that settling for anything less is unlikely to pass muster with him.
When I visited recently, Hale showed me a stack of plans for the rest of the Bing. He’d already shown Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno and others the plans, and was gearing up to give them a public showing as well at a fundraiser. A large performance space is the centerpiece, but the cavernous old theater may also eventually hold a smaller screening room, editing suites and a second level. The roof is slated for renewal as a small performance space for music, too. It looks as if the Bing is about to become a space that can host arts events for 20 or 400, a unique venue in the Valley.
It’s telling that Hale isn’t content with having realized phase one of his project. It would be a fine place to rest, but he’s clearly called by what’s just down the hall from the bright, up-and-running front lobby, itself a sizeable space.
Down that hallway, there’s a door marked “No Admittance.” If you didn’t know what was there, opening that door would be astonishing: enter the dark space beyond, and once your eyes adjust, you can make out that tattered old screen and row after row of dingy red seats under a vaulting ceiling.
He’s happy to preside over the existing Arts Center, but the persistence of Hale’s vision of a future Springfield with a sleek new Bing makes it feel certain that, somehow, he’ll see this place become exactly what he envisions, that the door marked “No Admittance” isn’t going to stay.
Eva Cappelli & the Watershops Band play Nov. 19, 8 p.m., $5, The Bing Arts Center, 716 Sumner Ave., Springfield, (413) 731-9730, bingartscenter.org.
