Gateway, The Paramount, other Long Island venues used $93M in COVID grants to keep shows going
Curtains are still rising on Long Island stages because of a $93 million life preserver from the federal government during the pandemic's height, arts industry executives said.
Just over 100 local performing arts centers, independent movie theaters, bars with live music and producers of entertainment won COVID-19 relief last year via the federal Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program, according to a Newsday analysis of new data.
For some, the SVOG money arrived in the nick of time as they had used up earlier help, including Paycheck Protection Program loans, COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loans, state and county grants, and private donations.
"We would not have made it because we didn't have the resources to survive," said Paul Allan, executive artistic director at the Gateway, which has been producing plays and musicals since 1950. The Bellport theater won $3.4 million in SVOG funding.
The largest grant — $9.1 million — went to the Paramount, which presents live concerts, comedy shows, boxing and other entertainment in Huntington village. The average grant amount was $894,370, the analysis shows.
That seems like a lot of money at first glance, but arts executives said many venues were closed for more than a year due to the lockdown imposed by New York State.
Even as venues have been kept afloat, some continue to tread water and hundreds of jobs haven't come back to the sector.
At the Gateway, Allan said he was still using SVOG funds earlier this year to pay bills because the first two musicals of the current season lost money: "Head Over Heels" and Disney's "The Little Mermaid." The 472-seat theater reopened in June 2021 to smaller audiences as people remained leery about catching the coronavirus.
Allan said the SVOG covered the wages of employees — about 80 people work on each show — as well as production costs, utilities and other expenses. The Gateway is now close to breaking even, though he's worried a future recession will cause people to forgo seeing a show.
"COVID will be behind us in 2023 and the new challenge will be staying on top of the economic situation — how it affects people's ability to go out," Allan said.
The Gateway is among the performing arts venues, playhouses, concert halls and bars with live entertainment that received 44% of Long Island's SVOG funding. Talent agents and theatrical producers snagged 21% of the dollars, festivals and carnivals won 19% and independent cinemas got 13%.
All were hurting because the state shut down the economy for months in 2020 to slow COVID-19's spread, and even after activities resumed, people stayed home because of new variants last year, according to Lauren Wagner, executive director of Long Island Arts Alliance, which represents more than 100 arts and cultural organizations.
“Without the SVOG, many, many organizations would have permanently closed their doors,” she said. “This program was an absolute lifeline.”
Wagner and others said the federal grants supported 104 arts organizations that by 2021 were seeing fewer donations and facing refund requests from ticket holders for shows that were either canceled or postponed.
“Every month [the economic situation] got worse,” Wagner said, citing the alliance's survey of 84 local arts groups that found they lost more than $49.4 million in the pandemic's first year and at least 2,350 employees were laid off or working fewer hours.
“We were in a state of panic,” she said.
Of the local SVOG recipients, 24 secured $1 million or more, according to the data from the U.S. Small Business Administration, which runs the program. Newsday obtained the data under the Freedom of Information Act.
After the Paramount, the next largest awards went to Metropolitan Entertainment Consultants in Port Washington, which received $5 million, and Pinnacle Entertainment Inc. in Levittown, which got $4.7 million. Metropolitan produces concerts by Jon Anderson, Patti LaBelle and others, while Pinnacle is a talent agent for singers and musicians.
The Paramount's owners, through a spokesman, declined to comment for this article. Representatives of Metropolitan and Pinnacle didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Rounding out the list of Top 5 recipients is the John W. Engeman Theater in Northport, $4.5 million, and MidAmerica Productions in Rockville Centre, $3.7 million. An executive at MidAmerica, which produces chamber music and choral concerts around the world, declined to comment.
Kevin J. O’Neill, Engeman’s co-owner and managing director, said he is grateful for the SVOG, but it wasn’t a panacea.
Grant amounts were determined by the SBA and couldn’t equal more than 45% of the applicant’s 2019 gross earned revenue. An applicant could receive a maximum of $10 million, according to SBA regulations.
“SBA specified what we could use the money for; in particular, they wanted to keep people off unemployment,” O’Neill said, adding the Engeman has 16 full-time employees. “SBA required receipts and other proof that its rules were followed. Otherwise, the money had to be returned,” he said.
