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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In the mid-fifties, when Robert Moses came up with the idea of Lincoln Center--a performing-arts complex that would make the depressed West Side of Manhattan respectable and provide the impetus for large-scale urban renewal--most of the city's performance venues were old, and people thought they should be replaced, not restored. The Metropolitan Opera House, on West Thirty-ninth Street, had sight-line problems, a cramped backstage, little room for storage, and inadequate rehearsal space. The company had been trying to relocate for nearly fifty years. The New York Philharmonic was particularly desperate, since its lease at Carnegie Hall was about to expire, and, in any case, the hall was going to be torn down to make way for an office building. The Philharmonic was the first tenant to move into Lincoln Center, in September, 1962. The New York State Theatre opened less than two years later, then the Vivian Beaumont, and the Met in the fall of 1966.
There were complaints about the facilities at Lincoln Center from the beginning, and persistent squabbling among the various institutional constituents, so it didn't come as much of a surprise to hear, a year or so ago, that the New York City Opera was talking about putting up a new hall miles away, at Ground Zero. Having struggled for years to produce operas in a building that was designed to muffle the sound of toe shoes on the stage, why shouldn't City Opera have a place of its own? But when the Philharmonic announced recently that it was leaving, too--moving back to Carnegie Hall, which, of course, hadn't been torn down after all--it was pretty clear that Lincoln Center was in serious trouble.
It's not likely that either the Philharmonic or City Opera would have bolted if its hall had been more suitable. Avery Fisher Hall--which is what Philharmonic Hall has been called since 1973--is widely thought to be an acoustical disaster and has been resistant to tinkering, despite a complete reconstruction in 1976. But the raison d'etre for Lincoln Center was dubious from the beginning. It originated with Robert Moses, not Leonard Bernstein, and Moses didn't care much for opera, or theatre, or symphony orchestras. He just figured that they could serve as a magnet for development. Using culture in this way was a new idea in the fifties, although almost everything else about Lincoln Center was stuck in the past. As a piece of design, it was as retrograde as the halls that it replaced--and much less successful.
Moses first proposed that the new arts complex be built at Columbus Circle. He would have set the Philharmonic and the Met behind the building that eventually became the New York Coliseum. When that plan didn't work out, he moved up the street to Lincoln Square and expanded the notion to include the New York City Ballet, the Juilliard School, and a new repertory theatre. John D. Rockefeller III signed on as the first president of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and Wallace K. Harrison, who had been more or less the Rockefeller house architect since the early days of Rockefeller Center, was asked to start making plans for the new Met, which would be the focal point of the complex, and to coordinate the choice of architects for the other buildings. Harrison asked a few of the architects he admired, including his partner Max Abramovitz, Alvar Aalto, Marcel Breuer, I. M. Pei, Pietro Belluschi, Edward Durell Stone, and Philip Johnson, to come to his office for a two-week-long charrette, or architectural work...
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