Show’s stopper
Outcry for center access
EAST HARLEM artists are furious the massive, city-owned Julia de Burgos Latino Cultural Center has been shuttered to the public for more than two years.
The community events room and 160-seat theater inside the five-story, E. 106th St. center are vacant and collecting dust — and next week, a group of uptown actors, performers and artists are hosting a guerrilla performance outside in protest.
“We’re in a cultural Death Valley but sitting on a gold mine and the city doesn’t see it,” said Eugene Rodriguez, an award-winning East Harlem playwright and poet. “I’m here with a great play, and a wonderful young man to act in it, and I can’t even get a reading in one of these spac- es.”
Part of the center’s problem is a sullied management history.
For almost a decade, an arts organization called Taller Boricua ran the former public school building after it underwent multimillion-dollar renovations. But in 2011, the center’s landlord, the Economic Development Corporation, evicted the 40-year-old arts group from the management seat, apparently after complaints it charged arbitrary fees to organizations that wanted to rent the space.
The corporation selected the Julia de Burgos Arts Alliance, comprised of local arts groups and the Hispanic Federation, to manage the space. The alliance said it was signing a five-year lease, soundproofing the space and going to provide 1,700 hours of programing during the first year of operation.
But nothing became of those promises. And representatives of the alliance didn’t show up at two community meetings earlier this year. The Hispanic Federation did not return calls or emails. “When (Taller Boricua) ran the space, we got event notifications all the time. Since the change, we’ve gotten nothing,” said George Sarkissian, district manager of East Harlem’s Community Board 11.
Sarkissian added he’s as much in the dark as everyone else about what happened to the space.
Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito (D-East Harlem), who was a proponent of the arts alliance managing the center, was unavailable for comment Thursday.
Rodriguez, the playwright, just wants change.
“Honestly, I think our mayor wants the whole space to go to the charter school and to hell with the Latino community,” said Rodriguez. “I look at this theater, I see a center for opportunity. It could be the economic engine for this community, but I don’t know how to make the city see that, too.”