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    Some Venue Owners Get a Federal Lifeline. Others Are Told They’re Dead.

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    The first applications for the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program, offering $16 billion in federal aid, were approved.As the emails finally started arriving late last week, some business owners got the good news they had been long awaiting: They would be awarded a piece of a $16 billion federal grant fund intended to preserve music clubs, theaters and other live-event businesses devastated by the pandemic.But other applicants ran into fresh obstacles — including the discovery that the government thinks they’re dead. It was the latest bureaucratic mishap for the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant initiative, an aid program created by Congress late last year that has struggled at nearly every turn to disburse badly needed relief funds.Derek Sitter, the owner of the Volcanic Theater Pub, a 250-capacity music and performance venue in Bend, Ore., was at home on Saturday watching a British soccer game when an alert popped up on his phone: “Congratulations,” ran the subject line of an email from the Small Business Administration, which manages the grant program.Mr. Sitter ran outside to tell his wife and daughter the news, with tears swelling in his eyes. “My heart rate increased,” he recalled in an interview. “But it was a good increase.”The Volcanic was awarded about $140,000, Mr. Sitter said, though the funds have not yet arrived. (The size of the grant is pegged at 45 percent of a venue’s gross revenue from 2019.) Just how many venues have learned that their applications have been approved is unclear, but members of the network of small venues — which became a tightly connected hive during the pandemic — say they have heard of only a few so far. The Small Business Administration has not released details on how many claims it has approved.Bobby McKey’s, a piano bar near Washington, is stuck in bureaucratic limbo. Bob Hansan, the venue’s managing partner, said that his application was stalled because the government thinks he is dead. Charles King/C King MediaOther applicants got grimmer news. Bob Hansan, the managing partner of Bobby McKey’s, a piano bar near Washington, received a cryptic email Tuesday afternoon that began: “Your name appears on the Do Not Pay list with the Match Source DMF.”A few minutes of frantic Googling revealed that was a reference to the government’s Death Master File, a record of more than 83 million people whose deaths have been reported to the Social Security Administration.Mr. Hansan immediately called Social Security’s headquarters, which referred him to his local office, which told Mr. Hansan that they could find no record of his name anywhere on the death list. The office agreed to send him a form affirming that he’s alive, but the document can only be sent by mail, he was told — a process he worries will be slow.“It’s this continual drip-drop of delays,” he said.Michael Swier, the founder of the Bowery Ballroom and the Mercury Lounge in New York — and a prominent figure in the independent music world — also received notification early Wednesday that he was considered dead, and said that he was beside himself trying to understand how to correct the error.“What do I do? What kind of proof do they need?” Mr. Swier said. “Can I say over the phone, ‘It’s me’?”Representatives of the Small Business Administration did not answer questions about the erroneous death data.Michael Swier, the founder of the Bowery Ballroom and the Mercury Lounge in New York, was told he was considered dead. (He is alive.) “What do I do?” he asked. “What kind of proof do they need?”Michal Czerwonka for The New York TimesThe glitches were the latest to bedevil the program, which has suffered many delays, including a complete failure of its online system on the day it tried to start taking applications. (The application system finally opened in late April.)Some 13,000 people applied, seeking a total of $11 billion. The Small Business Administration has not yet released details on how many it has approved.In Facebook groups and on Twitter, frantic business owners have been swapping tips and trying to glean where in the application process their own claim might be.Some venues are beginning to get good news.Hugh Hallinan, the executive producer of Downtown Cabaret Theater, a nonprofit venue in Bridgeport, Conn., spent weeks checking the S.B.A.’s grant portal each day, and last Thursday learned that his theater had been approved for a $541,000 grant.On Tuesday the theater held a news conference with Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.