A Hollywood boost for Pitman's downtown

A proposed park alongside Pitman's Broadway Theatre is getting a boost from Hollywood.

Don Wildman, the witty and literate host of the Travel Channel's Mysteries at the Museum series, is helping raise money to transform a forlorn portion of Theatre Avenue into an outdoor gathering spot called Theatre Plaza.

"You grow up in a town like Pitman and you're bonded to it for life," said Wildman, 54, who visited the borough Saturday to make a video that will promote the project online and perhaps on cable TV. "Pitman is the foundation of everything I'm interested in."

Wildman moved to Pitman as a 4-year-old in 1965 and recalls seeing The Poseidon Adventure and other hits on the Broadway's big screen. He lived in the borough until 1977.

"I was very tight with this theater when I was a kid," he recalled. "It was big and fancy and exciting. It's where the movies were."

I caught up with Wildman and borough Chamber of Commerce president Lisa Morgey at Sweet Lula's, one of the stylish establishments that have opened in recent years in the center of town.

"There's a trend of [Americans] spending more leisure time downtown," noted Morgey, the owner of a borough screen-printing business called Xmarxthespot.

The chamber has contributed $10,000 toward the project. Other donors have pledged a total of $2,275 to the "Love for Pitman's Theatre Plaza" campaign on Gofundme.com.

"The park is an investment in the future," said Morgey, citing the popularity of even temporary public spaces such as the summer's Spruce Street Harbor Park in Philadelphia. Downtown Pitman lacks that sort of focal point, she said.

"We're losing a little bit of parking, which is an issue," Morgey said. "But I hope the park will attract businesses and visitors downtown."

In the 2.3-square-mile Gloucester County borough of 8,900, downtown's fortunes were dwindling, along with those of the theater, until about a decade ago.

Things began turning around after Pitman native Peter Slack bought the 1,100-seat Broadway for $320,000 at a 2006 sheriff's sale and began a $1 million restoration.

The gloriously ornate house, built in 1926 for vaudeville and silent movies, is now a venue for touring stage productions, concerts, and other entertainment.

"It's a centerpiece, and a spark" for reviving downtown, said Slack, who lives in the borough and owns a medical-publications firm in West Deptford. "After the theater reopened, other people invested money."

Nevertheless, "what can we do to make Pitman an even cooler place" remains an essential question, he said.

"We still have a few sore spots [downtown], including Theatre Avenue," said Slack, adding that the park "will enhance that space for people in Pitman, and for visitors."

The park site is small - about a storefront wide and a half-block deep - and must be kept accessible for backstage deliveries, as well as emergency vehicles.

"It was a very interesting challenge," said Gloucester County landscape designer Alan Koch.

"We're trying to make it inviting, to draw people in," he said. "But everything in the center [of the park], including a row of bollards and clusters of tables and chairs, must be removable."

Koch, who lives in Washington Township and is an old friend of mine, noted that the park site got lots of direct sun and offered little space for shade trees.

So three pergolas will frame the space, supporting the growth of shade-providing vines above the heads of visitors.

The design is "very Euro," said Wildman, an engaging, down-to-earth fellow who travels extensively for his documentary-style show, and keeps tabs on Pitman through Facebook.

He envisions the two-minute promotional video as "experiential television" of the sort familiar to fans of his Travel Channel work, in which he often guides his audience through unusual places or little-known events or stories.

The Theatre Plaza promo comes with a backstory: how a vintage theater in a little South Jersey town inspired a local boy to dream big.

"I'd walk down here and see the movies and gawk at the opera boxes," Wildman said. "It set a higher bar. It let me know there's a world out there."