Student plans to re-open venue

Once a haven for musicians and artists, the building formerly known as the Aquadome now is a vacant building in downtown Kirksville — but not for long.

Dust and broken glass currently fill the upstairs of old building, but Vuagniaux said that when she graduates in May she wants to turn it into a performance venue for musicians and artists.

Senior Brie Vuagniaux just leased the property for May to October from owner Myles Kelly.  

"We have a lot of work to do, obviously," she said. "What we want to do is kind of have a community center downstairs and then we could have people come [upstairs] and practice with their bands like they can't do at home. You can play as loud as you want here."

Vuagniaux said she's remodeling the place with her own money, and doesn't plan to charge bands to practice or perform, outside of an occasional cover charge.

"I think most people would find that very logical," she said.

The abandoned building at 121 N. Main St. in Kirksville has been vacant for more than a year, but a decade before Vuagniaux decided to lease the building, people knew as a performance center and living space.

"You could basically do anything you wanted here," Vuagniaux said. "They did a lot of shows, a lot of music shows."

Eric Tumminia, who was involved with the Aquadome in its 2001-2004 heyday, said it was open to anyone and anything. He said people lived there for little to no rent.

"On a really generic level it was an open community, art, music and cultural space you could say," he said. "Bands practiced in the upstairs, some people lived in the upstairs, there were a whole lot of shows."

Tumminia said performers at the Aquadome came all the way from Mexico and Canada.  He said that when a French-Canadian band visited the Aquadome, the night ended with a visit from the police.

"We went out there and like, some people had created these effigies of roosters and robots and put on a play, and then at the end we burned the big rooster and robot effigies," he said. "And then the police, the Kirksville SWAT team showed up in these vehicles that none of us had ever seen before [because] there was a group of people having a fire, basically."

In those years, the Aquadome made Kirksville residents. Terry Shelton uneasy. Shelton said sometimes the crowd at the Aquadome made her nervous. Shelton works at a law office near the lot and said she didn't always feel safe.

"There would be people some nights that would just be hanging out along the side and I think a lot of people were just kind of taken aback," she said. "Whoever was in the loop and knew what that place was about was fine, but I don't think anyone in the general public felt encouraged or even wanted to go around there."

Shelton said she would have felt better about the Aquadome if she had known more about the people involved and what was going on there.

Senior Allison Sissom is the co-coordinator of Tom Thumb, an art and music exhibit that will meet at the Aquadome for the second consecutive year. She said she can understand why some people in the Kirksville community would be nervous about the venue reopening.

"I think that is a problem because Kirksville is really conservative," she said. "If you just hear stories and myths then you don't really understand what's going on."

Tom Thumb began in 1998, three years before the Aquadome opened, as an alternative to structured, selective exhibits at Truman.

(Additional reporting by Blaise Hart-Schmidt.)