They Told Me Not to Take that Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center (14 page)

       
5.
     
To develop the public space in a way that enlivens the image of Lincoln Center, encourages public use, and integrates the complex into its surroundings

       
6.
     
To maximize efficiency and minimize costs for all constituents

My immediate preoccupation was less with the aesthetics and functionality of redevelopment than with creating an incentive structure that would activate the constituents. Sustained cooperation in this massive undertaking did not come naturally to the inexperienced, the ill-prepared, or the shortsighted. The focus of all on self-interest required Lincoln Center to create a set of attractive inducements for participation and engagement.

In formulating a workable scheme, I paid attention first and foremost to how our plans might appeal to private donors and to the state and federal governments. In the last days of the administration of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the City of New York committed up to $240 million of capital funds to the physical redevelopment of Lincoln Center. It happened on Gordon Davis’s watch. This was an important and often unacknowledged accomplishment.

It was surreal that some resident organizations like the New York City Opera and the New York City Ballet appeared to believe that these city funds were intended to be spent on virtually any capital request they articulated. The fact was that the city’s capital appropriation had to be matched by noncity governmental and private dollars. Approved projects also had to satisfy specific and exacting eligibility criteria. These realities seemed to escape the attention of many of my colleagues and of the trustees to whom they reported.

With indispensable early funding from the city secured, it was imperative that funds be raised from individuals, foundations, and corporations and from the state and federal governments in unprecedented sums. Lincoln Center and its constituents needed contributed income in orders of magnitude higher than had ever been raised before.
Indeed, few at Lincoln Center had the slightest idea how the $1 billion or more needed to finance redevelopment expenses could possibly be found. Many believed it would never happen.

Of course, the post-9/11 economic recession was not the most favorable environment in which to begin. But was that temporary financial condition a reason to delay, or merely another pretext? After all, the endowments of the constituents hardly grew and balance sheets hardly strengthened during the decade of the 1990s, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average tripled.

Having recognized that not all resident artistic organizations were ready to tackle a redevelopment project at the same time, we formulated our plans accordingly and announced a collective goal in the $400 million range.

By 2004 Jazz at Lincoln Center had raised on its own some $140 million in pledges to move into its resplendent new Rafael Vinoly–designed venues: Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, The Allen Room, and the Rose Theater, all on 59th Street and Columbus Circle, at the Time Warner Center, only four blocks away from Lincoln Center’s traditional sixteen-acre campus. The location of Jazz was affectionately referred to as Lincoln Center South. This successful effort on the part of a fledgling organization in existence for less than two decades was nothing short of remarkable. A cadre of dedicated trustees, staff, and other true believers made it all happen. Their collective accomplishment provided some evidence that a much broader and more ambitious campaign could also succeed.

S
O WE BEGAN
with those who were ready. As the campus landlord and the largest presenter of art in the world, Lincoln Center now also became the clear, bold, no-nonsense leader of public space modernization, infrastructure repair and replacement, and artistic facility renovation and creation. Except for The Juilliard School, this group—The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the School of American Ballet, the Chamber Music Society, Lincoln Center Theater, and Lincoln Center, the parent body—was regarded by the larger constituents as composed of organizational lightweights. We were called unrealistic and were thought to be unable to realize a capital campaign. The group was often referred to derisively as the “Northern Alliance.”

The glue that held together these organizations was their eagerness for a street-level identity and ease of patron access on a campus and in facilities worthy of the artists, audiences, and students of the twenty-first century. That yearning was strong enough to overcome their stark artistic, managerial, educational, and economic differences.

This is the deal that Lincoln Center offered to these institutions.

First, we selected Diller + Scofidio (Renfro was added as a partner later) as our design architect. The choice of this firm, which at the time of Lincoln Center’s decision had not yet been the lead architect on a single completed building, was a major surprise. Norman Foster, Richard Meier, or Cooper Robertson in collaboration with Frank Gehry—competitors all: any of these would have been a more logical and certainly safer choice.

We were betting on the creative, nonstop flow of ideas that emerged from the studio of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio. We appreciated very much Liz’s explicit admiration of Lincoln Center and her desire to mix change with continuity. The firm respected what the founders had built, but Diller and Scofidio were convinced that Lincoln Center deserved to come off its pedestal, lower its barriers to entry, and embrace urban life in the form of an inviting pedestrian landscape. For Diller + Scofidio, Lincoln Center wasn’t just a prestigious client; it was a place to inhabit, a series of intellectual and institutional challenges to be seized, and a set of players to be engaged in all of their variety, with all of their seemingly incongruous notions. Sooner than anyone thought possible, the selection of Diller + Scofidio became a unanimous choice. Even Volpe agreed.

Second, Lincoln Center committed to constituents that it would raise all the funds required for every improvement to public spaces: the removal of a huge plaza, the size of several football fields, suspended above much of 65th Street, allowing light to replace darkness at ground level; new outdoor green spaces and expansive seating in a totally Wi-Fi’d environment; ease of access for the physically handicapped; waterproofing and paving of badly deteriorated plaza stone; and a new information landscape consisting of twenty-first-century appliances that through beautifully designed video blades and three-sheet cases would offer information about current and coming attractions. Up-to-date news would also appear in scrolling and dissolving text on a
grand stairway facing the main campus, Josie Robertson Plaza, and an enlarged 65th Street stairway leading to that destination.

Travertine building facades would be replaced with glass. Transparency would allow for real institutional identity, which would be readily apparent to the passing pedestrian or to auto and taxi passengers. What had been a long stretch of garage entrances and exits, loading docks, and service corridors would become an inviting, foot-traffic-friendly street of the arts. And fully renovated, well-lit underground passageways would attract each day thousands of commuters and students walking to and from the subway and ticketholders bound for one or another venue.

