Riverhead in talks to lease Vail-Leavitt Music Hall to Stony Brook’s Jazz Loft, town officials say

Riverhead Town is in talks to lease the Vail-Leavitt Music Hall to The Jazz Loft, a nonprofit performing arts organization in Stony Brook, according to town officials. 

Officials from The Jazz Loft toured the Vail-Leavitt and are “very interested in making this work, as are we,” Supervisor Tim Hubbard said in an interview Friday. He said the town is working out the particulars of a contract with the organization, which has operated a museum and music venue out of a historic building in Stony Brook Village since 2016. 

Hubbard said The Jazz Loft would run programs out of the historic building, which the town recently took back from a nonprofit organization that had owned and operated the theater for more than 40 years.

The Jazz Loft would also work on the building’s restoration, Deputy Town Attorney Danielle Hurley said in an email.

“The Jazz Loft performed a very similar feat in Stony Brook wherein a historical building was restored and managed into a very popular venue. We are hoping they can do the same thing here,” Hurley wrote.

Hurley said no agreement has been drafted yet. “We are waiting to hear if they are interested in taking the next step which would be a formal work session, then the negotiation and drafting of a lease,” she wrote. “We aim to incorporate into the agreement the ability for community groups to use the venue as well.”

The Jazz Loft is within a restored historic building in Stony Brook built in the 1770s and used most recently as a museum, according to the organization’s website. In addition to being a performance space and a Jazz memorabilia museum, The Jazz Loft also offers educational programs, including one in collaboration with Stony Brook University, where the organization’s founder and president, Thomas Manuel, is a music professor.

Manuel confirmed in a phone call Friday that The Jazz Loft was in talks with the town. He said the organization has been having “wonderful and inspiring conversations” about the possibilities of leasing the Vail-Leavitt, but declined to comment further.

Riverhead Town sued in May 2023 to take the Vail-Leavitt Music Hall from the Council for the Vail-Leavitt, a nonprofit created in 1981 to restore the building and operate it as a performing arts center. Riverhead Town bought the building in 1980 and gifted it to the nonprofit in 1982. The deed from the town to the Council for the Vail-Leavitt Music Hall had a “reverter clause” to allow the town to recover title to the building if the council did not use it for the purposes for which it was conveyed, or “in the event that the historical character of the property was not properly maintained.”

Recently, there had been few performances at the Vail-Leavitt. According to town officials, the organization did not properly maintain the property, which they said was in dire need of urgent, and expensive, repairs.

A few months after the town filed its lawsuit last year seeking to take back title to the property, pursuant to the deed’s reverter clause, all of the council’s board members resigned and turned over the council — and therefore, the building — to Riverhead Town. Town Board members then appointed themselves the interim board of directors of the council. The Vail-Leavitt board would meet after 15 business days to elect a permanent board, according to the Town Board resolution.

While the town encouraged interested people to send letters of interest for appointment to the Vail-Leavitt board, Town Board members never met to appoint a permanent board.

Meanwhile, the town’s lawsuit to recover title to the building continued and, on May 8, the town took title to the building, according to court documents. 

Then Town Board members, acting as the directors of the Council for the Vail-Leavitt, voted to dissolve the organization, citing the significant amount of debt and very few assets. The Council for the Vail Leavitt has a little more than $800 in its bank accounts, while it has more than $40,000 in debts, including roughly $34,000 it owes on a credit card to DIME bank, according to court filings.

“Despite efforts, there was no interest in taking over a Board that was so far in the red,” Hurley wrote. The best course of action, the town decided, was to judicially dissolve the company, she said.

The Riverhead Town Attorney’s office, on behalf of the Council for the Vail-Leavitt, filed dissolution papers in Suffolk County Supreme Court on Monday. The attorney general’s permission is needed to dissolve the nonprofit organization.

“Now that the [theater] is secured and owned by the Town, the intention is to lease it to a not-for-profit that will help with the restoration and programming so that it can be another working part of downtown,” Hurley wrote.

The prior Vail-Leavitt board commissioned a restoration appraisal of the property, which indicated renovations of the buildings would cost roughly $200,000, Hurley said in an email. The Council for the Vail-Leavitt was awarded a $250,000 grant from Suffolk County in November, which the town is able to use to pay for repairs, Hurley said. 

“The goal is historic preservation, not to modify in a major way,” Hurley wrote of the restoration project. “A new roof is the biggest expense and change pursued.”

The Vail-Leavitt was built as an upstairs opera house in 1881. It is on both the national and state registers of historic places, as well as being a town landmark. It has hosted many events and theatrical productions throughout the last forty years.