Wiggle Room
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The four-story, 43,000-square-foot art deco building at 4544 N. Lincoln has been vacant since 1987, when the Hild was supplanted by the Conrad Sulzer Regional Library, just down the street. When the city’s Cultural Affairs Department offered it to the Old Town School, in early 1994, the school had already been searching for a new home for more than a year. Under Hirsch course enrollment had exploded, from 175 in ’82 to about 2,000, and he’d expanded course offerings to include ethnic music and started successful community outreach programs that have boosted minority attendance at the school’s concerts from less than 2 percent to 24 percent. Suddenly the building the school had occupied since 1968, at 909 W. Armitage, was downright cramped. So after nine months of feasibility studies, the Old Town School accepted the city’s offer, buying the Hild building for the nominal sum of ten bucks.
Most impressive is the new, curvy concert hall, which will seat 425 people. That’s 150 more seats than the space on Armitage–and none of them, on the main floor or in the balcony, will be more than 38 feet from the lip of the stage. The hall also will be equipped with new lights, a $150,000 sound system, and acoustically designed windows, ceilings, and supports; it will even be prewired for radio and television broadcasts.
The Creative and Improvised Music series at Unity Temple is officially history–but now so are a couple of superb concerts from last year’s program. Wobbly Rail, a new imprint run by Superchunk front man Mac McCaughan in Chapel Hill, has just released Steve Lacy’s Solo: Live at Unity Temple and Stumble, a set by the AALY Trio with Ken Vandermark.
