‘You are a star in this place.’ Otis Redding center spotlights arts, Macon

MACON — A block from this Georgia music mecca’s City Hall, precisely 120 paces from the front doors of the City Auditorium where Otis Redding’s funeral was held 57 years ago, a new 15,000-square-foot arts center that bears the soul-singing legend’s name was christened Tuesday.

The Otis Redding Center for the Arts, a roughly $11 million undertaking spearheaded by his family and largely funded by donations, sits on hallowed ground here.

It overlooks Cotton Avenue and a corner of Cherry Street, one of downtown’s main thoroughfares. Part of the center’s first floor was for a century home to the original Nu-Way Weiners stand, an iconic hot dog emporium that was gutted by fire 10 years ago this week.

The center is at once an homage to Otis, his legacy and his hometown, and its presence is yet another infusion of, well, soul for a pocket of this city’s downtown that for decades had seen better days.

“I just can’t wait to have the kids and the seniors in this community to come and not only think that they can be stars, they are stars,” Karla Redding-Andrews, Otis’ daughter, who is executive director of the Otis Redding Foundation, said as she addressed a crowd of a few hundred at Tuesday’s ribbon cutting. “Because once you walk in this building, you’re gonna see, you are a star in this place.”

Credit: THE MELODY

Credit: THE MELODY

The space will provide artistically inclined local children and teens with a place to learn about music and all aspects of it, from instruments to technology to law, engineering, business and touring. Other programs will be geared to toddlers and senior citizens and the center will host an array of camps and workshops and offer private lessons. The Otis Redding Foundation has hosted summer camps and events over the years but never had a dedicated venue, until now.

From a stage that is the focal point of a pie-slice-shaped outdoor amphitheater, Redding-Andrews saluted her mother, Zelma Redding, seated to her left.

Zelma Redding is the namesake of the amphitheater that graces the corner of Cherry and Cotton. It is part park, part performance venue and will soon feature a bronze statue of her husband sitting, yes, on a dock above a fountain — a makeshift bay — in a nod to perhaps his most famous song.

“You know, dad was amazing in his own right,” Karla Redding told the crowd. “But you know how he got amazing? A strong woman. ... We were in Los Angeles, California, unveiling (Otis Redding’s star) on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and (Atlanta rapper) Killer Mike was our host for that day. And he said something that was so perfect that I will never forget, that there would be no Otis without Zelma.”

Then she added, “There would be no Otis Redding Center for the Arts without Zelma Redding.”

Credit: Jason Vorhees of The Macon Melody newspaper

Zelma Redding, who turned 82 in October, did not speak publicly Tuesday. But after the ceremony, she remarked how it had long been a dream to build the center. She had looked all over town for the right spot.

In the end, she said she told her daughter, “Karla, if I’m gonna spend my money, I’m gonna buy what I want. I’m gonna buy that corner. She said, ‘Mom, you can’t afford that.’ I said, ‘Watch me.’”

Her daughter stood nearby, and moments after the ribbon cutting, greeting well-wishers, Redding-Andrews gazed out at this new vista for downtown Macon, one that will likely be among the city’s most-photographed landmarks.

The new center is blocks from a juke joint where Little Richard got his start. It lies down Cotton Avenue from the H&H restaurant that the Allman Brothers helped make famous and, nearby, the former business office of Capricorn Records. As it happens, the center is also a few doors down from where Otis Redding’s original office sat.

“It’s significant here on Cotton Avenue,” Redding-Andrews said, “and all of its history and heritage and what it means for the Redding family.”