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BAM Announces $25M Project Joining 3 Spaces

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An old photo of the Brooklyn Academy of Music opera house. (Photo Credit: Brooklyn Academy of Music)
A rendering of the new addition. BAM Strong will connect the existing Harvey Theater, left, with a vacant site and the ground floor of a high-rise condominium at the corner of Fulton Street and Ashland Place. (Photo Credit Mitchell Giurgola Architects)

The Brooklyn Academy of Music consisted of just a single theater for over a century. The BAM Harvey Theater was added in 1987, followed by a cinema complex in the Lafayette Avenue building ten years later. Another theater, the BAM Fisher opened next door just a few years back.

The newest addition was announced on Friday, July 31, which consists of $25 million building project that will link together three of its spaces and create permanent art galleries and additional new amenities.

The new “unique complex” will connect Brooklyn Academy of Music spaces at 651 and 653 Fulton Street and 230 Ashland Place through the addition of an elevator, balcony and seating, permanent art gallery space, terrace, audience amenities, and a ground floor cafe.

BAM’s longtime president Karen Brooks Hopkins, who resigned in June, said, “It will unite the whole block. This is the last piece of the BAM campus.”

$6.2 million is being contributed to the project by the city and the rest will be through fundraising. So far BAM has raised $17 million.

The project is planned to be finished by September 2017, with work beginning soon. The construction and design will be overseen by architectural firm Mitchell Giurgola Architects, LLP.

The New York Times reports:

“The project calls for new balcony seating in the Harvey and a one-story structure at 653 Fulton Street between BAM’s sites at 651 Fulton Street and 230 Ashland Place, which will have a cafe on the ground floor.

The properties facing Fulton Street will be connected by a new canopy that telegraphs BAM’s presence. “The idea is to use the marquee to connect the iconic old theater facade and adjacent spaces as a monolithic whole,” said Paul Broches, a partner at Mitchell Giurgola Architects, the project’s designer.

The Harvey, in a former 1904 vaudeville theater that became a first-run movie house before it was abandoned, has not received much attention since it was originally renovated by Hugh Hardy in 1987 to be the performing arts center’s second, somewhat smaller theater.”

“We have to improve the Harvey customer experience,” Mr. Fishman said. “We’re going to make the people who sit in the balcony a lot happier.”

Fishman added, “We need to have that presence on the corner as the neighborhood gets built up — we want to make sure our patrons know there’s a BAM Harvey down the street. The world around BAM is changing so rapidly, and the world around Brooklyn is changing so rapidly, you’ve got to react to it.”

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