‘Artifacts’ returned to Penn Theater
Some artifacts that remained in the Penn Theater from the time it closed until its roof started leaking will be returned to the building once its renovation is complete.
Brian McCafferty, chairman of the board of directors of the city’s Redevelopment Authority, said the board voted at a Thursday meeting to give items — including two projectors, its classic theater seats and numerous movie posters — to the building’s new owner, Bryan Frenchak.
McCafferty said those items had been removed from the theater when the roof started leaking, and the board wanted to give them to Frenchak as a way of preserving the theater’s history.
“We were worried about a lot of the valuable artifacts,” McCafferty said. “We had taken both projectors, a lot of light fixtures, boxes of movie posters; we housed them in our office — two of the original seats in the theater that still have the upholstery; there was one main projector that looked pretty old, and then a secondary — it's all in the interest of preserving it.”
McCafferty said he was curious about the movie posters that had been preserved at the theater, believing they could be vintage pieces from the theater’s early days. However, most of them are from the 1980s and 1990s, he said.
The Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, the lending arm of Landmarks Community Capital Corporation, lent the Butler Redevelopment Authority $290,000 to buy the building in 2009. On Nov. 10, the authority voted unanimously to accept a $65,000 offer from Frenchak to buy the building.
Frenchak said when he bought the theater that he would like to see it serve multiple uses upon its reconstruction.
“We’re planning a redesign of the theater to be a mixed-use type of venue,” Frenchak said. “It’ll make it more interactive, and we might have concerts a few nights a month, some comedy shows.”
The Redevelopment Authority board of directors also passed the administrative budget for 2023, which has a total operating cost of $259,148. The authority budgeted $212,916 in 2022, but ended up coming in a few hundred dollars under budget by year’s end, according to a budget report.
McCafferty said the authority finally was able to give a 5% raise to its acting executive director and operations manager, Veronica Walker, in this year’s budget, bringing personnel costs from an expected $92,896 last year to a projected $145,520 in 2023. Other increases in expenses are mainly rising utility costs, McCafferty said.
“We are still trying to catch her up from many years of the authority not having any money to give her a raise,” McCafferty said of Walker’s pay.
The approved budget also includes about $366,000 in revenue from Community Development Block Grants, the Pennsylvania Housing Affordability Fund and “project-specific income,” listed as housing rehabilitations performed by the redevelopment authority through block grants.
