How cultural institutions should respect what they displace
This month, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts brings back its Legacies of San Juan Hill Festival, which builds on its multiyear project to excavate the cultural heritage of the neighborhood it replaced when it was constructed between 1955 and 1969, an important attempt to reckon with its own history as an arts institution. It has created a website with essays devoted to the history of San Juan Hill, commissioned a musical composition by jazz trumpeter Etienne Charles inspired by the neighborhood, and subsidized a documentary that features those evicted from the area for the performing arts center.
In addition to those works, the neighborhood is featured as the source and inspiration for festival performances that ranged from a concert version of the musical “Shuffle Along,” first shown in 1921 at a music hall on 63rd Street, to performances led by pianist Mathis Picard that celebrate the music of the area.
San Juan Hill was a largely working-class area, streets lined with three- to five-story buildings. There were rooming houses filled with Irish porters and German elevator operators; churches bursting with Caribbean immigrants who joined African Americans as longshoremen working the docks on the West Side piers; and a tiny enclave of Japanese immigrants. The mix carried the hallmarks of the segregated city: White people populated the broader north-south avenues; people of color the narrower east-west streets.
It was an everyday neighborhood, not a hub of business and transportation, such as Times Square, nor a bohemian center like Greenwich Village. Its cultural offerings followed the outline of its residents. People squeezed moments of pleasure out of long days of toil. St. Drake’s Dancing School on 62nd Street offered dancing classes and served as a front for a dance hall called the Jungle Café, as African Americans often would not be able to get a license for a nightclub with dancing. In defiance, James P. Johnson rollicked the piano keys at the Jungle Café, adding a looser rhythm into ragtime — eventually called stride piano — that moved it to jazz.
Music and dance of the neighborhood, full of Black talent, appeared at theaters on 62nd and 63rd streets. “Shuffle Along” (1921) featured music by Eubie Blake and lyrics by Noble Sissle, and its cast included Josephine Baker and Florence Mills, launching them to greater fame, although often in Europe. And “Runnin’ Wild” (1923) had a musical composition by Johnson titled “The Charleston,” with the signature syncopated leg twisting and punchy elbows that came to define the dance. The neighborhood’s arts were those bubbling up from its residents.
This is what was lost when Lincoln Center, a cultural treasure in its own right, was born. Those who built the complex argued that clustering so many cultural institutions in one place would create inspiration, a kind of brilliant symbiosis. The urbanist gadfly Jane Jacobs scorned this conception. The cultural complex, she argued in a 1958 talk, “is planned entirely on the assumption that the logical neighbor of a hall is another hall. Nonsense. … It is a piece of built-in rigor mortis.”
Distributing theaters throughout the city could lead to benefits for each neighborhood — subsidiary businesses such as restaurants, flower shops and training facilities thrived next to theaters. Putting multiple theaters next to one another, Jacobs argued, only concentrated wealth and promoted a segregation of benefits.
Jacobs believed that Lincoln Center’s proposed superstructure — making a district that would fill in streets of the grid — would further sequester the arts and entrench inequities. The new marble buildings and plaza blazoned exclusivity, not invitation.
Struggles occurred within the establishment too. Lincoln Center Inc. was created to manage the complex, with constituent organizations devoted to different genres, from the New York Philharmonic to the New York City Ballet. Proximity, however, often caused tension rather than collaboration — even pettiness.
Lincoln Center Inc. asked all the constituents with theaters surrounding the plaza to turn on their lights every evening to welcome people into the complex even if their building was not hosting a performance. Memos in the early years scolded organizations for not doing so. Fundraising was a source of regular conflict, as the companies did not want to share their lists with the central organization or each other. And then there were battles over who could program the theaters on empty weeks, with Lincoln Center Inc. attempting to make money by bringing in outside productions that the home constituent did not think met its high bar of quality.
Lincoln Center Inc. did make some efforts to make the grand institution more accessible and responsive to those around it. In the early 1970s, the umbrella organization hired a community relations director who built the Out-of-Doors Festival that took over the plaza each summer. It featured not only free programming but kinds of arts that were not represented in the theaters — jazz, salsa, modern dance, community theater.
Over time, though, the neighborhood became more like the complex: whiter and more affluent. As the city became Blacker and poorer throughout the 1960s and ’70s, the streets around the complex went from an 18% nonwhite population in 1950 to less than 2% nonwhite in 1970. Even more telling, the 1970 census showed that almost 45% of the total population in the immediate area of the new Lincoln Center moved in from 1965 to 1970. (Census data analyzed by tract via Social Explorer.)
The reckoning that’s underway at Lincoln Center to reconnect with the old, diverse neighborhood that it replaced might be seen as simply “woke.” But that’s far too easy a characterization. What the San Juan Hill festival represents is long overdue: an attempt to ensure that this cultural treasure is a place where a wider range of New Yorkers can feel welcome and see the arts and culture they love celebrated.
This is about more than programming; it’s about physical space, as witnessed in the current renovation of the southwest corner of the campus. The back of an outdoor stage and the high marble wall behind the Metropolitan Opera House have been seen by some as material and cultural signs that Lincoln Center ignores its West Side neighbors. (After the building opened, a 1966 brochure from the neighborhood center in the nearby Amsterdam Houses adjusted its mission to make sure the walls of the complex “were not barriers requiring armed guards for the surrounding community.”) A new design includes sloping steps, more trees and places to sit, and an outdoor amphitheater that opens to the housing project across the street.
That, along with the San Juan Hill festival, is a sign of Lincoln Center trying to move with care and confidence into a future that enacts a more inclusive, long-term flourishing of the performing arts. It can be an elite cultural treasure — but it need not and should not be only for elites.
