The mixed-use building at 633-647 Old Post Road in Bedford that houses the Bedford Playhouse and Clive Davis Arts Center is being shopped for sale and the nonprofit that operates the arts center is studying whether it can find a way to buy it.
Cushman & Wakefield Capital Markets, which has an office in Stamford, is circulating a flyer advertising the property for sale and describing the 36,000-square-foot building, which is on a 3.14-acre site.
In addition to six commercial spaces on the ground and lower levels that are fully occupied, the building has 26 fully-rented residential units plus the arts center with its completely renovated theater. There are 65 on-site parking spaces.
An asking price was not advertised, but according to records on file at the Westchester County Clerk’s Office the property was bought on June 7, 2013, by Alchemy Bedford LLC for a consideration of $8.1 million. Kenneth S. Horn was identified as managing member of the LLC.
In 1990, Horn founded Manhattan-based Alchemy Properties. It reports that since its inception it has delivered more than 3 million square feet of real estate valued at more than $6 billion. Related is Alchemy-ABR Investment Partners, a real estate investment, development and operating company formed in 2015 as a partnership between Alchemy Properties and ABR Partners.
The Bedford Playhouse theater opened in 1947 as a single-screen venue complete with balcony. It changed hands a number of times over the years and had been leased by Bow Tie Cinemas, which converted it into a two-screen operation. When Bow Tie Cinemas elected not to renew its lease in 2015, Alchemy created a plan to convert the playhouse into retail space.
A community group organized by John Farr proposed saving the theater and converting it into an arts center with a renovated main auditorium for presenting films, a smaller theater and additional space for cultural activities and food and beverage service. Horn was supportive of the community effort. Legendary music producer Clive Davis made a major contribution for the project and other local notables such including Chevy Chase, Glenn Close and Paul Shaffer became involved. Cushman & Wakefield said that the playhouse renovation was more than $10 million.
According to Michael Hoagland, executive director of The Bedford Playhouse, the organization’s long-term lease for the space includes a purchase option.
“We’re of course looking at all of our options right now. The Bedford Playhouse has been sort of the cornerstone of the community since 1947, so we certainly want to continue that relationship with the community,” Hoagland told the Business Journal.
He said that the organization’s board of directors is looking into whether the purchase option could be exercised and what it would take to do that. He said that the board would like to reach a decision sooner rather than later.
“We’re in pretty close contact with Alchemy because we’re sort of the largest spaceholder in the building, so we talk with them pretty regularly,” Hoagland said. “At this point our board of directors is sort of looking into our options and I’m sure they would be accommodating to us if we did exercise some kind of an option.”
Hoagland said that the importance of the playhouse as a cultural resource has been underscored during the Covid pandemic by the response they’ve been seeing to virtual programming that has been substituted for on-premises screenings and events that could not take place because of the state-mandated shutdown of theaters.
“The number of arts organizations even in Westchester County that have shuttered their doors permanently during the course of the pandemic is really, really troubling. We’ve been able to hang on because we’ve got an incredibly supportive community and we’ve done some smart things,” Hoagland said.
“In the summer we took our programming outdoors and we’re planning on doing more of that this year because we’ve now seen how it works. We’ve sort of tested the waters and it’s given us a different outlook on how we can serve our community, even expanding our community to the national scene.”
Hoagland explained that they filmed a holiday concert by Emmy Award-winner and Tony nominee Liz Calloway at the playhouse. The show “Home for the Holidays” was shown nationally last month through a virtual cinema network in which the playhouse partnered with almost three dozen other venues across the country that distributed the event to their patrons.
Hoagland said that coping with the pandemic made the organization change its programming model in ways that perhaps they never would have done otherwise, while the need for fundraising to help cover costs has remained a constant.
“We started doing things like a bourbon tasting that was incredibly successful. We actually did two of them this fall,” Hoagland said, adding that they’re planning “more music programming and trying to find different ways to engage our community in addition to coming in to see a classic or blockbuster film.”
