The few people who visit the Sawtooth Building these days sweat under hard hats. They breathe in a good bit of dust, find dirt difficult to avoid and cope with a relentless cacophony of drills and other tools.
The Sawtooth Building, along with the former AC Delco building next door at Second and Spruce streets, has come alive with the sights, sounds and smells of extensive renovations.
The goal of the work is clear: an $11 million Downtown Center for the Arts with a new multi-use performance venue called Hanesbrands Theatre. The Sawtooth renovations include reconfiguring galleries, performance spaces and visual-arts classrooms for the Sawtooth School for Visual Art. The theater, with its 300 seats and its ability to create different stage setups, will help satisfy the demand for a smaller space that can accommodate a range of dance, theater and film productions.
The endpoint of the work is also clear, at least to officials of the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County. In July of 2008, they said they had raised enough money to begin work on the council-owned center and were lining up financing for a project that was expected to last 18 months. Richard Emmett, the council's chief operating officer, said Monday that work started in December and would be done in June or July of 2010.
"We hope to have some opening festivities in September or October (of 2010)," Emmett said. "We're on schedule."
But at least one potential stumbling block remains.
The Sawtooth plan represents the $11 million capital portion of an overall $26 million campaign by the arts council. (The campaign's other goals include $5 million for an endowment to sustain the center and the theater, $1 million for a three-year effort to promote Winston-Salem as the "City of the Arts" to visitors and potential employees, and $9 million for the council's annual fundraising drives over three years that began in 2008.) Although about $21.4 million has been pledged so far, the council must still raise $4.6 million -- money that would "complete the capital portion of the campaign," Emmett said.
"We have to do that in order to have this building ready and open," he said. "The hard-construction costs do not include funds for furnishing and stuff like that. We have to raise all the money so we can have the money for … all the finishing touches."
The council has borrowed about $7 million to cover hard-construction costs of the renovations until an equal amount of capital pledges come in.
Emmett expressed confidence in future fundraising efforts, pointing to what the council described as "full participation" among two leading firms and substantial increases in giving among city- and school-system employees.
"We're still out there," Emmett said. "We've had some great successes."
Milton Rhodes, the council's president and chief executive, also sounded positive about the prospects for a successful conclusion of the capital portion of the campaign.
"We're really working hard on getting that closed out and trying to be sure that all people participate," he said. "We've got until Oct. 1, 2010, to get it done. The opening ceremony is beginning to be planned. A large group that's been assembled has put together several different opening events."
Rhodes spoke of the council being on the brink of a major breakthrough with the center.
"It complements the arts district; it sets up a theater district," he said. "Those two anchors become a leverage point to get in more restaurants and more retail."
If the remaining $4.6 million is not raised, the council "has developed contingency plans," Emmett e-mailed -- but added that the council's board would decide how to proceed.
Art tour
Emmett recently took the press on a tour of the renovation work being done by the Frank L. Blum Construction Co. If potential funders had been with Emmett and Rhodes (who joined the tour briefly), they would have seen several tangible benefits to the city's arts communities that are becoming clearer as the renovation work proceeds.
The tour began at the Marshall Street entrance of the Sawtooth Building, bringing the skeletal forms of several future Sawtooth classrooms into view.
"It really is going to enhance the size of the classrooms and the quality of the classrooms for the Sawtooth School and allow some of their programs that are really growing to have space to grow," Emmett said.
What was once the RJ Reynolds Gallery has been totally gutted and will be renamed RJ Reynolds Place. Before the renovations began, pedestrians on the Marshall Street side of the Sawtooth Building couldn't know for certain what was happening in the gallery area because indoor ramps and a staircase obstructed the view. Now, they can look through huge glass windows to see inside Reynolds Place, which will present everything from chamber music to weddings. The same goes for a planned ceramics studio, near Winston Square Park, in an area once occupied by restaurants. This will help demystify what happens in the Sawtooth Building and, presumably, attract greater participation.
As the renovation work has proceeded, there have been a few minor changes.
The original plans for Hanesbrands Theatre, for which Hanesbrands gave a $2 million gift toward construction, called for a covered, open-air walkway along Spruce Street. This feature, which would have taken up at least 7 feet, has been eliminated.
"We felt we could get more out of having a little more space in the theater," Emmett said.
Council officials are also planning two permanent installations of public art in both the center and the theater.
A national search has unearthed three finalists for art in the lobby of the Hanesbrands Theatre as well as three finalists for art in the center's main entrance lobby facing Spruce Street. Formal proposals must be submitted by Aug. 15.
"I was really impressed with the artists and what they would do for some of these spaces," Rhodes said. "I wish I had more money for public art."
■ Ken Keuffel can be reached at 727-7337 or at kkeuffel@wsjournal.com
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