They Told Me Not to Take that Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center (20 page)

Could it be that the very project that almost tore Lincoln Center asunder in 2001 and 2002 was a decade later partially responsible for an unprecedented level of cooperation, coordination, and cohesion?

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eminent sense as an economic set of entities cooperating on revenue generation and expense controls. By taking advantage of the economies of scope and scale that exist among twelve different organizations, whenever possible, there are financial gains to be secured. The ability of this many performing and educational
organizations to work together from an artistic perspective is also facilitated by their proximity. Redevelopment may well have solidified relationships all over Lincoln Center’s campus. One of its consequences is that artistic cooperation seemed to increase appreciably.

It is no accident that Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, was selected to create and lead the first-ever matriculated major in jazz at The Juilliard School. Similarly, maestro Alan Gilbert, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, accepted a position as the head of The Juilliard School’s Conducting Program. Whenever special guest artists are performing for constituents, Juilliard’s president Polisi is attuned to how they might be invited to enrich the experience of students. Lectures, small-group discussions, and master classes abound.

Maestro Gilbert included a New York premiere of a Marsalis-composed jazz piece for the orchestra to open a New York Philharmonic season. Peter Martins commissioned Marsalis to compose a piece for the New York City Ballet. Lincoln Center retained Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra to open its twenty-fifth anniversary Midsummer Night Swing outdoor dance series.

The Lincoln Center Festival has presented the New York Philharmonic playing the work of Varèse and jointly presented with the Metropolitan Opera the Kirov Opera Company and its orchestra performing a summer
Ring Cycle
conducted by Valery Gergiev. The festival also used the services of the New York City Opera Orchestra to accompany performances of the Ashton Festival at the Metropolitan Opera House in 2004, Julie Taymor’s
Grendel
at the New York City State Theater in 2006, and the San Francisco Ballet at the same place in the same year. And it jointly presented with the Chamber Music Society a Prokofiev Marathon in July 2003.

Lincoln Center has recently reached an agreement with the New York Philharmonic to perform three pathbreaking staged operas. They will be cocurated by both institutions. The first, scheduled for August, 2015, is
Written on Skin
by the composer George Benjamin and the librettist Martin Crimp and directed by Katie Mitchell. The second,
The Importance of Being Earnest
by the composer Gerald Barry, will be mounted in 2016. A third opera, soon to be announced, is in the planning stages for 2017. To produce these rarely played works in America is expensive.
By joining forces, Lincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic will bring them to life in New York City. This major undertaking exemplifies artistic cooperation as between two constituents.

The Mostly Mozart Festival and the Great Performers series have frequently presented difficult-to-acquire films at the Walter Reade Theater with the cooperation of the Film Society.

When Lincoln Center reopened Alice Tully Hall and the New York City Ballet celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of George Balanchine, as many of the resident organizations as possible offered their artistry for these landmark occasions.

The Chamber Music Society frequently joined forces with Lincoln Center’s programming department. In 2013, inspired by the codirector of CMS, David Finckel, a concert entitled The Cellists of Lincoln Center was arranged. Drawing from that instrument’s repertoire, the first chair cello players of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, the New York City Ballet Orchestra, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Chamber Music Society all participated enthusiastically. It was difficult to discern whether the players—or the standing-room-only audiences—enjoyed themselves more.

The Metropolitan Opera, under Peter Gelb, has taken special initiatives with many of Lincoln Center’s constituents. Perhaps the most notable has been joining forces with Andre Bishop at Lincoln Center Theater to develop new operas in workshop form. This process is guided by directors who frequently present plays at Lincoln Center Theater. Also notable is the Met Opera joining forces with The Juilliard School on the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, launched in 2009, and in the New York Choreographic Institute beginning in 2002. In addition, Alan Gilbert has been invited to conduct the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, as has Louis Langrée, the maestro of Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Orchestra.

