Photo by Joseph Van Dusen
Bob Jones with fellow CCS member Margaret Weinstein
There was a time when Coatesville was a bustling steel town. But when the American steel industry faded away in the 1970s, Coatesville went with it.
What's left is the rusting shell of what was once Lukens Steel Company, whose dilapidated warehouses and factories still dominate the center of town. To the people who once worked within them, these decaying facilities are a constant reminder of the hardships they now face.
Red brick buildings, some with boards over their windows, line the surrounding streets. It's here -- hardly a stone's throw from the old steel mill -- that an uncharacteristically well-maintained building rests, with a clean, gold on green signboard across the front reading "Coatesville Cultural Society."
Rain plastered the front windows of the CCS café as I sat down with Bob Jones to discuss his role within this organization and his mission to bring people together in his community.
Q: You’re the artistic director here at the Coatesville Cultural Society. What exactly does that entail?
A: Mopping the floor, making corned beef, making lemonade with honey. You laugh but it's true! It entails making decisions about what we're going to produce in the place, what we are going to do as actors in our season, what outside people we're going to support to bring things into our space. Developing the theater troop, running the chess club.
Q: So am I understanding that you also act in the plays as well as being the artistic director?
A: I act in the plays. Sometimes I play music in the plays.
Q: The CCS was started in 1994. How long have you personally been involved with it?
A: I was one of the founders
Q: What initially drew you to create this place?
A: Well, we did it because really our theater was People's Light [& Theater], and we were doing things that were sort of outside the vision of People's Light, and they didn’t want affiliation with what we were doing.
Q: What kind of things were you doing?
A: I would say that our theater is more avant-garde. They're trying to reach a wide group and they're doing more traditional kinds of things. I think that was one of the primary reasons, and we needed a theater to play, so we made our own theater, and as we sat down to try to organize, we needed a mission statement. Once we made the mission statement, [to create a community of artists who live and make art in Coatesville], our focus shifted a little bit from just theater itself to this community thing. I guess being in Coatesville and feeling that racial division made us want to bring people together.
Q: I noticed on your Web site that you're hosting traditional Irish music on Oct. 16. What are your thoughts on downtown Coatesville as the setting for Irish folk music?
A:The Irish musicians seem to really love the venue. They love coming out to this town. They love getting out of Philadelphia. They really love being in a small town, you know?
Q: How does your audience respond to Irish folk music?
A: The Irish audience comes. A small percentage of attendees live in Coatesville. A lot of these folks describe our place like a spaceship that landed in Coatesville. It's out of step with a lot of what's happening here. But we are here too and we draw folks. We have Fiesta Latina, which draws many of the Latina people in the Ville; we have old time music festival with fiddles and banjos playing Appalachian music. The people that come to Fiesta Latina don’t really come to the old time festival, and the people that come to the old time festival don’t really come to Fiesta Latina. We've had gospel music, we've had a hip-hop festival, we had a jazz festival. So really, it's not local in the way that maybe you're thinking, where just people in town come.
A: Coatesville has a reputation for being a gritty town. What kind of role do you think the CCS plays in an environment like this?
A: We're not going to change the perception of Coatesville, but surely I can't think of any other place at night where you will find a group of white people gathering in Coatesville socially. I mean it's hard to get them to come to Coatesville period, but on a Friday night for them to be here, we're probably the only place that has that kind of a draw, where people would actually come to socialize, to have a good time, to see theater, to have a discussion. I think we're like an outpost for diversity.
Q: Do you have examples of some positive effects that you have seen occur here since you have been running the CCS?
A: Fiesta Latina is an example of what you're talking about, because the Spanish community really loves the Fiesta Latina. We may not do it anymore, but we've done it for 10 years I think, and they talk about it the whole year. We block off the street and we have vendors and musicians and DJs. We've had dancers come and salsa bands and mariachi bands. I don’t know how to measure it, but I'm sure that’s had a good effect. It’s a celebration and a lot of the people are aliens, but that gives them more of a sense of connection to the town, which I think is good. But I don’t know if everyone would see that as a good thing. What we might perceive as good might not feel that way to someone else.
Q: What kind of challenges have you encountered while running the CCS?
A: To stay here. To survive. We've been really broke. We haven't had funding. For a couple years we only survived off what we were making. The council of arts gave us something and we had some people who gave personal contributions. But the foundation support, which we were depending on and we were hoping to rely on, withdrew from us. We've been without funding for a while.
Q: Which foundations withdrew?
A: Do I want to even get into that? I don’t want to stigmatize any particular foundations, but you know, we were reaching out to people, mainly in Philadelphia, some local people. They helped us out at first, and then they kind of withdrew. It seemed like we were going to be the redevelopment thing, and then we disappointed them because we didn’t change Coatesville. We sort of stepped out there, and all these things were going to happen that never did happen. So we were in a strange position, because we could have maybe survived, but when things didn’t happen, we were left alone. That’s been the major challenge for us. To stay afloat, keep our integrity and not sell out our mission. Even to continue now because we're not into making money or big numbers. When we have a play, we try to keep our house no more than 25 people per night because we come out [to the café] after the show and we have food together and we talk. We talk about the show sometimes and we talk about things that are on people's minds. So if somebody from the east end you know, who's right off the corner, is sitting here with somebody who's from Bryn Mawr, we're eating together and we're laughing together. It's not a real direct change you can get, but people walk away with something.
Q: How much longer do you see yourself doing this?
A: As long as I can keep my sanity I guess. It's my life. I'm committed to it. I don’t get a salary here. We're all volunteers. It's what we do.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to add?
A: I'll say this about what our mission is. You know, I grew up in Coatesville. I graduated from Scott [High School] in 67, the last class that graduated from Scott. Some people talk about the good old days you know, with Lukens [Steel Company], when everybody was getting paid. And there was something good about that, but this place has been sort of racially divided. They had James Adams [Community] School down there. And even when the avenue was mixed, Coatesville was racially divided. The schools were different, and in the movie house you had to sit in a different section. You couldn’t sit at the [J.J.] Newberry's or Woolworth's at the lunch counter and eat. You had to take the food out if you were black. That went up into the sixties, you know? There's been big changes since then, but a lot of that is still here, and even though we're not trying to make changes or tell people that it's better do that, we have tried to be a place where everybody could feel welcome so this [change] could happen for those that wanted it to happen. To come together with someone who's different. A lot of folks want to be around folks that are like them. They want a place where their neighbor cuts their yard like they do. It's understandable, but it's also, I think, important for us because we're a large community, to be able to minimize these differences enough to understand. That’s what we're dedicated to.