Besides paying employees’ wages and health insurance, the 400-seat for-profit theater used the SVOG for taxes, utility bills, rent for a set-construction shop in Ronkonkoma and a new ventilation system.
O’Neill was active in the nationwide Save Our Stages campaign that persuaded Congress and then-President Donald Trump to establish the SVOG with $16.2 billion in funding in December 2020. O'Neill said he made frequent telephone calls and text messages to Rep. Thomas Suozzi (D-Glen Cove) and others.
“I told [Suozzi] that independently owned performing arts centers were going to be destroyed, and if that happened the economies of downtowns would take much longer to recover because the centers are a big economic driver,” O’Neill said, adding that the Engeman brings an estimated 125,000 people to Northport every year.
Mulcahy’s Pub & Concert Hall in Wantagh also lobbied for the SVOG’s creation, hosting a Save Our Stages event in September 2020 with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who championed the program.
It “was a lifesaver; it helped a ton,” said John Murray Jr., owner of Mulcahy’s, which received $1.5 million in grant funds.
The Save Our Stages campaign emphasized the economic contributions of arts organizations, from jobs and tourist spending to audiences patronizing nearby restaurants, bars and shops on performance days.
On Long Island, the arts groups that were eligible for SVOG grants employed a total of 5,480 people in January-March 2019, one year before the virus struck. The sector was still short 700 jobs earlier this year, based on the most recent available data from the state Department of Labor.
The recovery of the arts contributes to the recovery of Long Island's economy, said Richard Vogel, an economist and dean of Farmingdale State College’s business school.
“Arts activities generate income and create the vibrant life that everybody is looking for in the community," he said. "Life is about more than going to work, coming home and going to sleep.”
Vogel said playhouses, movie theaters, concert halls and other places that offer live entertainment contribute to a community’s quality of life, which in turn attracts companies and the employees that they need.
In Huntington village, the owners of restaurants, bars and retail shops are thrilled to have the Paramount back to running a full season. Among the entertainers scheduled to take the stage in December and January are Theresa Caputo, Andrew Dice Clay, Debbie Gibson, Kevin James and Sal Valentinetti.
"When the Paramount has shows, the [audience] tends to fan out to many places in the village," said Jack Palladino, owner of Christopher's, a 40-year-old pub and eatery on Wall Street. "When you have 1,600 to 2,000 people attending a show, the challenge is to get some of them in your door."
He and others said the Paramount draws crowds from outside of Huntington. "There's a trickle down benefit" to bars and restaurants in the village, said Palladino, who has 15 to 20 employees.
Long Island secured 4.5% of the $2.1 billion in SVOG grants sent to New York State. New York City got 80%, or $1.7 billion for 940 venues, according to the Newsday analysis.
Besides the much-needed infusion of cash, the SVOG provided a psychological boost to arts workers who were weary after months of producing drive-in concerts and Zoom events, selling messages on theater marquees in return for donations, and other activities aimed at remaining relevant to the community.
“We felt forgotten by government in the early days of the pandemic; that nobody cared what happened to the arts,” said Julienne Penza-Boone, executive director of the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center. “Then the SVOG was announced and it was like, ‘This is going to be OK. We’re not going to be diminished in any way,’ ” she said.
The 425-seat center’s survival was never in doubt because of community backing. But there was uncertainty about what types of shows the center could afford to put on when it reopened in August 2021, Penza-Boone said.
The center spent 63% of its $1.1 million SVOG grant on artist fees, which include backstage personnel, equipment rentals, food and gasoline.
“It was about getting back on our feet and we needed to present shows that people would be excited about,” said Penza-Boone, who has worked at the Westhampton Beach center for 14 years.
Nationwide, just 26% of the 17,637 venues that submitted SVOG applications didn't receive aid, the data show.
Republicist, a consulting firm in Manhattan that manages the careers of musicians and promotes their shows, was turned down on multiple occasions.
Republicist went from $38,000 in gross revenue per month, on average, to zero when COVID struck. It closed studios in Long Beach and Brooklyn. The firm’s founder, Joseph W. Villanueva, said he subsisted mostly on meals of Goya chickpeas for 18 months but refused to lay off the seven full-time employees.
