New home for lines - News - LINES Ballet and San Francisco Dance Center - Brief Article

Dance Magazine, Feb, 2002 by Rita Felciano

When the San Francisco Conservatory of Music bought the building that was home to Alonzo King's LINES Ballet and its school, called the San Francisco Dance Center (SFDC), dancers panicked. The purchase was announced in March 2000 at the height of the Bay Area's real estate boom. At the time, rehearsal space and studios for classes seemed to disappear faster than yesterday's headlines. And the school and company, which had been in their building since 1989, were stalwarts. Where were the 8,000 students and teachers who ride SFDC's creaky elevator every month going to go for their fix of its nearly 100 classes?

As of January, they'll only have to walk a few blocks east to the corner of Market and Seventh Streets, where LINES and SFDC have secured a ten-year lease (with an option to renew for another five) on two floors of the historic Odd Fellows building. "We were looking first of all for a place which could keep the whole operation in one unit," said Pamela Hagen, the company's executive director. "We also wanted to be near public transportation, since that's what 60 percent of our dancers and students use; and we absolutely needed large rooms with high ceilings." Hagen is delighted with what LINES found. "We'll have 18,000 square feet, six large studios with unobstructed views, and they are ready to go," she said. "All we have to do is pull up the carpets, lay the floors, and install barres and mirrors." "The new lodgings are more spacious than those the school and company are leaving. The old space had only five studios, none of them as large as those in the new location.

LINES first looked at the Odd Fellows building with some other organizations in 2000, but couldn't come to terms with the owners. Then Oakland tried to lure the company across San Francisco Bay. A deal with a developer who was going to build to LINES's specifications fell through when the economy started to nose-dive and the planned balancing act between profit and nonprofit endeavor began to look too shaky. "That would have been a really spectacular place," Hagen remembered.

So LINES went back to the Odd Fellows, inviting representatives to visit the company's current home "in the evening when we were going full swing," Hagen said. It worked, and alleviated whatever concerns about noise and traffic there may have been.

LINES recently embarked on a three-year, $2 million fund-raising campaign to stabilize the organization and help with the increased costs of living in a new home. As for the creaky elevator: Ah yes, there will be one there as well.