Architects and Taxpayers
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.
Lincoln Center has burned through $10.4 million in New York City taxpayer funds since 1999 on planning for an elaborate redevelopment project, the New York Times reported yesterday. The Times reported that construction executive Peter Lehrer, in resigning from the project, denounced the costs as “grossly excessive and unjustifiable.” The architect Frank Gehry “was paid as much as $1 million,” the Times reported.
The Lincoln Center crowd of course responds that these amounts are small compared to the private funds to be raised for the project, or even to the economic benefits that the cultural institutions provide to the city in terms of jobs and tourism. It points out that the Lincoln Center serves poor students as well as the opera-going elite. But this is a city fiscal environment in which public library hours are being trimmed, firehouses are being closed, and sales and prop erty taxes are being raised. It seems hard to justify raising the sales tax and property taxes on the city’s middle- and working-class folk in order to fund the work of celebrity architects like Mr. Gehry.
A similar dynamic is at play in the re development of the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan. There, The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. has selected and approved the work of another celebrity architect, Daniel Libeskind, at a cost of some $798,817. One of the problems with Mr. Libeskind is that he has little experience designing office buildings. So, as our Julia Levy reports in today’s New York Sun, a more experienced firm, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, will be brought in.
We’ve got nothing against celebrity architects per se. Sometimes they become celebrities because of good work, other times, alas, because of a kind of flamboyant flakiness in their public personalities. If the city is building new structures, they might as well be soundly designed and aesthetically pleasing. Private developers and private cultural institutions can hire what architects they please.
But given the sums of public money involved in both the Lincoln Center and the ground zero plans, it would be nice to see some oversight and skepticism being offered on behalf of the ordinary members of the public who, in the end, are hiring the celebrity architects by paying higher taxes.
