Witness to History: Richard L. Smoot on Building the Kimmel Center
September 19, 2025
Above: Philadelphia Orchestra Board Chair Richard L. Smoot (left) and Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts Board Chair Willard G. Rouse III at the opening of the Kimmel Center on December 15, 2001
Photo: From The Philadelphia Inquirer. © 2001 Philadelphia Inquirer, LLC. All rights reserved. Used under license.
By Judith Kurnick
The recent merger of The Philadelphia Orchestra and the Kimmel Center (now The Philadelphia Orchestra and Ensemble Arts) might seem, in retrospect, to be a no-brainer. But Richard (Dick) L. Smoot recalls a time when the Orchestra’s move to the new hall was not a given. As a member of the Orchestra Board’s executive committee in addition to his day job as regional chair of PNC Bank, he was acutely aware of the growing tension between Orchestra leadership and that of what was then known as the Regional Performing Arts Center (RPAC).
RPAC’s priority was to be the premier performing arts center in the United States.
“The elephant in the room,” Smoot recalls, “was that the prospective resident companies—of which the Orchestra was the largest—wanted to be RPAC’s top priority, believing that this effort was being undertaken by the city to let them grow and expand and be better. RPAC’s priority was to be the premier performing arts center in the United States. When you have different priorities, you have a hard time coming to agreement about how RPAC was going to support the companies in being the greatest they could be. And since the Orchestra was moving from owning our own residence where we made decisions about what we needed, to becoming a tenant, we had a lot of needs as a tenant to be successful.”
To have it done, to have completed it, to be enjoying this party, was great.
When Smoot was elected chair of the Orchestra Board in September 2000, the resident companies were still a long way from signing leases. Progress seemed to have stalled. Smoot went to RPAC chair Bill Rouse. “We met one or two times and weren’t making any progress. Then one day he and I really went at it. He was tough and I was tough. But he got it, and things began to move. Bill Rouse should get a lot of credit for that because he saw that he wasn’t going to get home unless things changed.”
The Kimmel Center’s opening December 14–16, 2001, was one of the high points of Smoot’s 13-year service on the Orchestra Board. “To have it done, to have completed it, to be enjoying this party, was great.”
But the hall was still dealing with some birth pangs. “I remember it was so cold,” Smoot says. “The air conditioning and heating systems didn’t work correctly. And the air came up under the seats. The ladies were freezing to death.” A few weeks later they were still working on the systems when Smoot ran into two older women at a Friday afternoon concert. “They said, ‘It’s so cold. What is being done to make it better?’” He told them the Kimmel Center was working hard to get the system working correctly. Meanwhile, he told them, “There are two things you can do. The air comes up right under the pedestal of your chair. If you had a scarf or something, you could wrap it around the pedestal and the air wouldn’t come up. The other thing you might consider is to wear long pants. And this older woman said, ‘Oh, Mr. Smoot. One could never wear pants to The Philadelphia Orchestra.’”
“That was kind of a sum up of how things were,” recalls Smoot, who had chaired the Board’s marketing and finance committees prior to being elected chair. “We still had that old clientele, and we loved them, and we were trying to figure out how to keep them happy and also move on to the next generation.”