City man to renew push for floating concert hall
A renewed push to bring a floating concert hall to the city is about to begin after a deal in Florida fell apart.
A renewed push to bring a floating concert hall to the city is about to begin after a deal in Florida fell apart, according to an organizer of the Kingston effort.
City resident Peter Wetzler, who had led an effort last year to bring the Point Counterpoint II concert hall to Kingston, said “we would want to revive (that effort) ... and there are a lot of pieces to put together and, once again, we have to move rather quickly. We really need to find some new angels.”
Wetzler referred to fundraising efforts to collect the money needed to purchase Point Counterpoint III and have it docked in Kingston, perhaps at the Hudson River waterfront.
In December, Wetzler said the Point Counterpoint had been sold by vessel owner Robert Boudreau to a consortium of business people in Florida.
“Boudreau held out as long as he could for our group to find funding, because he believed that Kingston was the best place for Point Counterpoint to reside,” Wetzler wrote in an email at the time. “However, he had an obligation to his board to secure the boat for the winter, and we just didn’t get the funding we needed, although I am still confident we could have if we had more time.”
“The effort to bring the barge here has officially gone south,” Wetzler wrote.
But this week, Wetzler said that deal had fallen apart and the barge is again up for grabs, with the barge in dry dock on the Illinois River, 60 miles west of Chicago.
“We are just going to keep pushing forward,” Wetzler said.
The proposed sale price for the Florida deal was never announced. The vessel was expected to fetch as much as $4 million, according to The Wall Street Journal.
City officials have said Kingston does not have the money to buy the Point Counterpoint II, a 195-footlong barge-like vessel that opens like a clamshell to reveal a concert stage.
Malia Dumont, chief of staff at Bard College, which was part of the effort to bring the vessel to Kingston, wrote in an email to Wetzler in December: “We pulled together a very impressive coalition with a great vision. Another organization beat us to the punch because they pulled their funding together more quickly.”
Wetzler and other backers of the Kingston effort initially hoped to get the Point Counterpoint II to the local waterfront before the cold weather set in, then use it over the winter