Is it better to spend $42 million repairing two rundown city theatres, or $200 million turning them into a state-of-the-art facility?

That is one of the questions being brought to city hall next week as councillors debate how to divvy up the 2020 budget.

Built as the city of Toronto’s official 1967 Centennial project, the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts on Front St. E., opposite Berczy Park, requires an estimated $42 million in repairs just to bring it up to current municipal code, including making the building accessible to people with disabilities.

The board of TO Live, the agency that runs the city’s publicly owned theatre venues, is pitching instead to tear down the St. Lawrence Centre and build a new civic and cultural mecca to serve the performing arts community, residents and tourists.

The proposal includes using the $42 million from the city that would otherwise have been spent on repairs, along with $100 million in as-yet-unsecured city, provincial and federal money, and $38 million to $58 million that would be raised by TO Live’s recently created fundraising arm.

“We want to be a world-class city and to be a world-class city, we need world-class venues,” said TO Live’s vice-chair, Coun. Gary Crawford (Ward 20 Scarborough-Southwest).

“Arts and culture is an incredibly important part of every city — any international city — for tourism, for jobs. It’s an important part of the ecology of a successful city and I think that’s why moving forward with the redevelopment will be a very positive step forward for the city.”

While slight on detail, the proposal for redevelopment envisions:

a state-of-the-art performance hall, with flexible configurations allowing for 750 seated guests or a standing audience of up to 5,000 people;

a second, 300-500 seat theatre space;

a welcoming public space, including a better lobby and food and beverage on offer;

outdoor spaces, including a connection to Berczy Park across the street;

three rehearsal spaces;

administrative and support facilities.

“I think there’s an opportunity here to make a mark, not just for the local community, but also, if we do it right, to make a mark internationally, to say, this is how you create a sense of community with a partnership of the arts and culture and really redefine the downtown core in the city of Toronto,” said Clyde Wagner, president and CEO of TO Live and the former executive producer of the Luminato Festival.

TO Live is the city agency that oversees Meridian Hall (formerly the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts) on Front St. and the Meridian Arts Centre (formerly the Toronto Centre for the Arts), near Yonge St. and Sheppard Ave., as well as the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts. The agency receives about $5 million in annual subsidies from the city.

The St. Lawrence Centre contains the 868-seat Bluma Appel Theatre and 497-seat Jane Mallett Theatre. Both theatres are so dated they can’t properly serve the evolving theatre scene, which increasingly requires stages that can be easily transformed into different configurations, said Leslie Lester, vice-president of the centre’s redevelopment, on a recent tour of the site.

Past renovations have provided temporary fixes, but the building has not kept current with industry-wide standards for performing arts companies.

The redevelopment proposes turning the site back into the cultural and civic mecca it was meant to be when it first opened in 1970. The larger theatre was meant to house performing arts and the smaller one was put to use as a town hall — the first event there was a debate on the proposed Spadina Expressway.

“I understand the potential of this particular real estate. It thrills me,” said Lester, who was project manager for the Young Centre for the Performing Arts in the Distillery District. “As a Torontonian, I’d love to see something magical happen here.”

She points out that in addition to being across the street from the popular Berczy Park, the St. Lawrence Centre is just a few steps from Meridian Hall and two blocks from Union Station. From the west windows of the existing building, the CN Tower is visible.

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Both theatres at the St. Lawrence Centre are currently underused. The hope is that a new facility would be much more widely used and make more money, perhaps eliminating the need for a subsidy.

The city’s stages are not commercial stages — their mandate is to represent the city on stage, according to Wagner. Still, the hope is that the redeveloped venue would be a commercial success.

“It’s very different from a commercial mandate. Having said that, we want to build a stage that lowers that subsidy and maximizes every dollar the city gives us,” said Wagner.