Lincoln Center Revitalized
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

This is a propitious moment for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts to commission an institutional history. Having soothed various rivalries and minor rebellions among its 12 constituent organizations, Lincoln Center this spring finally broke ground on the first stage of its massive renovation project. Construction on the second phase will begin in January 2008, with both phases scheduled for completion in fall 2009. Although it was delayed by several years, for reasons including internecine conflict, leadership turnover, and the attacks of September 11, 2001, getting redevelopment off the ground can only be counted as a major success.
“Lincoln Center: A Promise Realized: 1979-2006” (Wiley, 244 pages, $40) rightly celebrates that success and others that Lincoln Center has achieved over the last quarter century. As its title suggests, the book, cowritten by Stephen Stamas, a former vice chairman of Lincoln Center, and Sharon Zane, is very much an official history. The authors describe the Center’s most successful programs at length. Less successful initiatives, programs that lost their funding, and political crises are somewhat glossed over. For a more detailed and exciting account of the drama and maneuvering to reach consensus on redevelopment, for instance, you’d be better off doing a Google search for “Lincoln Center” and “renovation” and “Volpe.” For these episodes, the authors seem to rely on press accounts, anyway, even though presumably their access might have allowed them to dig deeper had that been their mandate.
This book covers only the second half of Lincoln Center’s history –– the first 20 years are documented in Edgar Young’s “Lincoln Center: Building of an Institution” (1980) –– and it provides a useful, if occasionally plodding, account of the major themes of this period. These include the addition of new constituents –– the School of American Ballet and Jazz at Lincoln Center; the growth of the campus (in the Samuel B. and David Rose Building); and, most significantly, the expanding role of Lincoln Center, Incorporated, as a producing and programming organization in its own right, as opposed to a mere landlord.
Great Performers, a recital series that features internationally renowned musicians, and the Mostly Mozart Festival were both started in the early years and have been almost continuously successful. The Lincoln Center Festival, now a wonderful feature of summer in New York, which has brought unique productions like the recent “DruidSynge” by Dublin’s Abbey Theater, is a comparatively recent development, established in 1995. In the 1990’s, Lincoln Center also started a concert series called American Songbook, devoted to American standards, and continued to expand other summer programs like Lincoln Center Out of Doors and Midsummer Night Swing. Each of these steps was resisted by many constituents, who worried about competition for audience and fund raising. Lincoln Center has said the expanded programming is financially necessary, because dark theaters are expensive.
Mr. Stamas and Ms. Zane give lots of space to the ongoing debates over the acoustics of Avery Fisher Hall and of the New York State Theater. These narratives have a Sisyphean quality: Since it was built, Avery Fisher Hall has been renovated seven times with the goal of improving the acoustics. The Philharmonic is currently considering planning yet another renovation, designed by Norman Foster. In 2002,in the midst of an architectural competition for a redesign of the hall, the Philharmonic abruptly announced that was in discussions with Carnegie Hall about merging into a single performing arts institution. These discussions eventually fell through, and the Philharmonic was coaxed back into the Lincoln Center fold.
In 2003, New York City Opera, whose leadership has maintained for years that the New York State Theater is a bad venue for opera, failed to secure a spot at the World Trade Center site. At the moment, City Opera is still looking for somewhere to move, while it also seeks a new director.(The general and artistic director, Paul Kellogg, will retire at the end of this season.)
That two major constituents would seriously consider abandoning Lincoln Center is striking. This book doesn’t raise larger questions about Lincoln Center’s success in yoking together many individually powerful performing arts organizations. Are these institutions better off being part of Lincoln Center, or might they thrive as well or better on their own? This is largely a theoretical question, since Lincoln Center exists and few would propose dismantling it, but an attempt to answer such questions might lead to some interesting possibilities.
Understandably, Mr. Stamas and Ms. Zane cannot provide a detailed history of each member of the Lincoln Center family, but it seems odd that the new general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, Peter Gelb, is not even mentioned, particularly since the problems he confronts –– a declining, aging audience, a widespread impression of the Met as “elite” and aesthetically conservative –– apply to some degree to Lincoln Center as a whole.
The book could have looked ahead to the long-term challenges Lincoln Center and its institutions face, including audience development. Redevelopment is supposed to make the campus more inviting and attractive. The renovated Harmony Atrium (a public-private space across the street from Lincoln Center) and a new restaurant will provide needed spaces for socializing. The Harmony Atrium will also include Lincoln Center’s first centralized discount-ticket facility. Lincoln Center Theater, whose subscribers are almost uniformly gray-haired, plans to build a third, 100-seat theater to showcase new directors and playwrights, which would be a wonderful addition.
Lincoln Center has always represented to me an exciting, if decidedly upscale, feature on New York’s cultural landscape since I first went with my grandmother on her American Ballet Theatre subscription. Its architecture, which has been criticized as a mediocre version of mid-century modern, I have always enjoyed and found impressive. But, apart from the student population of Juilliard and the School of American Ballet, I don’t see many young people there. Like many major New York cultural institutions, Lincoln Center must continue trying to create an atmosphere that will draw them.