Columbia’s new opera house between the existing NBSC and the proposed Octagon Last Monday morning about 50 delegates of the Garden Club Council reviewed plans and proposals for downtown Columbia, mostly along Main Street. I was invited to speak by Doris Kahn, who also asked for illustrations. Led by their president Barbara Ridgill, the Garden Club Council’s main interest focused on the new opera house on Main Street between NBSC and the SouthTrust Building.

Citing small opera houses seating between 1,500 and 1,800, I narrowed the discussion of guiding examples to La Fenice in Venice and the Staatsoper in Berlin. A great advantage of a small opera house is the ideal distance from the performance stage for just about every seat. To see and to hear are the requirements of any performing arts hall, but an opera house has even greater demands for the same two requirements.

Here in Columbia, where we have the Koger Center with no attached parking and the Township with no attached parking, we should locate our opera house next to existing garage parking. As every office worker can attest, attached parking matters, especially when it rains. Parking the car in the rain a block away is hardly a feature to sell performance tickets.

By placing the 1,500–seat facility on Main Street between NBSC and the SouthTrust Building, where the Carolina Theater once stood, we back up to the existing 900–car garage. The service drive off Lady Street for the SouthTrust Building also serves the backstage access for the opera house. The existing garage, the engineers tell us, can take another two floors of parking. Underground below the opera house there is more proposed parking, plenty for current and future demands.

The Garden Club Council studied an architectural scale model of Main Street and readily recognized the appropriate placement of an opera house in the middle of the block between Lady and Gervais. Tall buildings cannot stand close together because each blocks the other’s views. The low–level opera house can define and dimension the gap between the existing NBSC and the proposed octagonal tower on the corner at Gervais Street. In other words, the most prestigious corner in SC, what should be the most expensive corner in SC, allows for 25 stories of prime office space, The Octagon, attached at the top with the SouthTrust Building.

The taxes collected off The Octagon office tower on the corner, as part of the Vista’s tax–increment bond finance district, go directly to the opera house. Between the existing parking garage and the tax–increment bond financing, the construction cost of the opera house is over half–financed.

The construction cost comes to $50 million, which is just over $30,000 per seat for the 1,500 seats. This kind of money would give us quality comparable to the Blumenthal Center in Charlotte, or better, which is a whole lot better than anything else in SC.

Charlotte’s opera company produces probably five performances a year, and then there’s always a traveling troupe or two coming through. With only five or seven opera productions a year, why build an opera house? Other performing arts can immediately see the advantages of a 1,500–seat facility. The Koger Center seats about 2,300, and the Township seats another 1,000 over that, so 1,500 seats should fill a market niche. But for day–to–day use, our new opera house gives our new convention center, built for 900 banquet diners, a classy presentation venue.

The DuPont Theater works this way in Wilmington, as do many performing arts halls in office–tower surroundings. They rent more often as presentation halls than as performance halls. The rent from the presentations and speeches and other gatherings pays for the buildings availability for opera.

Now that we have the new opera house located and practically financed, and we can foresee the occupancy, what’s next?

Build.