Center Created in Former CityStage Is Designed to Educate, Inspire

Work of Arts

As he talks about Hope for Youth & Families (HYF), the foundation he created in 2022 after selling his Pride chain of gas stations and stores, Bob Bolduc will inevitably reference the “three legs of the stool,” as he puts it, meaning its main focus points.

One is literacy, where the family foundation is making progress in efforts to help young people who fall behind in reading proficiency and are in danger of dropping out of school as a result. The initiative, involving interns and peer-to-peer support, has yielded results, with half of those involved moving up a full grade in reading level and another quarter moving up two grades.

Bob and Roberta Bolduc.

Students take a guitar lesson during one of the summer programs at Hope Center for the Arts.

The second stool involves high-achieving students and providing them with avenues to a college education. And the third is participation in the arts, something that is in many ways lacking in Springfield, said Bolduc, due to funding restrictions in the schools.

It is this third leg, the arts, that is … well, taking center stage recently through a massive, ongoing effort to transform the former CityStage in downtown Springfield, dormant for several years now, into an arts hub for Springfield youth.

Called the Hope Center for the Arts, the facility has become a passion project for Bolduc, his wife, Roberta, and his foundation, which acquired the former CityStage for $1 million at auction in 2023 and has since invested roughly $15 million in the center, which will be thoroughly modern in every respect.

“We didn’t spare any expense — it’s all state-of-the-art, from the stage to the security,” said Bolduc, adding that the center, spread across nearly 40,000 square feet over two levels, is designed to provide flexible learning, rehearsal, and performance space that will advance the mission of HYF and several partner organizations focused on both the arts and helping youth and families in Springfield thrive.

Build-out of various spaces continued at a frenetic pace through the winter and spring, leading to the start of free summer programs for middle school and high school students, which began July 7 and will run until Aug. 1. During the school year, there will be after-school programs.

Meanwhile, the city and region will regain a valuable asset in the center’s main stage, which has been retrofitted with sound and lighting equipment that will make it one of the most advanced facilities of its kind in the country, one that will see a full schedule of performances — starting with the Springfield Jazz & Roots Festival earlier this month — by artists that will involve young people involved with the center in some way.

“The arts are not just entertaining and cultural, which we need in this city; they’re also inspiring. Imagine a kid who gets turned on to dance or vocals or an instrument and then goes to a good school on a scholarship … we’ve changed their life.”

As he talked about the main stage, Kyle Homstead, technical director of the center, said the sound will be “three-dimensional” in nature, and the lighting system will enable crews to create virtually any kind of digital landscape, both behind the performers on a large screen and beneath their feet on the stage.

“All this makes this room a multi-media powerhouse,” he explained, one that will draw performers across a broad spectrum to Springfield. “We’ll be able to transform and bring all kinds of imagination to life. Whether it’s a touring performance artist or kids in our program, we’ll be able to take their ideas and all the types of art going on in this facility and really bring it to life.”

While the main stage gets much of the attention, the center focuses on all aspects of the arts and also includes a 110-seat black box theater, two large rehearsal rooms and two smaller ones, practice rooms, a recording studio and media production room, a digital arts classroom, a visual arts studio, a photography studio, childcare space, a teen café and lounge, and a catering kitchen and service counter. There are also plans to convert the former Pizzeria Uno space (currently a hookah lounge at the tail end of its lease) into a student-run coffee shop.

Kyle Homstead (at left) on the main stage at the Hope Center for the Arts.

Bolduc showed off all of this and more during a detailed tour during which he focused on not just on the facilities being created, but what they mean for young people in the city — and their families.

“The arts are not just entertaining and cultural, which we need in this city; they’re also inspiring,” he explained. “Imagine a kid who gets turned on to dance or vocals or an instrument and then goes to a good school on a scholarship … we’ve changed their life.

“Arts programming can be an important contributor to student success in school, and yet arts programs are often the first to fall victim to budget cuts,” he went on, adding that compounding this is a lack of things do after school. “Unless they play sports, they have nothing to do, and … being kids, some of them are going to get into trouble. Young people who may not be interested in sports deserve just as much opportunity and access to programs that enrich their lives and encourage them to express themselves.”

For this issue, BusinessWest got what we’ll call a backstage look at the Hope Center for the Arts, learning not only how that dormant space has been dramatically and colorfully transformed, but how its various programs may transform young lives.

Filling in the Canvas

Flashing back a few years, Bolduc said he approached the city about possibly renting CityStage for some initiatives to address that third leg of the stool he mentioned.