Villanueva said he believes his application for $180,000 in SVOG money was rejected because Republicist’s federal income tax return for 2019, its first year in business, was stuck in a processing backlog at the Internal Revenue Service.
“SBA looked at us with suspicious eyes when there was no IRS record of our successful 2019 year,” said Villanueva, who also serves as Republicist's chief strategy officer. “To them, it looked as if we were a shell company that was trying to receive funds fraudulently.”
Once the tax return was processed earlier this year, SBA approved Republicist for a $108,000 EIDL loan but so far refuses to reconsider the SVOG application again, he said.
SBA stopped awarding grants in July, though $473 million was held back to pay “additional award amounts, if any, resulting from litigation and quality assurance reviews,” agency spokesman Han Nguyen told Newsday. He said SBA is working “with existing grantees to ensure [they] receive the full amount for which they are eligible.”
At the Tilles Center for the Performing Arts, Executive Director Tom Dunn said $3.5 million in SVOG funds led to the rehiring of workers and preparations for reopening in fall 2021. The center, on the Brookville campus of Long Island University, has 10 full-time employees and 2,706 seats between two performance spaces.
Dunn said 2022 ticket sales “are looking good but it takes an enormous amount of work to get people out of their houses to come see live entertainment.”
He joined Tilles in August from the Southampton Arts Center, which he led during the pandemic’s worst days.
In addition to its gallery, the arts center hosts film screenings and live performances, which made it eligible for an SVOG of $267,964. The grant came at a critical time, Dunn said.
“I had calculated when we were going to run out of cash,” he recalled. “It was, no joke, dire circumstances."
Curtains are still rising on Long Island stages because of a $93 million life preserver from the federal government during the pandemic's height, arts industry executives said.
Just over 100 local performing arts centers, independent movie theaters, bars with live music and producers of entertainment won COVID-19 relief last year via the federal Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program, according to a Newsday analysis of new data.
For some, the SVOG money arrived in the nick of time as they had used up earlier help, including Paycheck Protection Program loans, COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loans, state and county grants, and private donations.
"We would not have made it because we didn't have the resources to survive," said Paul Allan, executive artistic director at the Gateway, which has been producing plays and musicals since 1950. The Bellport theater won $3.4 million in SVOG funding.
The largest grant — $9.1 million — went to the Paramount, which presents live concerts, comedy shows, boxing and other entertainment in Huntington village. The average grant amount was $894,370, the analysis shows.
That seems like a lot of money at first glance, but arts executives said many venues were closed for more than a year due to the lockdown imposed by New York State.
Even as venues have been kept afloat, some continue to tread water and hundreds of jobs haven't come back to the sector.
At the Gateway, Allan said he was still using SVOG funds earlier this year to pay bills because the first two musicals of the current season lost money: "Head Over Heels" and Disney's "The Little Mermaid." The 472-seat theater reopened in June 2021 to smaller audiences as people remained leery about catching the coronavirus.
Recession is next worry
Allan said the SVOG covered the wages of employees — about 80 people work on each show — as well as production costs, utilities and other expenses. The Gateway is now close to breaking even, though he's worried a future recession will cause people to forgo seeing a show.
"COVID will be behind us in 2023 and the new challenge will be staying on top of the economic situation — how it affects people's ability to go out," Allan said.
The Gateway is among the performing arts venues, playhouses, concert halls and bars with live entertainment that received 44% of Long Island's SVOG funding. Talent agents and theatrical producers snagged 21% of the dollars, festivals and carnivals won 19% and independent cinemas got 13%.
All were hurting because the state shut down the economy for months in 2020 to slow COVID-19's spread, and even after activities resumed, people stayed home because of new variants last year, according to Lauren Wagner, executive director of Long Island Arts Alliance, which represents more than 100 arts and cultural organizations.
“Without the SVOG, many, many organizations would have permanently closed their doors,” she said. “This program was an absolute lifeline.”
Wagner and others said the federal grants supported 104 arts organizations that by 2021 were seeing fewer donations and facing refund requests from ticket holders for shows that were either canceled or postponed.
“Every month [the economic situation] got worse,” Wagner said, citing the alliance's survey of 84 local arts groups that found they lost more than $49.4 million in the pandemic's first year and at least 2,350 employees were laid off or working fewer hours.
