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Date: 5/17/2022
HOLYOKE – Since its inception, Gateway City Arts has been a place for the community to come together for a variety of events in the arts, which made restrictions from the coronavirus pandemic a tough burden that they were afraid they would not make it through.
“We were shut down for 16 months and I was the only one here for that time. After a while, we didn’t know how long it would take with COVID[-19] so eight months into it we felt we could not recover and were trying to sell the building,” says GCA co-director Vitek Kruta who founded the space with his partner Lori Divine. “The reaction of the community was overwhelming, Lori and I didn’t even know the extent of the impact we had on the community. People were devastated.”
Kruta said there were a few interested buyers and the first buyer said he was planning on using the building space as a warehouse. This made Kruta realize what he had and sought the opportunity to stay put in order to preserve this source of arts within the community.
“I was thinking to myself, there’s no way we are going to give this to somebody who is going to make a warehouse that would kill the downtown development completely,” Kruta said. “Downtown Holyoke needs something like Gateway City Arts so people can have fun, go out, gather, learn and it’s right in the center of the city.”
Kruta also received an offer from someone who wanted to bring in a brewery and do a decent amount of renovation. This made Kruta feel that was a wasteful move for the building space especially after spending $60,000 over the years in renovating the space.
Looking for a solution to the problem, Kruta and Divine started negotiating with Signature Sounds and Dan Smalls Production (DSP), which owns the local Holyoke group Race St. Live, which organizes productions for GCA, as they were looking for a location as well for their work. DSP came up with the idea that they manage the portion of GCA focused on concerts and live performances.
A workable agreement was put in place with the parties and finally allowed for GCA to tread water once again and reopen their doors to the public. The job of booking concerts and securing acts will no longer be the responsibility of Kruta and Divine, allowing them to focus more on the restaurant side and the Divine theater.
“It allows us to go back to the original idea of focusing more on a community, so the gallery reopened and now we have fantastic shows that include 30 to 40 local artists so that itself is building the community again,” Kruta said.
The Divine Theater, named after Lori’s mother who died before its construction was complete, was built during the coronavirus pandemic and is starting to have reoccurring programming from nerd night to experimental music night, classical concerts, bingo, poetry readings and other programming.
While things are normalizing more to pre-coronavirus pandemic days, impacts of the disease are still occasionally presenting themselves. As of last week, the restaurant at GCA had to close due to a COVID-19 outbreak among staff.
“The challenges have not stopped yet and the challenges are there because either we don’t have a staff to offer the service that we need to offer or people are not coming out because they are also afraid of COVID[-19],” Kruta said.
In a better place now than in the past two years, GCA has reached their 10th anniversary and the owners are proud of where they are and are ready to celebrate the milestone. Kruta’s journey to the Pioneer Valley and creating GCA with Divine has taken many paths to get to this point.
Kruta grew up in the Czech Republic and was involved in an underground movement against the country’s Communist government before escaping in 1981 to Germany where he stayed for 10 years. While in Germany, Kruta learned the field of restoration where he did work on antiques and cathedrals and churches in the country. He brought this expertise to the United States when he moved here in 1991.
Kruta lived in Connecticut for 10 years and had his own art gallery and restoration business before moving to the Pioneer Valley in 2001. He opened a studio in the early days of Eastworks in Easthampton.
In 2004, Kruta made another move to Holyoke where he has been since. He later would meet Divine in Northampton and they eventually would buy the GCA building in 2012, which was an empty warehouse at the time.
“No one was interested at the time to do anything down in Holyoke. I was looking for a studio as I was working out of my house and it was increasingly more difficult to explain to my clients, I could not restore certain things in my living room,” Kruta said. “I needed a more professional environment and this building came up on Race Street. It was sitting empty with boarded up windows, leaky roofs, outdated systems, but we loved the location and we loved the building and downtown so we decided to buy it.”
Kruta says they had no idea what they were getting themselves into as they just had the vision for creating this space where people could come and learn and do art classes and performances. Shortly after starting programming they began getting more and more requests for performing in the space.
Once the music side of the venue started, food and liquor were next. They started to sell food and drink and little by little they built up the food operation they have that currently is there with events and in the café.
“Next thing you know we turned the warehouse, which is a smaller building next to the main building, into a concert hall that can have 500 people in there,” Kruta said.
After selling out two nights of their opening show, Kruta and Divine figured they have to keep paying attention to what people want so they decided to renovate the performance space. Bathrooms, a bar, a new stage, investments in sound equipment and lighting and then a connector between the two buildings that houses the commercial kitchen and café were all added to the space following this growth for the organization.
Kruta said he and Divine always had the idea from the beginning to create something to get the community involved. The 48,000 square foot building gave the two a lot of freedom to figure out what to do with the free space which has led to where they are now.
The cornavirus pandemic caused a scare for GCA, but they have bounced back with resiliency and are committed to keeping the space around for the long haul. Kruta hopes the space will continue to be a prime location for local events.
“We are incredibly grateful and proud of what we accomplished in 10 years. We are extremely grateful to the community who has been supporting us big time during and before COVID[-19],” Kruta said. “It has been amazing, and we are very proud of what we created and thankful to everybody who supported us.”