“We’ve been in Bridgeport for 41 years, and we’ve never gotten recognition like this,” Mr. Hallinan said in an interview. “I just thought, ‘We’re going to soak it all up right now. We’re going to bask in it.’”Downtown Cabaret came close to shutting down last year. Downtown Cabaret Theater, in Bridgeport, Conn., which came close to shutting down, learned that it had been approved for a $541,000 grant. Richard Pettibone“If all patrons who had tickets called in and said, ‘I need a refund,’ it was game-over time,” Mr. Hallinan said. Instead, many opted for a credit on their account, and about a third of donated the cost of their tickets back to the venue, Mr. Hallinan said.The funding has not yet started flowing to Broadway. A spokeswoman for the Broadway League, a trade organization representing producers and theater owners, said that none of its members had notified the group about receiving application approvals. Charlotte St. Martin, the group’s president, had said last month that officials had told the group that money would start coming in by the end of May, but that deadline has now passed.And several major performing arts organizations in New York City that are planning summer or fall reopenings are also still waiting. Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic, New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theater, the Public Theater and the Metropolitan Opera have not yet heard. Many will not be eligible until a later round of awards.Mr. Sitter, in Oregon, said he had no idea why the Volcanic got its award so early. Like many applicants, it had lost at least 90 percent of its revenue during the pandemic, which qualified the Volcanic for the first round of grants. Others who lost less will be eligible for awards in mid- to late June.The Volcanic received some federal money last year from an earlier round of federal pandemic relief. That got it through 2020, Mr. Sitter said. But by last month, the Volcanic was down to its last few thousand dollars, not enough to cover its rent and monthly bills for June, Mr. Sitter said. He was considering whether to sell or shut it down.With the shuttered venue grant, the Volcanic can stay open until next year, when Mr. Sitter expects its pipeline of shows to be back to normal. This weekend, it is planning to put on its first shows since last summer, at 50 percent capacity.“There’s certainly not a lot of profit going to be made here,” Mr. Sitter said. “This is simply to lift the spirits of people, to say, ‘We can kind of do this, we’re doing good, and there is a way out.’” More

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      The Night New York's Theaters, Museums and Concert Halls Shut Down

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMarch 12, 2020: The Night the City Sighed to SleepChocolate fountains, Debbie Harry and an artist’s swan song cut short. We gathered scenes from the New York City cultural landscape in the last moments before lockdown.The view from Sardi’s on March 12, 2020, as Broadway and much of New York locked down.Credit…Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesMichael Paulson, Julia Jacobs and March 11, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETMarch began with an ominous drumbeat. A packed cruise ship with a coronavirus outbreak was left floating for days off the coast of California. South by Southwest was canceled. The N.B.A. suspended its season. And then, on March 12, Broadway shut down, and with it every large gathering in New York City.By the time the grates came down, it was not much of a surprise. The city that never sleeps was grinding to a halt.But it was impossible to imagine what was to come. The staggering death toll. The vast job losses. The isolation. The endlessness.That evening, a group of Broadway bigwigs — theater owners and producers, mostly — gathered to drown their sorrows at Sardi’s, the industry hangout famous for its celebrity caricatures. They noshed, they drank, they commiserated, and they hugged. Several of them wound up infected with the virus, although there were so many meetings, and so few masks at that point, who knows how they got it.They posted signs on their theaters saying they expected to be back four weeks later.Now it’s been 52.Do you remember your final nights out? We gathered scenes from around the city as the curtains closed. MICHAEL PAULSONFondue Fountains, Buckets of Bouquets and Fresh DolceThe dressing rooms at the Brooks Atkinson Theater were filled with flowers. The ruby chocolate fondue fountain was booked for the after-party. Brittney Mack’s mother and her brother and her best girlfriends had all flown into town, not about to miss the moment when the 30-something Chicagoan made her long-awaited Broadway debut as a 16th-century English queen.But it was not to be. Ninety minutes before the scheduled opening of “Six,” an eagerly anticipated new musical about the wives of King Henry VIII, Broadway shut down.