PALMETTO — There’s a building on the Manatee River, right on the line between a small suburb and a smaller semirural community, where famed musicians perform and nobody knows it’s happening.
Katy Perry was there in 2017, as were Faith Hill and Tim McGraw. Linkin Park was there a few years before that. Michael Bublé said he has “many fond memories of ripping footballs around with my band and crew all over that building” from when he visited in 2019.
Feld Entertainment Studios is massive enough that if you’ve ever driven past, you may have wondered what was going on in there. Occasionally, the answer is rehearsals for national concert tours. Feld keeps the rehearsals secret, and secure. Most Feld employees who work on the property don’t even know which superstar is there until after they’ve left.
The tours rent out one of the two arena-sized rehearsal halls in the building to work out the kinks before hitting the road, and to ensure their stage setups will fit into different venues. Currently, the quarantined WNBA is finishing playing its 2020 season there. Other times those spaces are filled with velociraptors or an ice-skating Princess Elsa rehearsing for one of the shows put on by Feld Entertainment, which has been headquartered there since 2013.
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The facility, originally built as a Siemens generator factory in the 1980s, is the third largest single-occupancy building in Florida. It used to be second, behind NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building, but then Amazon built a huge fulfillment center in Ruskin.
Two Tampa Bay Times journalists were given a tour of the complex recently. It was enchanting, but eerie. The place is literally a fun factory, but it was cavernous and empty at a time when fun has been canceled.
There were sleeping monsters parked in the shop, like Grave Digger, the beautifully-airbrushed Monster Jam monster truck. There were dozens of other monster trucks, all on the smaller tires used to move them around when they’re not flying over crushed cars. Giant shelves were filled with the seats from the monster trucks, which are custom molded to each driver’s butt.
One lonely looking guy in mechanics coveralls dug around in a monster-sized toolbox as the tour went by. The tour did not pass anyone else in the 580,000-square-foot space.
There were signs everywhere of the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus that Feld owned for decades and retired in 2017. One hallway featured brightly-colored abstract paintings on which someone signed the names Nicole, Icky and Alayna, the elephants who painted them.
The guides explained that the facility was also formerly used to paint and refurbish the train cars that carried the circus' human performers, animals and some of the performers' cars all over the country up until the end.
The tour walked through huge costume and set fabrication shops, with rolls on rolls of fabric, endless rows of paint cans, fake trees, and a sign taped to the wall announcing one table as the workspace of “Sew Team Six.” There were pencils, and painting masks and brushes left askew. A lot of it looked like people had just left for the day.
In one room, Stephen Yaros, a senior vice president of global communications for Feld, said, “The people who work in here are sculptors, just incredible craftsmen. I wish they were here.”
We continued past a tarp that was obviously covering a triceratops, passed under a rack of Toy Story-alien heads that were skewered on a big pole like a kabob and through rolling cabinets labeled “cloaks and flowveralls” alongside a picture of the Guardians of the Galaxy. The next room was a warehouse a football field long where more than 24,000 circus costumes dating back to the ’60s were hanging in multiple tiers. About 1,000 of them were for animals.
There are, and this is just an estimate, about a million-gajillion sequins in that room.
Also, the ringmaster’s jacket feels like it weighs around 40 pounds.
Much of the facility is now being used as storage. When Feld was forced to pull all its tours off the road in March, it had to put the dozen portable rinks that travel with various Disney on Ice tours, and all the other stuff, somewhere. There was still mud from the last event caked on the dozens of Monster Jam Speedsters parked in another room.
For all the cool stuff that was there, what was missing was more striking. The people.
Feld laid off or furloughed many of its employees when the pandemic ended live events, but the signs of their work were everywhere.
In one office area, the cubicles were empty, but the walls were filled with designs for Disney and Marvel popcorn buckets and cotton candy containers. The conference room in the corner (one of 17 conference rooms on site) was stuffed full of toys, either ones designed by the people who worked there, or ones they were using for inspiration.
In a department devoted to travel and logistics, a poster on a bulletin board proudly proclaimed that Feld personnel and equipment had successfully traveled 28,393,341 miles in the prior year, noting that the moon is only 238,000 miles from earth.
A world map hung on the wall nearby packed with red pins denoting the cities Feld’s shows had played.
It had been months, at least, since a pin had been added, but maybe it won’t be too much longer.
"Factory" - Google News
September 29, 2020 at 10:10AM
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A peek inside Feld’s massive fun factory during a pandemic - Tampa Bay Times
"Factory" - Google News
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