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the largest of its kind in the world, draws many of its special exhibits from the work and history of the constituents. To select just three, it mounted
Opera on the Air: The Metropolitan Opera Radio Broadcasts Turn 75
(December 2005–May 2006);
Historic Debuts at SAB’s Workshop Performances
(April–July 2009); and
Lincoln Center: Celebrating 50 Years
, a fiftieth-anniversary exhibition (October 2009–January 2010).

And of course for forty years the nationally televised program
Live from Lincoln Center
has featured constituent performances for exposure around the country. These have included virtually every resident organization, many on multiple occasions.

These are only illustrations of the many and varied forms of artistic collaboration regularly occurring at Lincoln Center. So it is a source of annoyance to my colleagues and to me whenever some critics complain of insufficient cooperation between and among Lincoln Center and its constituents. There is a term of art for such carping: baloney.

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its constituents are estimated to pump $3.4 billion of economic activity into the metropolitan-area economy. Data on employment, tourism, real estate development, retail business, restaurants, and New York City’s sales and property tax revenue also support the revitalizing effect Lincoln Center has had on the Upper West Side.

But walking, over less than one square mile from the sixteen-acre campus, bordering from south to north, 57th Street to 79th Street, and from east to west, Central Park West to Twelfth Avenue, is just as telling. The changes are dramatic from the day I stepped foot on the campus on March 1, 2002, through almost thirteen years later. The streetscape, the skyline, and the rush of pedestrian and vehicular traffic, uptown, downtown, and crosstown, are not to be compared.

Not only has Lincoln Center been utterly transformed, but so have its surroundings. Just consider restaurants. On Lincoln Center’s territory proper, in 2002 there were the Metropolitan Opera’s dining establishment The Grand Tier and Arpeggio, a food service in Avery Fisher Hall. Eleven years later, they were joined by Tom Colicchio’s “wichcraft” in the David Rubenstein Atrium, Marcus Samuelsson’s American Table at Alice Tully Hall, a popular café called Indie tucked into the new Elinor Bunin Film Center, and of course, Jonathan Benno’s Lincoln Ristorante.

These new venues range so widely in their cuisine, price points, ambience, comfort, and speed of dining that every pocketbook, taste, and schedule can be satisfied. They have become places where audiences, artists, employees, and administrators hang out. Lincoln Center has begun to have the feel of a campus, a name that its acreage has often been called.

The facts and figures are impressive. In 2013, over one hundred thousand people enjoyed a meal at Lincoln alone, roughly half pre- and post-theater patrons and half destination diners. All of the restaurants on the campus together grossed in the vicinity of $20 million. As striking, they served more than 425,000 diners. In 2013, compared to 2002, Lincoln Center’s dining facilities were generating four times the dollar sum and serving five times the number of guests.

Beyond the statistics, they lured people to linger and enjoy themselves. Social encounter and cultural discourse became natural allies. Friends and companions found it easy to meet and anticipate the show to come or to share reactions soon after a curtain fell.

Artists and administrators, students and spectators, foreign tourists and domestic travelers, subway commuters, and drivers or taxi and black car customers all found common ground over a quick salad or sandwich or a repast that could run up an impressive bill and leave a wonderful memory of a terrific dining experience.

But as wide-ranging as are Lincoln Center’s food service offerings, they almost pale by comparison to the abundance of choice now on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, an area regarded before 2002 as a culinary wasteland.

Sure, there were a few preexisting standbys when I arrived at Lincoln Center, like Café Fiorello, Café Luxembourg, Gabriel’s, Picholine, and Shun Lee.

But now ticket holders and visitors can also dine at Asiate, The Atlantic Grill, A Voce, Bar Boulud, Bouchon Bakery, Boulud Sud, Ed’s Chowder House, Jean-Georges, Nougatine, Landmarc, The Leopard at des Artistes, Le Pain Quotidien, Masa, Nick and Toni’s Cafe, Per Se, PJ Clarke’s, Porter House, The Smith, and Telepan, all within six blocks of Lincoln Center!

