Out & About
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.
The Sound of New Digs
Things were looking — and sounding — very bright for WNYC yesterday.
With early morning light streaming through the windows of the soon-to-be new headquarters at 10 Hudson Square, which WNYC will move into in two months, luminaries such as Ira Glass, Kristin Chenoweth, and Eric Bogosian shared why they love New York’s public radio station.
The reason for the gathering was that WNYC has raised 74%, or $42.5 million, of its $57.5 million capital campaign goal, and accepted a $6 million gift from the Jerome L. Greene Foundation that will help create the Jerome L. Greene Performance Center, a 120-seat street-level theater that is part of WNYC’s move. Greene’s widow, Dawn, runs the foundation. The $6 million gift is the largest ever to a public radio station.
The gathering also eagerly anticipated the potential of the new headquarters — the state of the art equipment and a doubling of the newsroom staff.
“It looks beautiful,” Mrs. Greene said to her daughter, Christine McInerney, as they viewed a rendering of the theater from the street.
WNYC hosts expressed their enthusiasm. Talk show host Brian Lehrer said he wanted to make the theater “democracy’s living room.”
“It’s amazing to have this whole new possibility opening up in front of us,” the host of “Soundcheck,” John Schaefer said.
“It makes a difference to have a place where you can do your work,” Mr. Glass said. “Let’s have ambitious plans.”
Guests at the breakfast included the president of the Ford Foundation, Susan Berresford (who helped make the match between the Jerome L. Greene Foundation and WNYC, and whose own foundation has contributed $4 million to the capital campaign); the president of the New York Public Library, Paul LeClerc, and Michel Martin, host of the new NPR show “Tell Me More.”
Mrs. Greene said she and her late husband loved going to the theater — and that he would get a kick out of all the commuters passing by it on their way to the Holland Tunnel. Her husband was a trustee of Lincoln Center, Montefiore Hospital, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
