Pittsburgh Center Honoring Playwright Finds Itself Short on Visitors and Donors PITTSBURGH - The bank has sued to foreclose. The city's philanthropic groups, with names like Mellon and Heinz, have withdrawn support. The $42 million August Wilson Center for African American Culture, a bow-front building inspired by a Swahili sailing ship, is high and dry. Keith Srakocic/Associated Press A conservator has taken over control of the August Wilson Center for African American Culture. The playwright August Wilson, about five months before his death in 2005, found poetry among poor Pittsburgh blacks. Named for the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who found a street-savvy poetry in the lives of poor Pittsburgh blacks, the culture center's plight has been especially painful for those who had hoped it would enshrine the music, art and literature of the urban world he knew. Instead, it appears to be a victim of mismanagement by its senior staff and board of directors, who borrowed to build a grand palace of culture, but failed to find a wide enough audience and donor base in the hometown of Wilson, whose plays are mostly set in the Hill District just blocks away. "It's extremely sad," said R. Daniel Lavelle, a city councilman who represents the Hill District, a largely poor neighborhood. I know what August Wilson's name means in terms of history, and I know the impact a national African-American theater can mean to both Pittsburgh and the country. On Monday, a state judge handed control of the cultural center to a conservator, usurping its board in a final effort to avoid liquidation. The bank that holds the mortgage, which has gone unpaid for months, is advancing $25,000 to pay the conservator. The culture center is flat broke. Mark Clayton Southers, a former director of its theater program, said the Wilson center struggled to find an audience among the people Wilson portrayed: working-class blacks, many of whom feel unwelcome downtown with its skyscrapers and largely white-owned businesses, he added. "You can't build it and they will come," Mr. Southers said. Not when you're trying to work with a community that is not traditional theatergoers or cultural consumers. Mr. Southers said the center's board sometimes displayed an indifference to August Wilson. It was rare, he said, to see board members at the performances of the Wilson plays he staged. Money was so tight that when he put on Wilson's "Gem of the Ocean" in 2012, in a joint production with his own independent company, the center charged him rent for its 486-seat theater. He could not get management to print tickets. Wilson, who died in 2005, turned the lives of trash haulers, landladies and cabdrivers scarred by racism into a cycle of 10 plays, one for each decade of the 20th century. Almost all are set in the Hill District where Wilson grew up, the son of a black cleaning woman and a white father who largely abandoned him. Most of the plays ran on Broadway, including "The Piano Lesson" and "Fences," which starred James Earl Jones. Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle of plays "have been hailed as a unique triumph in American literature," according to a state historical marker outside his childhood home on Bedford Avenue. The building is boarded up and decrepit. "It's an eyesore," acknowledged Paul Ellis, a nephew of Wilson's, who bought the three-story brick building and seeks to turn it into an arts center. Mr. Ellis, a 44-year-old lawyer, recalled how throngs crowded Centre Avenue in the Hill District for his uncle's funeral. "People shouted, "We love you August!" " At a new library on the avenue, a wall-size map of "August Wilson's Hill" identifies the imagined locations of his plays. A lone reader flipping through a newspaper, Dale Hall, admitted he had never seen one. Looking through a window at a block of mostly boarded-up storefronts, Mr. Hall, 49, ticked off businesses that had closed - Eddie's restaurant, Hamm's barber shop. Idle men sat on steps. "The people up here don't want to work," scoffed Mr. Hall, a disabled former steelworker. But there are also clear signs of renewal, including well-kept mixed-rent housing developments and a new supermarket that opened last month with public subsidies after a 30-year effort.