Funded! Armored Car Theatre banks its Kickstarter funds

The Kickstarter funds will help transform the facade of Vault1031 at 1031 S. Sixth St.

Armored Car Theatre’s Kickstarter project that we reported on last week has been fully funded. The Kickstarter finished at $15,811 with 158 pledged backers.

It was slow going at the beginning of the campaign.

At the halfway mark Jon Huffman and Barb Cullen’s project had raised less than 50 percent of the their goal.

It was troubling. This was a fairly modest Kickstarter ask that supports something anyone in the performing arts community in Louisville would agree is sorely-needed: a new performance and rehearsal space.

Granted, helping a start-up theatre space gussy up its facade and replace a concrete rehearsal hall floor with a safer, more forgiving material isn’t particularly sexy. (Unless you’re into that sort of thing – which I am.) And unless you pledged beaucoup bucks to this campaign, you weren’t going to walk away with a tangible like a pack of cards or a tee shirt.

Still, in this art-loving city it seemed like it should have been a no-brainer for the fundraising to take off like a rocket.

But it didn’t.

Five days ago, as we reported, Ted Smith, Louisville’s Director of Economic Growth & Innovation posted this on Twitter.

And that was enough to spur this writer and at least 33 other people to back the Armored Car project.

The Smith push along with the already considerable networking and pulling together of the performing arts community amped up the fundraising in the final days.

By the end of the Kickstarter push, the theatre had exceeded its initial $15,000 ask.

The renovations supported by the Kickstarter campaign should be completed within two months, after which Cullen and Huffman will begin work on fundraising for the next and final stage of renovation of the Vault1031 building – the Armored Car Theatre itself, which they hope will be “a 130-seat, state-of-the-art performance venue designed by Michael Hottois… and the greenest, most eco-friendly theatre in the region.”