This whole episode is so aggressively sad.
I worked at and consulted for WXPN through the period where Hal and the original team were planning this venue. I walked through this space when it was just a shell. I have had so many positively wonderful experiences in this building. Seeing it end like this is just tragic.
The handoff after Hal’s retirement to a team of folks with zero experience in running a venue threw kerosene on a fire. This is one of the nightmare scenarios my former colleagues worried about.
Flipping the venue from for-profit to non-profit a few years ago should have opened up a track to keep the place solvent. But I’m not entirely sure that anyone realizes this is an organization that LICENSES its name from XPN and Penn. Most folks I talk to assume that “Penn will just pay the bill.”
And they probably will, but only as part of taking over the venue entirely. (Which, at this point, is not a terrible idea. There were so many concerns in the 90s and 2000s about how direct ownership of a venue would raise business and political issue. After all of this, I’m not sure how you would do it otherwise.)