“I got to the theater early, and there were gifts from all over — buckets and buckets of plants, and cookies, and so much love, and I was like, ‘Hell, yes,’” Mack recalled. “And then the assistant stage manager came in and said the show is canceled, and I just said, ‘How dare you!’”Credit…Lucas McMahon“It was very, very overwhelming, and all of a sudden I felt incredibly alone. And then I was like, ‘But my dress! And the earrings!’ So many perspectives hit me, and I realized this happened to our entire industry, and I thought, ‘What the hell are we all going to do?’”What most of the “Six” family did was to gather. Mack went out for drinks with her friends at Harlem Public, near her apartment. Meanwhile, the show’s producer, Kevin McCollum, fresh off canceling an 800-person opening night party at Tao Downtown, hosted about 100 members of the show’s inner circle at the Glass House Tavern, a few doors down from the theater.“Looking back, it was ridiculous that we did that, but we didn’t know what we didn’t know, so we had a buffet of crudités, and a host of droplets, I’m sure,” he said. “We were in shock. There were people crying. We were giving it our best stiff upper lip, for the British, but we were emotionally devastated.”The notice posted on the doors of the Brooks Atkinson Theater, home to the Broadway production of “Six.”Credit…Lucas McMahonBundled playbills that would have been distributed to the sold-out audience.Credit…Lucas McMahonGeorge Stiles, an English composer, was among many British friends of the show who had flown over for the opening. Stiles was once in a band with the father of Toby Marlow, who wrote “Six” with Lucy Moss, and had become a mentor and then a co-producer.“Never before has something that I’ve been involved with felt so poised to go off with a crack,” Stiles said of “Six” — quite a statement given that he wrote songs for the stage musical adaptation of “Mary Poppins.” “I was anticipating the euphoria of the crowd, and the fun of the red carpet-y nonsense, and the everyone wanting to be the last one to sit down.”Instead, he and his husband and Marlow’s father licked their wounds at Marseille. What was on the menu? “The sheer awfulness of being this close to a wonderful Broadway run.” Stiles has since put his “suitably regal” gold and black Dolce & Gabbana outfit “into very careful mothballs,” anticipating that there will yet be an opening night to celebrate. “We are very gung-ho,” he said, “and hopeful, fingers crossed, that it wont be too many months away.” PAULSON“We Love You, New York! Don’t Touch Your Face!”Only about half of the people who bought tickets to the March 12 show at Mercury Lounge had turned up, but there were still throngs of people drinking, talking and grooving to the band. Debbie Harry of the band Blondie was there, and so was the music producer Hal Willner. He would die less than a month later from Covid-19.Onstage, Michael C. Hall, the star of “Dexter” and lead singer of the glam rock band Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum, belted and wailed into the microphone.The staff members at Mercury Lounge knew they were watching their last live concert for a while; what “a while” meant, they had no idea. Bands had been canceling their appearances at an increasing rate, and on a call earlier that day, the owners had asked the staff members if they were still comfortable working, said Maggie Wrigley, a club manager. The line was silent for a moment, before one employee spoke up to say that no, it was no longer comfortable.Michael C. Hall, the star of “Dexter,” and his glam rock band, Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum, were the last act to perform at Mercury Lounge prior to shutdown.Credit…Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated PressOthers piped up to agree: They felt exposed and vulnerable to the virus at work. Because the late show had already canceled, the owners decided that the club would shut down that night after the early show.At about 9:30 p.m. — painfully early for a Thursday night on the city’s club scene — the audience was asked to leave. “We love you, New York! Don’t touch your face!” Hall yelled at the end of his set.Alex Beaulieu, the club’s production manager, sanitized the microphones and packed the drum kit, amps and cables for longer term storage.