But as visions of flashy productions dance in the footlights of those imagined venues, two state-of-the-art theaters—one of them with more than 900 seats, Manhattan’s largest below the theater district—sit dark most nights in Tribeca.

The Tribeca Performing Arts Center, commonly called “Tribeca” for short, is nestled within Borough of Manhattan Community College and up the long ramp from Chambers Street, near West Street. Its entrance is shared by the school’s 17,000 students, its box office off to the side in the college’s large foyer. A sign on the school’s brown brick facade, juxtaposed above a basketball court—announces the theaters. “Performing arts downtown for all New York,” it says.

Though a noteworthy array of shows have appeared there, the New York that lies next door seems to pay little notice. The center offers a successful children’s series, “Family Folk and Fairy Tales,” but most other productions are poorly attended by local residents and workers.

“There seems to be a disconnect between the community and the performing arts center,” said Community Board 1 chair Madelyn Wils, a Tribeca resident who was last in the theaters years ago, when her children were much younger.

Linda Herring, Tribeca’s executive director since 1996, said she wishes she could change that.

“We’re the best kept secret in town,” she said last month, seated in her subterranean office next door to the 262-seat Theater Two.

Programming has grown sparser these days, and that doesn’t help. Theater rentals, which largely fund the center’s own productions, are half what they were two years ago.

“It’s all about budget restraints,” said Herring, who served for 11 years as managing director of the New Federal Theatre on Grand Street. “More money, more activity.”

Herring said she and her staff, who operate on a $500,000 budget, market the center’s productions to Lower Manhattan by placing pamphlets in stores and apartment buildings and by attending community meetings. But she and others said that it likely would take “star power” to draw local audiences to a theater that must compete with Manhattan’s big-name venues.

“I wanted to bring in the Four Tops or the Temptations. That was $30,000 plus I’d have to supply the band. They had to fly first class. They had to have a suite. It would have been a hoot, but when I started calculating, it wouldn’t be possible. No one could afford to come.”

“Here we have a facility in our neighborhood that, if the director had a bigger budget, she could commission new work, support artists and have more recognizable names,” said Liz Thompson, executive director of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC). “It’s about supporting the artist.”

The theaters, which opened with the college in 1984, are meant first to serve the students. The college has a theater program and uses the space for other activities, including two months of student registration.

But the performance center’s multiple guises—as college space, rental space, and theatrical performance space for occasional offerings—may also blur its public image.

“If you don’t have a budget with programming it’s hard to make a splash with it,” said Amy Chin, whose Chinese Folk Dance Company this month, for the 12th year, presents its dance celebration of the Chinese New Year at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. “If you have body builders one week and Chinese dancers the next, what is the public supposed to think? I’d get confused.”

The center’s mandate is to provide multicultural programming, reflecting BMCC’s diverse and largely minority student body. (Students, Herring estimated, make up about 10 percent of the audience.) But it is broad enough, BMCC officials said, to include a range of offerings to satisfy everyone.

“Our mandate is to bring in programming that would serve our students and the community,” said Sadie Bragg, BMCC’s vice president for academic affairs. “We want to be a viable alternative to people for a theater Downtown.”
What kind of programming would that be?
Said Herring: “I need this community to stand up and say what they want to see—and support.”

The college plans to solicit community opinion this summer through focus groups, Herring said. In the meantime, she recently reached out to a group of six Lower Manhattan dance companies in an effort to bring local artists to the center’s offerings.

Downtown Dance Partners—Battery Dance Company, Jane Comfort, Amy Chin’s Chinese Folk Dance Company, Karole Armitage, Risa Jaroslow and Molissa Fenley—will share billing next fall in a series of performances at the center.

For most of them, it will be their first appearance on the Tribeca Performing Arts Centers stage.

Jonathan Hollander, whose Tribeca-based Battery Dance Company has been appearing at two midtown venues for years, said that it’s about time.

“There are a lot of people who believe that Lower Manhattan is the outreaches,” he said. “That is not the message I should be listening to.”

Those who would like to see cultural institutions help revive Lower Manhattan often mention big names like the 92nd Street Y and City Opera—“powerful programming engines,” as Carl Weisbrod, president of the Alliance for Downtown New York, puts it.

But some look at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center and say it is also worth remembering what is close to home.

“While committing capital dollars, we should examine the resources we have,” said Liz Thompson, of LMCC. “You have to send dollars to the artists that make a building great.”
Battery Dance’s Hollander agrees. “Even if they want to build something special Downtown, shouldn’t phase one be to build what is already here and make it fantastic?”