Save our independent stages. Pass the Restart Act.
Op-Ed by Katie Tuten and Robert Gomez (Crain's Chicago Business - July 21, 2020)
This op-ed, originally published in Crain's Chicago Business, examines the dire challenges facing Chicago’s live music venues during the COVID-19 pandemic. As venues remain closed until Illinois reaches Phase 5, their economic contributions and the livelihoods of specialized workers are at risk. The piece highlights these venues' vital role in their communities and calls on Congress to pass the Restart Act to provide much-needed financial relief.
Chicago’s live music venues make up the greatest percentage of businesses that are prohibited from opening until Illinois enters Phase 5 of Restore Illinois, when a COVID-19 vaccine or highly effective treatment is readily available. These venues were the first to close and will be the last to reopen.
The lights dimmed on Chicago stages beginning March 13. The consequences of a mandated shutdown became immediately apparent. A McKinsey study in April on the economic impact of COVID locally concluded that arts, entertainment and recreation is the second most vulnerable sector, with 71,305 individuals (88 percent of total sector employment) at risk of losing their jobs.
Businesses and workers in this sector benefit from one another, which means we also suffer with one another. Venues are interwoven into the fabric of their neighborhoods and communities for generations. For example, restaurants and bars along Clark Street benefit from people attending a concert at 38-year-old Metro in Wrigleyville.
In Pilsen, Thalia Hall has become an anchor and, in less than a decade, has attracted numerous businesses and people from outside the area to visit. Not bound to events at permanent structures, the Silver Room Block Party has generated an estimated $3.6 million for Hyde Park’s and neighboring communities' businesses. Downtown Hyde Park Chicago notes in a 2018 impact report that the event's impact “is exponentially larger than the actual attendance. The economic impact, community outreach, social engagement and community impacts are remarkable, independently and collectively.”
Consider also the human component of live music venues: skilled workers with expertise in areas that often do not translate to other industries. For example, a lighting designer at a concert venue could do a similar job at a performance theater; a restaurant manager could do a similar job at a concert venue. What will the lighting designer and the restaurant manager do with their career’s worth of specialty training when the performance theater and the concert venue no longer exist? The possibility of this and similar scenarios coming to fruition in the coming months is very real.
Chicago Loop Alliance’s revised 2019 "Arts in the Loop Economic Impact Study" shows that concert, live music, arts and culture activities located within the Loop’s 1.5-square-mile footprint generate $2.25 billion, or $187 million per city block annually through direct and related spending.
Should these businesses remain shuttered much longer, many will close for good. We are independently owned and operated businesses without the benefit of financial assistance from parent companies or Wall Street. With little warning, we were mandated to cease operations and precluded from many of the benefits offered by the CARES Act. In May, Sens. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., and Todd Young, R-Ind., introduced the Restart Act to provide Phase 5 businesses relief they have otherwise been ineligible to receive.
As both houses of Congress recess at the end of the month, we remind them of their constituents whose lives and livelihoods depend on the financial assistance the Restart Act would provide. We urge Congress to pass it and the president to sign it into law.
Robert Gomez is owner of Subterranean and Beat Kitchen. Katie Tuten is co-owner of the Hideout.
Crain's Chicago Business