“We were in a state of panic,” she said.
Of the local SVOG recipients, 24 secured $1 million or more, according to the data from the U.S. Small Business Administration, which runs the program. Newsday obtained the data under the Freedom of Information Act.
After the Paramount, the next largest awards went to Metropolitan Entertainment Consultants in Port Washington, which received $5 million, and Pinnacle Entertainment Inc. in Levittown, which got $4.7 million. Metropolitan produces concerts by Jon Anderson, Patti LaBelle and others, while Pinnacle is a talent agent for singers and musicians.
The Paramount's owners, through a spokesman, declined to comment for this article. Representatives of Metropolitan and Pinnacle didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Rounding out the list of Top 5 recipients is the John W. Engeman Theater in Northport, $4.5 million, and MidAmerica Productions in Rockville Centre, $3.7 million. An executive at MidAmerica, which produces chamber music and choral concerts around the world, declined to comment.
Kevin J. O’Neill, Engeman’s co-owner and managing director, said he is grateful for the SVOG, but it wasn’t a panacea.
Grant amounts were determined by the SBA and couldn’t equal more than 45% of the applicant’s 2019 gross earned revenue. An applicant could receive a maximum of $10 million, according to SBA regulations.
“SBA specified what we could use the money for; in particular, they wanted to keep people off unemployment,” O’Neill said, adding the Engeman has 16 full-time employees. “SBA required receipts and other proof that its rules were followed. Otherwise, the money had to be returned,” he said.
Besides paying employees’ wages and health insurance, the 400-seat for-profit theater used the SVOG for taxes, utility bills, rent for a set-construction shop in Ronkonkoma and a new ventilation system.
The John W. Engeman Theater draws an estimated 125,000 people a year to Northport, said managing director Kevin J. O’Neill. Credit: Howard Simmons
O’Neill was active in the nationwide Save Our Stages campaign that persuaded Congress and then-President Donald Trump to establish the SVOG with $16.2 billion in funding in December 2020. O'Neill said he made frequent telephone calls and text messages to Rep. Thomas Suozzi (D-Glen Cove) and others.
“I told [Suozzi] that independently owned performing arts centers were going to be destroyed, and if that happened the economies of downtowns would take much longer to recover because the centers are a big economic driver,” O’Neill said, adding that the Engeman brings an estimated 125,000 people to Northport every year.
Mulcahy’s Pub & Concert Hall in Wantagh also lobbied for the SVOG’s creation, hosting a Save Our Stages event in September 2020 with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who championed the program.
It “was a lifesaver; it helped a ton,” said John Murray Jr., owner of Mulcahy’s, which received $1.5 million in grant funds.
Arts as economic driver
The Save Our Stages campaign emphasized the economic contributions of arts organizations, from jobs and tourist spending to audiences patronizing nearby restaurants, bars and shops on performance days.
On Long Island, the arts groups that were eligible for SVOG grants employed a total of 5,480 people in January-March 2019, one year before the virus struck. The sector was still short 700 jobs earlier this year, based on the most recent available data from the state Department of Labor.
The recovery of the arts contributes to the recovery of Long Island's economy, said Richard Vogel, an economist and dean of Farmingdale State College’s business school.
“Arts activities generate income and create the vibrant life that everybody is looking for in the community," he said. "Life is about more than going to work, coming home and going to sleep.”
Vogel said playhouses, movie theaters, concert halls and other places that offer live entertainment contribute to a community’s quality of life, which in turn attracts companies and the employees that they need.
In Huntington village, the owners of restaurants, bars and retail shops are thrilled to have the Paramount back to running a full season. Among the entertainers scheduled to take the stage in December and January are Theresa Caputo, Andrew Dice Clay, Debbie Gibson, Kevin James and Sal Valentinetti.
Ripple effect
"When the Paramount has shows, the [audience] tends to fan out to many places in the village," said Jack Palladino, owner of Christopher's, a 40-year-old pub and eatery on Wall Street. "When you have 1,600 to 2,000 people attending a show, the challenge is to get some of them in your door."
He and others said the Paramount draws crowds from outside of Huntington. "There's a trickle down benefit" to bars and restaurants in the village, said Palladino, who has 15 to 20 employees.