He said he was told that, while this might be an option, the city would prefer to sell it to him — or anyone else who might be interested.

“We came to realize that we had the potential here to be not just a theater, like it used to be, but to make this a true center for the arts.”

Not many were, and Bolduc prevailed at a public auction. And it was soon thereafter that he and others at the foundation realized that they could and should do much more than revive the main stage — originally known as StageWest and later renamed CityStage — that had hosted a wide variety of plays and other forms of entertainment for more than 35 years.

“We came to realize that we had the potential here to be not just a theater, like it used to be, but to make this a true center for the arts,” he explained. “We created an advisory board and met with just about every nonprofit group in the region and had them all through for tours. And people would say, ‘you can do this,’ and ‘you can do that.’ So it became very clear that we had the potential here to create a center for the arts, something like the Kennedy Center.”

And over the past 18 months or so, this vision has become a stunning reality, he said, adding that the project has involved a wide variety of tradespeople working on everything from HVAC systems to security systems; lighting installations to creation of a toddlers’ room where parents can leave younger children while they watch performances involving older siblings.

And the famously detail-oriented Bolduc has presided over every step in the process, from arrangement of free breakfast and lunch to a program enabling parents to drop off children early for programming — and pick them up late — to accommodate work schedules, to streaming services for parents and grandparents who can’t get to a performance for some reason.

“I’m a perfectionist; we’ve taken care of all those details. Whenever we see a problem, we fix it,” he said, adding that the summer programs alone come with a price tag north of $250,000.

An architect’s rendering of the courtyard area, being renovated by the city, outside the Hope Center for the Arts.

Meanwhile, the facilities are, as noted, state of the art. And nowhere is this more true than in the main stage, which has been reborn, and transformed, in dramatic fashion, as Homstead explained.

“We’re super excited about what this theater is going to bring to Springfield,” he said, adding that, while the team at the foundation drew inspiration from its unique design and construction of the stage and seating areas, the technical systems have been redesigned to make this one of the most advanced theaters in the Northeast — starting with what’s known as a spacial audio system, designed by L-Acoustics, a global leader in speaker manufacturing.

“They’re at the vanguard of audio technology; across the front, instead of the traditional left and right speakers, there’s five hangs of speakers that are part of what we call the main scene, and then we have 26 speakers in surround. What that allows us to do is mix in a whole new way that’s three-dimensional.

“Instead of hearing all the sounds piled on top of one another coming out of two speakers, left and right, we’re spreading all those sounds across the entire sound field to create something that, if you close your eyes, sounds very three-dimensional and very much as if you’re listening to a band spread out on stage,” he went on, adding that this is the second such installation in the country.

The Sound of Progress

The huge investments in the former CityStage space, which include much more than the main stage, paid dividends that were recognizable on day two of the summer program, when Bolduc led another tour, showing young people getting lessons in guitar, vocals, dance, theater, and more.

“This is not a summer camp,” he explained. “Kids can sign up for it, state their preferences, and they’ll be able to go to programs by professional artists to learn and participate in theater, all kinds of chorus, all kinds of dance, all kinds of visual arts, photography, creative writing, and audio-visual media labs that are as good or better than any of the top colleges.”

The summer programs will be a testing ground of sorts, Bolduc noted, adding that they will help shape programming to be conducted during the school year, which will have those twin goals of immersing young people in the arts and perhaps inspiring pursuit of college arts programs and careers in various fields.

The facility even includes recording rooms that young people can utilize to create portfolios of their work that may help them get accepted into a college arts program.

“They need a recording of them singing, playing an instrument, dancing, or whatever — and there’s no place to do that,” he explained. “We have recording studios where they can do it for free.”

Overall, every aspect of the center is similarly designed to not only educate, but provide a leg up for pursuit of further education or employment.

And that extends to the planned coffee shop in the former Pizzeria Uno space, a work in progress on many levels and a program that may not become reality for a few years, but is already stirring the imagination.

“Imagine if this was run by kids so we can teach them business, marketing, finance, and culinary arts, and it was open to the public,” Bolduc said. “And suppose there was a small stage in there with an open mic so that students can go in there and perform for free; they get to shine.”

Allowing young people to shine, and perhaps change the trajectory of their lives in the process, is the overriding mission of the Hope Center for the Arts, which has transformed a once-vacant space and has the power to help transform Springfield’s downtown as well as generations of young people.

It is truly a work of arts.