Why the Kimmel Center’s new cafe may be a step backward

Will the Kimmel Center ever become a fully functioning public space? While various Kimmel leaders over the years have tried making this vast, light-filled urban canvas live up to its potential, the latest move is a stumble.

It’s especially frustrating that Curtain Call, the new Kimmel café and bar, isn’t quite what it should be. Especially since its immediate predecessor, Garces Trading Co. at Kimmel, went a long way toward enlivening the areas surrounding the arts center’s two main halls.

The good news: it may not be too late to correct the new café’s deficits. Even better, there’s nothing keeping the entire Kimmel plaza, architecturally or operationally, from finding its groove someday. Yes — long sigh — we are still talking about this, nearly a quarter century after the Kimmel opened.

A discussion about the finer points of placemaking and interior design might seem marginal given the current social and political turmoil in our country. But the national climate actually provides a fresh mandate for the Philadelphia Orchestra and Ensemble Arts, the nonprofit that owns and operates the center, to make the plaza busy with free, highly visible arts events that speak to the moment.

Now is the time to be in the company of art and culture — composing it, writing, and dancing it; listening to and seeing it; and thinking about its place as one of the very few truly enduring contributions to civilization.

The Kimmel is the largest arts presenter in the region, and what happens in its public spaces is especially important if it wants to live up to its pledge of being a place for everyone. The moral imperative is even more clear when you’ve just renamed your main concert hall for a civil rights icon — Marian Anderson.

Though Curtain Call occupies a small portion of the Kimmel’s Commonwealth Plaza, it has an outsize effect on the entire dome-capped experience. It is the first thing you see when you walk in the main entrance on Broad Street, and announces the mood of the place.

The cafe is in the same spot as the old one and retains some of the main design elements — the sea of hydrangea-like light fixtures above, most obviously. Inexplicably, though, a tall row of fake shrubs and a metal-curtain wall now separate the cafe from the plaza, keeping the liveliness of the cafe from being shared with the rest of the ground floor. The once-transparent Spruce Street windows have been made opaque up to a certain height with a dot-matrix appliqué that hinders the view inside from the sidewalk.

One of the biggest design flaws of the Kimmel Center has always been the tall brick piles that make it difficult to “read” the fun going on inside. The Garces-era cafe mitigated this clunkiness by replacing the long ticketing booth, making the building more airy and permeable. Now, sadly, between the hedges walling off the cafe from the plaza and the newly opaque Spruce Street window, some of that permeability has been reversed.

The arrangement creates a tale of two arts centers — one, the café, private and inward looking; and the other, the plaza, often quiet, cold, and barren.

The arts center’s new food and beverage provider, Rhubarb Hospitality Collection by Oak View Group — which also serves Royal Albert Hall in London and Hudson Yards in New York, among other sites — might consider clearing the window and removing the fake shrubs. But ultimately, the success of the plaza depends on a real, long-discussed renovation for which funding must be secured. At the very least, what’s needed in Commonwealth Plaza are more places to linger, better lighting and acoustic control, and adequate heating in winter.

The architecture is one factor, but how the facilities are operated matters a great deal, too. When Garces opened Volvér on the arts center’s Spruce Street side in 2014, the thing patrons talked about most were the prices — as much as $500 for dinner for two. Six months later, Garces lowered prices, but the elitist reputation lingered.

Volvér has closed, and a new restaurant is slated to open this spring, said an arts center spokesperson.

I’ve visited the 80-seat Curtain Call several times since it opened in mid-January and usually have found myself among only a small handful of visitors. It’ll no doubt take a while for patrons to discover that the café is open again. All was quiet one recent Tuesday when I stopped in for a crisp salad and coffee. And then, a burst of life: hundreds of students streaming through the lobby after a Philadelphia Orchestra education concert. More noise like that, please.

But the feeling of the plaza around concert time has always been much more bubbly than at nonperformance times. Over the years, the Kimmel Center has shrunk some of the more public aspects of its operation. The rooftop space above the Perelman Theater is still called the Hamilton Garden, yet its trees were taken down long ago and the public access function replaced by a glass-enclosed rental space. The balcony over Broad Street, with its magnificent view of Broad Street and City Hall, is no longer a restaurant, and is only occasionally open.

La Noche, the monthly Latin dance party, has stopped, and the splashy, ambitious Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts is a distant memory. The orchestra this season is offering free lobby performances as part of its three “Orchestra After 5″ concerts, but the arts center’s website currently lists no forthcoming free events. A spokesperson says the group is fundraising for programming and is talking to “partners about the best way to utilize the space going forward.”

All this matters because the Kimmel has often been its best possible self in its public programming: a 2021 festival celebrating the return to in-person attendance after the worst of the pandemic; “play-ins” at which students and amateur instrumentalists play side by side with professionals; public art installations and dance parties. Various protests and inflatable rats over the years may not have been welcome to some, but now they are fixed in our memory as important exercises in free speech and the right to peaceful assembly.

The Kimmel knows how to do this. It knows how to cultivate a public space in smart ways. Now it needs to sustain free programming with a permanent endowment so it can do it more dependably.

When the Kimmel opened in 2001, there was a feeling among many that it was wedging itself onto an arts scene that didn’t necessarily need it. A lot has happened in two dozen years, and even more in the past month. Now it seems nothing less than indispensable.