The ghost light goes out: alumni reminisce as Drake Performance and Event Center is torn down

Zoe Botley
Wed, 15 Nov 2023 01:05:53 +0000
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Demolition of the Drake Performance and Event Center officially began last week.?Credit: Zoe Botley | Lantern Reporter

After housing decades of memorable performances, Drake Performance and Event Center’s closing night has finally arrived.

The center, originally built in 1972 as a second union to help students on West Campus feel more connected to the university, is being torn down this week as part of the Cannon Drive Relocation project to add a 500-year flood protection for the Columbus campus. While faculty and alumni already said goodbye during a ceremony in April, many are finding its demolition a time to reminisce on memories held in the rubble.

Associate professor of design Brad Steinmetz said the goodbye ceremony was a nice end to his time in the building, which faculty vacated in May.

“It was a wonderful opportunity to get to meet alumni and to have a real moment to say goodbye to the space,” Steinmetz said. “Theater is a space-dependent art, and so all the work we do is so intimately tied to the venue we’re in, so it was important to be able to say farewell to our old venue.”

Kevin McClatchy, associate professor in the Department of Theatre, Film and Media Arts and an alum, said the goodbye ceremony gave attendees the opportunity to bring the center’s ghost light, a light always left on in a theater, to the department’s new building on College Road.

“People were signing doors and signing the stage wall— and it was great,” McClatchy said. ”[Praising] the artistry of everyone who passed through the halls, got up on stages and stepped in front of the cameras,”

The new building and its sister, the Timashev Family Music Building, provide safer conditions and easier operation than the Drake, Steinmetz said. In his dozen or so years in the building, he saw the decline of the building, including failing equipment and wildlife finding its way into classrooms.?

Even so, McClatchy said he thinks fondly of his time in the building, even with its many repairs and iterations across 50 years, because he was able to help students reach their full potential and push them out of their boundaries in the center’s classrooms and theaters.

“You treasure those moments as an educator but also as a performer, and those memories are just soaked into every tile in the Drake,” McClatchy said.?

Though recent students and faculty might have enjoyed productions in the Drake before its closure, the building was also home to much more. While acting as a second union, the building was home to “Archie’s Alley,” a bowling alley and bar, which closed in 1999, aptly to lack of use, according to a previous Lantern article.?

Similarly, students were welcome to pool tables and water rentals to use on the Olentangy River, which sat just behind the building.?

While home to the Department of Theatre, Film and Media Arts, stints from national shows were recorded in the building, including “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” which was recorded in the Drake for a week in 2006.?

Steinmetz also recalls intimate memories of the building, such as in 2006, when Comedy Central did a weeklong midterm titled “Midwest Midterm Midtacular” that centered around a special they filmed for their television program “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”

“[The Drake’s Bowen Theater] was a flexible venue, so we were able to easily move the seating around and rearrange things so that everything ‘The Daily Show’ needed could fit in that space,” Steinmetz said. “It was a really fun and a really exciting weekend, great experience for our students as well.”

In the end, the building’s remoteness from the rest of campus was draining for many, including Steinmetz, and it could no longer attract the same crowd it once did as West Campus union.?

With the building almost completely down, McClatchy said the memories made there won’t go down with it.

“It makes it a little more urgent to keep those [memories] alive,” McClatchy said. “The physical structure is disintegrating day by day.”