Long Island secured 4.5% of the $2.1 billion in SVOG grants sent to New York State. New York City got 80%, or $1.7 billion for 940 venues, according to the Newsday analysis.
Besides the much-needed infusion of cash, the SVOG provided a psychological boost to arts workers who were weary after months of producing drive-in concerts and Zoom events, selling messages on theater marquees in return for donations, and other activities aimed at remaining relevant to the community.
“We felt forgotten by government in the early days of the pandemic; that nobody cared what happened to the arts,” said Julienne Penza-Boone, executive director of the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center. “Then the SVOG was announced and it was like, ‘This is going to be OK. We’re not going to be diminished in any way,’ ” she said.
Julienne Penza-Boone, executive director at Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center, said the SVOG program was a huge relief to LI venues. Credit: Newsday/Alejandra Villa Loarca
The 425-seat center’s survival was never in doubt because of community backing. But there was uncertainty about what types of shows the center could afford to put on when it reopened in August 2021, Penza-Boone said.
The center spent 63% of its $1.1 million SVOG grant on artist fees, which include backstage personnel, equipment rentals, food and gasoline.
“It was about getting back on our feet and we needed to present shows that people would be excited about,” said Penza-Boone, who has worked at the Westhampton Beach center for 14 years.
Nationwide, just 26% of the 17,637 venues that submitted SVOG applications didn't receive aid, the data show.
Republicist, a consulting firm in Manhattan that manages the careers of musicians and promotes their shows, was turned down on multiple occasions.
Republicist went from $38,000 in gross revenue per month, on average, to zero when COVID struck. It closed studios in Long Beach and Brooklyn. The firm’s founder, Joseph W. Villanueva, said he subsisted mostly on meals of Goya chickpeas for 18 months but refused to lay off the seven full-time employees.
Joseph W. Villanueva, founder of Republicist, an arts management company, was turned down for an SVOG grant. Credit: Craig Ruttle
Villanueva said he believes his application for $180,000 in SVOG money was rejected because Republicist’s federal income tax return for 2019, its first year in business, was stuck in a processing backlog at the Internal Revenue Service.
“SBA looked at us with suspicious eyes when there was no IRS record of our successful 2019 year,” said Villanueva, who also serves as Republicist's chief strategy officer. “To them, it looked as if we were a shell company that was trying to receive funds fraudulently.”
Once the tax return was processed earlier this year, SBA approved Republicist for a $108,000 EIDL loan but so far refuses to reconsider the SVOG application again, he said.
SBA stopped awarding grants in July, though $473 million was held back to pay “additional award amounts, if any, resulting from litigation and quality assurance reviews,” agency spokesman Han Nguyen told Newsday. He said SBA is working “with existing grantees to ensure [they] receive the full amount for which they are eligible.”
Bringing audiences back
At the Tilles Center for the Performing Arts, Executive Director Tom Dunn said $3.5 million in SVOG funds led to the rehiring of workers and preparations for reopening in fall 2021. The center, on the Brookville campus of Long Island University, has 10 full-time employees and 2,706 seats between two performance spaces.
Tom Dunn, executive director of Tilles Center for the Performing Arts at LIU Post, said it's still challenging to attract patrons to live events. Credit: Debbie Egan-Chin
Dunn said 2022 ticket sales “are looking good but it takes an enormous amount of work to get people out of their houses to come see live entertainment.”
He joined Tilles in August from the Southampton Arts Center, which he led during the pandemic’s worst days.
In addition to its gallery, the arts center hosts film screenings and live performances, which made it eligible for an SVOG of $267,964. The grant came at a critical time, Dunn said.
“I had calculated when we were going to run out of cash,” he recalled. “It was, no joke, dire circumstances."
James T. Madore writes about Long Island business news including the economy, development, and the relationship between government and business. He previously served as Albany bureau chief.
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Newsday Live Music Series: Long Island Idols Newsday Live presents a special evening of music and conversation with local singers who grabbed the national spotlight on shows like "The Voice," "America's Got Talent,""The X-Factor" and "American Idol." Newsday Senior Lifestyle Host Elisa DiStefano leads a discussion and audience Q&A as the singers discuss their TV experiences, careers and perform original songs.
