The August Wilson Center for African American Culture in Pittsburgh — the hometown of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright — is now in conservatorship, apparently as a result of mismanagement, the New York Times reports.

According to the Times, foundations including the Richard King Mellon Foundation and the Heinz Endowments, have withdrawn their support for the center as it struggles to address its financial troubles. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that local foundations had provided nearly 70 percent of the center's annual funding since it opened in 2009. Meanwhile, Dollar Bank has sued to foreclose on the $42 million bow-fronted building after the center missed payments for eight months on an $11 million loan. Last week, in a final effort to avoid liquidation, control of the center was handed to a former bankruptcy judge, who will serve as its conservator until at least February and will have broad powers to operate and manage the troubled facility.

Supporters of the center suggest that senior staff and the center's board borrowed to build a grand palace of culture just blocks from the Hill District, where many of Wilson’s plays are set, but failed to develop an audience and donor base that could sustain it. Subsequently, neither the founders of the center nor the new board that took over in 2010 could come up with a business plan that would fund the center's ambitious programs in dance, theater, jazz, and art while covering its $53,600 monthly loan payments. City Council member Sala Udin, a boyhood friend of Wilson's who spent a dozen years helping to raise money for the center, told the Times that CEO Andre Kimo Stone Guess battled his senior staff, eventually eliminating three top deputy positions; that the director of finance quit keeping accounts; and that foundations "were at their wits' end" and discontinued their funding.

"The debt was crippling; people expected it to just go away," said Mark Clayton Southers, a former director of the center's theater program. According to Southers, the center struggled to find an audience among the people Wilson portrayed — working-class African Americans, many of whom felt unwelcome in downtown Pittsburgh.

"It's extremely sad," said City Council member R. Daniel Lavelle, who represents the Hill District, where many of Wilson’s plays were set. "I know what August Wilson's name means in terms of history, and I know the impact a national African-American theater can mean to both Pittsburgh and the country."