The Rochester Performing Arts Center, the chameleonic pie-in-the-sky theater that reached for the stars but never got off the ground, died Wednesday in intensive care. It was 24.

The cause of death was acute monetary thrombosis, a cash flow clot, immediately following the removal of a $25 million feeding tube financed by billionaire Tom Golisano that had sustained the theater for more than a year.

In a statement from the theater’s bedside, Golisano said he ended the philanthropic life support because the Performing Arts Center was “no closer to becoming a reality” and had “not garnered the financial support it needs from the community.”

The theater died just two weeks after Mayor Lovely Warren and one of the developers who gives money to her political campaigns, Dave Christa, announced plans to make it a cornerstone of a $250 million downtown entertainment complex on the Genesee River.

In the architectural rendering, this incarnation of the Performing Arts Center shone gloriously from a glass-paneled high rise in a gleaming downtown of the future, where trees grow on rooftops and everybody loves musicals and riding bicycles.

Although the theater had been chronically ill, its death appeared to come as a shock to the mayor, who issued a statement saying her administration remained committed to it, as though it could be resurrected. She even gave it a new name, the “Riverside Performing Arts Center.”

The Performing Arts Center was a local celebrity in the broadest sense, an ever-changing vision of startling charisma that simultaneously made headlines and punchlines for its inability to get built.

Born in 1994 at the Auditorium Theatre, a former Masonic Temple on East Main Street that is home to the Rochester Broadway Theatre League, the Performing Arts Center sprung eternal from the mind and mouth of its fast-talking champion, Arnie Rothschild.

In those days, Rothschild was the unpaid chairman of the Theatre League board. But he would eventually become its paid chief executive officer, too, when the board, under his leadership, burned the manual for nonprofit best practices and gave him the dual roles.

The Performing Arts Center, he said, was needed for the Theatre League to attract the hottest touring Broadway shows — The Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon, Wicked, The Lion King, and the like — that always ended up coming to town anyway.

Rothschild was then eyeing two locations at High Falls and Gibbs Street, a strategy that proved prescient in that the site of the Performing Arts Center would forever be a moving target.

“We don’t expect government to build this for us,” Rothschild told the Democrat and Chronicle at the time. “We’ll go out and raise the money ourselves. We really believe this can be built by the end of ’96.”

But the Theatre League never raised any money and the Performing Arts Center was never built.

The only outward sign of a private fundraising effort was an oversized, sun-bleached thermometer that sat on the Auditorium Theatre lawn for years, its red mercury stuck at the base, like a sad novelty check that would never be cashed.

The Performing Arts Center lived only on architectural drafting paper, on poster board mock-ups, in feasibility studies and in the imaginations of Rothschild and a handful of politicians for whom he produced campaign ads on the side.

Known as Arnie’s white whale, the Performing Arts Center surfaced over the years at 19 different locations in greater Rochester, each time reinventing itself in a fashion redolent of Madonna. Always glamorous. Always trendy. Always chic.

There was Clinton Crossings, the former Rascal Café, the Rochester Savings Bank, the moribund Medley Centre mall, Marketplace Drive, Fishers Ridge and Finger Lakes Gaming and Racetrack.

The Performing Arts Center never married but was for a time engaged to the failed Renaissance Square project, a curious amalgam of a bus station, a community college and a state-of-the-art theater that was to rescue downtown Rochester from the brink of collapse.

It was the theater’s on-again-off-again love affair with Midtown Plaza, however, that shaped its life and career as an elusive Broadway roadhouse. Their beautiful yet turbulent relationship was less a matter of surrender than it was a selfless acknowledgement of each other’s boundaries.

On four occasions — 1994, 2002, 2010 and 2017 — the pair flirted with marriage. The most recent was last year when Warren announced she had selected another developer who funds her political campaigns, Bob Morgan, to build the Performing Arts Center and other stuff there.

That went south in June with the indictments of two executives in Morgan’s company, Morgan’s son and nephew, on wire and bank fraud charges.

The Performing Arts Center is survived by Rothschild, a more cynical city, an endless stream of running jokes, and countless architects, consultants and grant-writers with nothing left to do.

A memorial service and ash scattering to be held at the William A. Johnson Jr. Terminal Building at the Port of Rochester will be scheduled at a date to be determined.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to The Morgan Companies Legal Defense Fund and Friends of Lovely Warren campaign committee.

David Andreatta is a Democrat and Chronicle columnist. He can be reached at dandreatta@gannett.com.

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