“We locked the door and sat at the bar and had a drink,” Wrigley said of the club’s staff, “and we just kind of looked at each other, with no idea what was going to happen.”JULIA JACOBSA Swan Song, Cut ShortFor Sheena Wagstaff, chairman of modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the spring of 2020 was destined to be bittersweet. The Met Breuer, the museum’s experimental satellite space, was going to close, three years ahead of schedule. But its final show was one she’d spent years preparing: “Gerhard Richter: Painting After All,” a survey of the stern and skeptical German artist, filling two floors of the landmark building and including loans from 30 different collections.The exhibition, intended by the now 89-year-old artist to be his last major show, opened March 4. It had the makings of a blockbuster, and it ought to have introduced New York to four paintings called “Birkenau” (2014): streaked, abraded abstractions that obscure imagery of the titular death camp. On March 12, the show’s ninth day, Wagstaff realized it had to close.The Richter exhibition at the Met Breuer had all the makings of a blockbuster when it closed on its ninth day.Credit…Charlie Rubin for The New York TimesAt first the gravity of the crisis wasn’t fully clear. “I had every anticipation that it was going to reopen in May at the very latest,” Wagstaff said recently. But soon she realized that “Birkenau” — a culmination of Richter’s 60-year engagement with German history and the ethics of representation — would not find an audience. “Beyond a kind of personal huge disappointment, it was that the artist, so aware of his own mortality, was denied the possibility of actually making a mini-manifesto to the world. Alongside that was the curtailment of the Breuer. What we ended up with was this implosion.”Richter never saw the show. A few days before it came down, Wagstaff stood alone with “Birkenau”: paintings about the possibility of perceiving history that, now, no one could perceive at all. “It was a kind of haunting experience,” she said. “They became almost anthropomorphic. They’re sitting there on the walls, and there’s nothing, there’s no one to witness them. The paintings are witnessing something, and that witnessing cannot be conveyed any further.”By autumn, the Met had ceded occupancy of the Breuer to the Frick Collection. Most of Richter’s paintings had been crated up and shipped back to their lenders. Yet “Birkenau,” which belongs to the artist, stayed in New York. Wagstaff brought these most challenging works into the Met’s main building, introducing into the lavish Lehman Collection these four speechless acts of remembrance and horror. “It was a trace of the show. The viewing conditions weren’t perfect,” Wagstaff conceded. “We had really limited attendance; we still do. But people stayed in that room for a really long time. For those who came to see it, it was a revelation.” JASON FARAGOOne Final SetBy March 15, Broadway theaters and concert halls were empty, but in the dim light of the Comedy Cellar, audience members sat shoulder to shoulder sipping drinks and watching stand-up comedy. Masks were not required.The comedian Carmen Lynch was hesitant about showing up that night: Her boyfriend was heading out of the city to stay with his family in Connecticut, and she planned to join him — it seemed like it was time to hunker down. But, Lynch said, she knew that the days of doing multiple shows in a single night were ending, and she wanted to make as much money as possible before the inevitable shutdown. She exchanged texts with fellow comedians to feel out who was still performing.“I thought, ‘I’m not doing anything illegal. I’ll just do this one show and then leave,’” Lynch recalled.In the last stand-up shows at the Comedy Cellar before it closed on March 15, comedians joked about Corona beer and the newly clean state of the subway.Credit…Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesSo her boyfriend took her suitcase to Connecticut while she stayed to perform — one set at 7:45 p.m. another at 8:30. Before each comedian would walk onstage to tell jokes in front of the club’s famous exposed brick wall and stained glass, they would reach into a bucket to take a microphone that had been recently cleaned.Just before Lynch went on, the comedian Lynne Koplitz took the stage, removed the sanitized microphone from the stand and theatrically wiped it down with a white cloth another time, saying, “I’ve wanted to do this for years!”When Lynch finished her second set, she didn’t linger. She called an Uber and felt relieved when the driver accepted her request for an hour-and-a-half drive to Connecticut, not knowing how long she’d be gone (until summer) or what the city would be like when she returned (eerily empty, store windows boarded up).She drove away, and in retrospect, she remembers it like a scene in a disaster movie. “It’s like you’re in the car,” she said, “and you turn around and there’s an explosion behind you.” JACOBSAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More