Lincoln Center: Mixed Reviews
ON May 14, 1959, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower broke ground at Columbus Avenue and 64th Street for what would become Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, he joked that maybe the whole project was unnecessary. In a makeshift tent Leonard Bernstein had just conducted the New York Philharmonic in Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” and other works. “If they can do this under a tent,” the president said, “why the square?”
Turning serious, he forecast that this ambitious endeavor, which wound up costing $185 million, would become a “mighty influence for peace and understanding throughout the world.”
Fostering international peace is a rather lofty standard by which to measure the success of Lincoln Center as it begins its 50th-anniversary celebrations on Monday morning at the newly renovated Alice Tully Hall. What really matters is that night after night, as the founders envisioned, the plaza is abuzz with crowds heading into Avery Fisher Hall, the Metropolitan Opera House, the Vivian Beaumont Theater and the other performance spaces of the center’s 12 constituents.
Yet if a sprawling performing-arts complex like Lincoln Center were proposed today, it would never be built. Some of the impediments would be practical: the daunting costs, the lack of political consensus, the shift in attitudes toward large-scale urban development projects that displace entire neighborhoods. But the larger question is whether such a complex should be built in the first place. The idealistic assumption that sparked the creation of Lincoln Center — that orchestras, opera companies, ballet troupes and theaters would have much to gain by becoming partners in a centralized complex — would be vigorously challenged today....
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Turning serious, he forecast that this ambitious endeavor, which wound up costing $185 million, would become a “mighty influence for peace and understanding throughout the world.”
Fostering international peace is a rather lofty standard by which to measure the success of Lincoln Center as it begins its 50th-anniversary celebrations on Monday morning at the newly renovated Alice Tully Hall. What really matters is that night after night, as the founders envisioned, the plaza is abuzz with crowds heading into Avery Fisher Hall, the Metropolitan Opera House, the Vivian Beaumont Theater and the other performance spaces of the center’s 12 constituents.
Yet if a sprawling performing-arts complex like Lincoln Center were proposed today, it would never be built. Some of the impediments would be practical: the daunting costs, the lack of political consensus, the shift in attitudes toward large-scale urban development projects that displace entire neighborhoods. But the larger question is whether such a complex should be built in the first place. The idealistic assumption that sparked the creation of Lincoln Center — that orchestras, opera companies, ballet troupes and theaters would have much to gain by becoming partners in a centralized complex — would be vigorously challenged today....