Municipal Auditorium Gets New Name
June 30, 2010
Municipal Auditorium will have a new name — the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts — in honor of a local family known for its arts philanthropy and the result of what's believed to be the largest single arts-related donation in San Antonio history.The Tobin Endowment will commit $15 million to the effort to transform the underutilized but beloved auditorium into an acoustically appropriate home for the symphony, opera and ballet companies.
The announcement will be made at 2 p.m. today during an event at Municipal Auditorium. Actor Tommy Lee Jones, a member of the Bexar County Performing Arts Center Foundation's board of directors, will be the master of ceremonies.
The $15 million comes in the form of a challenge grant. The Tobin Endowment will match, dollar for dollar, the money raised before the project breaks ground next summer, and will gift the money over a period of several years.
Because the grant depends on more private donations before it's paid, there's a chance the overall donation will be less than $15 million.
However, board members — encouraged by the success of other recent challenge grants and the momentum behind the performing arts center — say they're confident they will meet their fundraising goals.
San Antonio is one of the larger American cities lacking a big performing arts center, a multiuse facility that serves as a base for local arts organizations.
Voters in 2008 approved an extension of the hotel and car rental tax to dedicate $100 million in public funds to transform Municipal Auditorium into such a center. Also that year, AT&T pledged $5 million for the project.
Plans include an exterior restoration that would leave the iconic facade in place, along with an interior redo that would divide the building into a series of smaller halls that could host anything from a rock concert to an opera or local theater production. An education facility will offer students everything from workshops to symphony performances.
A plaza with seating for 600 will lead down to the River Walk, opening the building to the river for the first time and providing a space for outdoor concerts and special events.
The Tobin Center name will particularly recall Robert Lynn Batts Tobin, an avid theater fan, patron of national and local arts organizations and an art collector.
Robert Tobin — known for his mane of gray hair, full beard and habit of wearing a cape to events — died in 2000 without any direct heirs and left his fortune to the Tobin Endowment.
“It's entirely appropriate that he should receive that honor,” former Mayor Phil Hardberger said. “He was the consummate theatrical person. He loved the theater. He loved opera. He loved art. He carried all of that into his daily life to the point to where many people thought he was eccentric.”
Hardberger and County Judge Nelson Wolff approached the Tobin Foundation two years ago and asked for the donation, hoping the center could be named for a native son instead of a big company.
“He has a lot more personality than some big corporation,” Hardberger said. “We were really lucky to have someone like him in San Antonio.”
“It's a name that has significance in our community,” Wolff said. “Tobin himself did a lot of good things for the community and the foundation has made numerous donations to arts organizations in the city. You couldn't find a more appropriate person to name that after.”
Family ties
The Tobin name is one with long ties to San Antonio. The family is descended from the city's original Canary Island settlers.
Edgar Tobin, a World War I flying ace and Robert's father, started Tobin Surveys after the war, which became the largest mapmaker for the oil industry and made the Tobins multimillionaires.
The family also has a long connection with Municipal Auditorium and the performing arts.
J. Bruce Bugg Jr., who heads the Performing Arts Center Foundation, the nonprofit overseeing the building's redesign, and who's a trustee of the Tobin Endowment, said Robert Tobin spent his free time as a teenager helping out with opera and theater productions.
That started in 1950, and in 1965 the stagehands paid back the favor, presenting him with a gold union card after a performance of “Faust.”
“Robert spent a lot of time here at the Municipal Auditorium at age 16 working backstage,” Bugg said. “He would just do anything on a volunteer basis. Then in '65, when they gave him that union card, it was like, ‘They accept me, I'm one of them.' It was a big deal to him.”
Tobin had the union card framed and kept it by his bedside, and in 1985 told the San Antonio Express-News: “I was speechless for perhaps the first and only time in my life.”
“The union doesn't give those out to just anybody,” said Rodney Smith, managing director of the foundation.
Tobin's love of theater and opera came from his mother, whose extensive charity work included helping organize the city's first symphony orchestra in 1939 and helping establish an opera series in San Antonio.
Margaret Tobin also sat on the advisory board of the Metropolitan Opera in New York and brought the Met's first Southwest Regional auditions to San Antonio more than 50 years ago.
And John Tobin, Robert Tobin's uncle, was mayor in the 1920s when Municipal Auditorium was built. His name is on the bronze dedication plaque.
Robert Tobin's love of opera and theater led him in college to start a theater-design collection that eventually would become among the best in the world. Included in his collection are original Broadway production designs from “My Fair Lady,'” “South Pacific'' and “West Side Story.''
In San Antonio, he was most closely linked to the McNay Art Museum. He donated his theater arts collection to the museum and served as chairman of the board of trustees for several years.
“The fact that this is being named for him is unbelievably appropriate,” said Linda Hardberger, who curated Tobin's theater collection and worked for him for 18 years. “It's something he felt very strongly about. His love was opera, but any kind of theater was his life.”
Fundraising efforts
With $15 million promised, the center's foundation board now enters its “quiet phase” of fundraising — essentially a time when board members and their companies donate money themselves and ask friends and colleagues to do the same.
“We think people are going to want to be a part of this,” said Richard Schlosberg III, the former publisher of the Los Angeles Times who now lives in San Antonio.
The fundraising will follow in the path of the McNay's successful $50.8 million capital campaign, the largest for the cultural arts in the city's history, which was completed in 2008 with the opening of the Stieren Center for Exhibitions.
There, the McNay board raised $33 million through peer-to-peer contacts, going to those who could write big checks.
Part of that came from the endowment with a similar challenge grant. The endowment put up $5 million and asked McNay board members to raise another $10 million.
Bugg said he was confident the performing arts center board could convince people to donate $15 million.
“Here, we're going to do a dollar-for-dollar. It's proven to be a motivator,” Bugg said.
Bugg hopes the gift will be transformational for the center, making it possible to raise the additional $15 million in a short time period, and ultimately go beyond that to keep enhancing the project.
“An opportunity to build something like this doesn't come along every generation,” Bugg said.
Municipal Auditorium Gets New Name
By Jennifer Hiller - San Antonio Express-News