But for those who would venture just a little further, are prepared to dine earlier to make curtain or catch a meal after the show, or are willing to hail a cab rather than walk, the choices are also delectable.
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Ask any of the chefs or investors in these establishments why they located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and one answer will inevitably pop up: Lincoln Center. Its year-round traffic is now estimated at 5.5 million people. They include 7,500 employees and 2,000 full-time students.

In a profession where few successful men or women are inclined to virtual anonymity, Lloyd Goldman is an exception: he’s a low-key developer. He told me over lunch that one of the key criteria he uses to determine what residential properties to buy is the presence of a two-, three-, or four-star restaurant with a long-term lease and staying power on the same block. Its location is, in his mind, highly correlated to low crime levels, to the high net wealth of residents, to an attractive clientele, and to a terrific neighborhood amenity.

Goldman’s observation underscores how development, once successfully started, can become a virtuous circle. The tremendous success of Steve Ross’s Related Companies’ Time Warner Center, which replaced the broken-down and forlorn New York Coliseum, helped to give those at the Hearst Corporation the confidence to build the first commercial skyscraper after 9/11, designed by Norman Foster.

Lenny Litwin built the Grand Tier Apartments in 2005 right across the street from Lincoln Center, charging rents two to three times the average of comparably located buildings. He is credited with proving that there existed a much more robust market for high-end rentals near Lincoln Center than was commonly believed.

Developers like Arthur Zeckendorf, Gary Barnett, Daniel Brodsky, John Avalon, Donald Trump, and Litwin himself all built major cooperative, condominium, or rental apartment houses near Lincoln Center during the period 2002–2014.
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And who, prior to 2002, would have ventured a guess that Apple, Barney’s, Best Buy, Brooks Brothers, Century 21, Helmut Lang, Hugo Boss, J. Crew, Lululemon, MAC Cosmetics, Patagonia, Pottery Barn, Rag & Bone, Samsung, Theory, West Elm, Williams-Sonoma, and Zara would all have opened shops up and down Broadway, Columbus, and Amsterdam Avenue? Today, the costs of retail space, commercial space, and condominiums and co-ops per square foot on these streets are comparable to or in excess of their counterparts on Madison Avenue, or for that matter, on Park, or on Fifth Avenue, or in Tribeca or SoHo.

Hotels, some at the very high end, like The Mandarin or The Trump or The Phillips Club, and others, more affordable but less well known, like The Empire, The Hudson, and The Milburn, enjoy high occupancy levels year-round. Business is thriving. Lincoln Center’s magnetic attraction to patrons and visitors contributes to that pleasant result.

Toward the end of my tenure, Glenn Dicterow, the first chair violinist of the New York Philharmonic, paid a visit to my office. Only twelve months before, after thirty-two years of service at “The Phil,” he had announced that he would retire to a teaching post at the University of Southern California. I asked him what he was most looking forward to enjoying. “The beach,” he said. He and his wife had bought a modest beachfront home where they could walk down a small flight of steps and be right on the sand to view the mighty Pacific Ocean.

In the early 1990s Glenn had purchased a condominium in the Harmony building. It was a very convenient place to live, located just steps away from Avery Fisher Hall. But the condo was poorly financed, poorly maintained, and adjacent to that much-neglected, non-code-compliant, seven-thousand-square-foot public space that had become a dismal hangout for the homeless: dark, dank, and poorly ventilated. Property values for Harmony residents plummeted accordingly. Now he revealed that following the completion of the David Rubenstein Atrium and more generally, Lincoln Center’s stunning modernization, the value of his apartment had zoomed. The impact of Lincoln Center’s renaissance enabled him to switch careers to teaching and occasional performing, while reserving plenty of time for glorious sunsets and glimmering seas.

“So, Reynold, I have come to thank you for making this future possible for me, my family, and countless others,” he said.

This is what economic development looks like when personified.