Third, these public space improvements would also include state-of-the-art security measures to respond to post-9/11 concerns about terrorism and would embrace the construction of a new central mechanical plant to provide heat and air conditioning at a unit-cost reduction of 20 percent to virtually all of the theaters on the main campus. The charge for these changes and for much-improved access for the physically handicapped? None. Lincoln Center would raise every needed penny here, too.

Lincoln Center also agreed to pay for all insurance costs associated with construction. It offered to handle all federal and state regulatory requirements involved in shepherding this complex project through and around many administrative obstacles, including a major one called Urban Land Use Review Planning (ULURP). It required dozens upon dozens of meetings, with the community board, local politicians, preservation and environmental groups, the Business Improvement District (BID), and the New York City Council itself.

Block for block, resident by resident, activist organization by advocacy group, pound for pound, the Upper West Side was well-known for its vigorous exercise of the First Amendment, for its proclivity to litigate, and for its constant courting of controversy. No resident organization competed with Lincoln Center for the privilege of assuming the responsibility to cope with these often contentious forces.

There was the matter of the expenses of the Lincoln Center Development Project (LCDP): this staff group would oversee the work of Diller + Scofidio; convene the dozens of design review and organizational meetings required; master the intricacies of city rules; and
set up competitions for the selection of theater designer, engineering firm, acoustician, and executive architect, among many other design and construction responsibilities. There was also the cost of research needed to mount a comprehensive, cohesive, capital campaign. Lincoln Center paid for it all.

If that were not enough, the deal closer was that for every approved artistic capital project, Lincoln Center volunteered to raise matching funds to those collected by the constituents, 20 percent of the first $25 million and 15 percent of everything above $25 million, up to a total of $120 million.

This unprecedented, concrete, dollars-and-cents offer came as a total surprise to the constituents of Lincoln Center. They had no reason to expect it. The proposal certainly caught their attention. It helped them to imagine what might be possible for their own facility wish lists.

For the School of American Ballet, the dream of Peter Martins was to double the capacity of its dance studios, and Diller’s light-filled, arresting design delighted her client.

At Lincoln Center Theater, Andre Bishop advocated strongly for a third theater space, one dedicated to promising playwrights, directors, and actors introducing new work. In close proximity to the other performance and rehearsal spaces of the theater, this newcomer, designed by architect Hugh Hardy, was also to feature a rooftop outdoor space overlooking the Paul Milstein Pool and Terrace, the place in which the famous Henry Moore sculpture was situated. Bishop was passionate in his advocacy for a new venue, later named the Claire Tow Theater, that would allow promising artists using it to mix and mingle with the veterans staging productions at the much larger Mitzi Newhouse and Vivian Beaumont Theaters.

The Juilliard School aspired to a major 38,500 square feet of expansion and 58,000 square feet of renovation. It would accommodate practice rooms, rehearsal spaces, studios, study carrels, a library and archive, lounges, places to dine, and new and expanded performance venues. Once inward-looking, in the hands of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, students could peer out of the school and easily view the stages where they longed to perform professionally upon graduation.

What Juilliard, the Chamber Music Society, Lincoln Center itself, and the Film Society had in common was that all desired a modernized
and much-improved Alice Tully Hall to call home. For Juilliard, Tully was the place where its orchestra and chamber music groups performed most. For the Chamber Music Society, Tully was literally created to be its home, financed by Alice Tully for that very purpose. For Lincoln Center, Tully was a venue receptive to diverse presentations of musicians and ensembles from around the world. There was chamber music. There were solo recitalists, vocalists, and instrumentalists, including organists utilizing the splendidly refurbished and renovated original Kuhn organ, soon to be reinstalled in the auditorium. There were chamber symphonies. Choral music. Jazz. Popular song. And even theater pieces and dance. For the Film Society, its two-week, world-famous New York Film Festival that opened the season was to return there.

The special accommodations shaped for these diverse needs by D S + R (design architect), Fisher Dachs Associates (theater designer), Jaffe Holden (acoustician), FXFOWLE (executive architect), and Arup (engineer) were nothing short of breathtaking. By installing sound-absorbing curtains lowered for film showings and moved out of sight for music, Alice Tully Hall would accommodate extremely well two art forms with opposing sound requirements. By allowing for stage extensions, the seating in Tully could be set up in three configurations, from 1,100 down to 850 seats. Smaller audiences could enjoy more experimental or contemporary work closer to the action, while dance and theater pieces could use the larger stage.

With the creation of an outdoor plaza accommodating 250 people and bleacher seating with equivalent capacity, a new performance venue had been born. It surprised and delighted residents and visitors exiting the busy subway station at 66th Street and Broadway. In addition, ticketholders could relax while waiting for their curtain time. And red carpets could be rolled out for stars to take their turns in front of the paparazzi.

The vaulting glass wall treated Broadway as a virtual stage set for those dining at Marcus Samuelsson’s American Table in the lobby of Alice Tully Hall or imbibing a drink at its romantic, undulating bar looking east across that world-famous boulevard.

And above the Morgan Stanley lobby, one could find upstairs the Hauser lounge, graced by an outdoor terrace. Like the space below, it
was frequently used for receptions and gala dinners, a crucial need never contemplated in the original design.

Add to all of this an expansive box office; special handicapped access; and a hall interior so comfortable, intimate, and stunning as to evoke amazement, most of all from those who knew the old Tully and had anticipated change with apprehension. They needn’t have worried.