The woman behind the talk of the town steps down
Sydney Goldstein turns lecture series over to the next generation
Propositions and prepositions will flow forth, anecdotes will be ladled out, and slices of literary pie will be plated and served. But as of July, Sydney Goldstein, who founded City Arts & Lectures in 1980, won’t be in the kitchen whipping up the feast of ideas. City Arts is telling its members Wednesday, July 5, that Goldstein stepped down from her job at the end of last week.
“I am looking forward to sitting in a good orchestra seat or even in the green room” at the Nourse Theatre, “and enjoying the programs along with other patrons,” said Goldstein last week.
Although she’ll continue as a consultant for five years, Goldstein, 72, has handed over the management of her lectureand event-production company to Holly MulderWollan, 37, who began working there in 2009, and Kate Goldstein-Breyer, her 37-yearold daughter, who joined the following year.
“With a full-time staff of four, everyone has always had their hand in every aspect of the work, from booking to setting the stage and handling travel and accommodations,” Goldstein said. “In recent years, Holly and Kate have assumed more active roles in every part of our work, including fundraising . ... I am so proud of them and how much more diverse our programming and our audiences have
become.” Between the September start of next season and the end of December, 26 talks/ conversations have already been booked, mostly by Mulder-Wollan and GoldsteinBreyer. A full season comprises 50 to 60 events a year, mostly presenting authors but venturing afield enough to include Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen and Linda Ronstadt.
Many programs are parts of series, such as the 826 Valencia College Scholarship events that City Arts has produced for 13 years. “We had no idea how much she would raise,” said Dave Eggers, founder of the nationwide tutoring program 826 Valencia. “To date, because of Sydney’s vision and hard work, we’ve been able to send 70 San Francisco kids to college. This is one of the many aspects to the monumental legacy of Sydney Goldstein.”
Goldstein was organizing literary events for the College of Marin in 1980 when she booked her first speaker, Fran Lebowitz, who was to lead off a series of six fundraisers for the San Francisco Public Library, in the Herbst Theatre. The program was “called ‘A Black Tie Lecture by Fran Lebowitz, With Audio-Visual Aids.’ She was in black tie, and there were no visual aids. That was Fran’s sense of humor.”
That event’s success led to her realization “that I didn’t have to go back to my job at the College of Marin, from which I had taken a six-month leave . ... That’s when I decided to start a nonprofit organization.”
Soon after that, Steven Barclay, who had taken Goldstein’s job at the College of Marin, came to work with her at the new company, “and added a lot,” said Goldstein, crediting Barclay with snagging Tony Kushner, for example, and adding “energy and taste that built up a certain part of our audience.” (Barclay eventually left to found his own speaking and appearance agency for authors.)
Goldstein-Breyer, of course, has observed her mother on the job since she was a child. Mulder-Wollan started as a part-time production assistant. With design and communications manager Alexandra Washkin, they manage an email list of almost 25,000 patrons, as well as a separate snail-mail list the same size. Friends of City Arts & Lectures has 1,300 members. Advance notice about programs is essential for selling tickets.
The 2013 closing of the 900seat Herbst Theatre for seismic retrofitting presented City Arts & Lectures with its biggest challenge, and ultimately resulted in its biggest triumph. The first time Goldstein looked at the San Francisco Unified School District’s 1,689-seat Nourse, “it was a storage facility so full of junk that you couldn’t even see walls.” She was quoted something like $22 million to transform it into a theater.
But visiting Cuba a short while later, inspired by “several old theaters in Havana that were pretty minimal in restoration, I realized there was a much less expensive way.” With the help of patrons and supporters like Moti Kazemi of BBC Construction, Helen and John Meyer of Meyer Sound and the school district’s facilities chief David Goldin, the restoration cost less than $2 million.
“Sydney did the work of finding a new venue, and against so many odds, raising money and finding really talented people to make it work for us and to make it work for so many other presenters,” said Goldstein-Breyer.
“It’s Sydney’s forward momentum, not just in City Arts & Lectures, but in refurbishing the theater, that’s really contagious,” said Mulder-Wollan. When City Arts & Lectures is not using the facility, it rents the space to other performingarts companies.
“I think the main lesson is to trust your instincts,” said Goldstein. “Because you can poll a lot of people and you end up with something that maybe by the numbers seems like the right thing, and it’s not. This work is very difficult, and if you don’t love it, you shouldn’t do it.”
As confident as that sounds, during her 37 years at City Arts, “an awful lot of time has been spent hoping that I have known what I was doing,” said Goldstein. “Looking at ticket counts today for fall programs, I know that choosing Holly and Kate to run City Arts is one of those moments of knowing that I know what I am doing.”