They Told Me Not to Take that Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center (19 page)

There were more than a few of those, and we adjusted our plans in response to them. There was also the usual mix of institutional self-interest, parochialism, showboating, and stridency on display. This is, after all, New York City.

We must have done something right. The ULURP process was completed without so much as a hiccup. No lawsuits were filed or even threatened. The accommodations that we made improved elements of the renovation. That so much time, energy, and money were devoted to public space improvement by Lincoln Center did not go unnoticed or unappreciated. And the fact that so many citizens deeply cared about its future was heartening. Their assembled data, perspectives, and points of view were worth taking fully into account—and we did. Repeatedly, D S + R and our staff were credited with being open to dialogue and faithful to a fair and thorough process. Our wide-open door won us much-needed goodwill.

And it established a precedent for the frequent communication required to prepare all Lincoln Center insiders and all of our neighbors for the noise, the dirt, the detours, the traffic snarls, and the inconveniences
that would occur throughout the construction process. Here is how D S + R describe what Lincoln Center managed to accomplish:

In a fashion akin to emergency medicine, Lincoln Center masterminded open heart surgery on a patient that was wide awake, as the work had to be carefully planned, translated and executed while [all] Lincoln Center’s venues remained opened [except for Alice Tully Hall’s eighteen-month closure].
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Amazingly, five million people were accommodated by Lincoln Center each year, even at the height of construction. Through meticulous planning, not a single curtain rose late, not a single student or faculty member at the SAB or The Juilliard School was displaced, and only a rare handful of complaints ever reached public officials or me in any given calendar quarter. I am certain that Lincoln Center’s timely communication of construction plans helped keep our neighbors well informed and, by and large, content. But I am also convinced that E. B. White was on the money when he observed, “New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience—if they did, they would live elsewhere.”
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On time and under budget, the Lincoln Center development project team, led by Ron Austin, an experienced hand at building arts centers, performed masterfully. He was supported throughout by a superb chief financial officer, Dan Rubin.

We were also blessed with able and grateful subcontractor and construction employees. Most of them had been hired in the middle of America’s deepest recession. Lincoln Center had created the equivalent of one thousand full-time jobs, paying a total of $70 million in wages. I felt terrific that so many working-class families could be sustained by the work Lincoln Center had undertaken.

A
NEW WAY
of thinking and operating was both cause and consequence of redevelopment. It did not only apply to lofty ideas like creating an alluring community gathering place where there had been a forlorn, desolate space. It was also relevant to mundane but important matters like getting to and from Lincoln Center in a car as conveniently and hassle-free as possible.

Ask anyone who was deeply involved in the redevelopment of Lincoln Center about Joe Volpe, and you are sure to hear a favorite story about our own homegrown enfant terrible. All will offer an example of obstinacy and obstruction on one issue or another—sometimes procedural, sometimes substantive, often just an effort to impede progress, seemingly just for the sake of doing so.

At critical moments, when Volpe’s ultimatums reached their highest decibel level and crossed the boundary from being merely unreasonable to being simply outrageous, Bruce Crawford would see him and/or the Met Opera’s chair, William Morris, behind closed doors. Generally, after these quiet conversations, somehow negotiations were put back on track.

Crawford is elegant, extremely well read, sophisticated in his tastes—in food and wine, in clothing, in furniture, in books, and, of course, in the performing arts, not least opera. Having left the business of advertising to run the Met as its general manager for two and a half years and to rescue it from a colossal deficit in the 1983–1984 season of some $8 million (inflation adjusted, that would be over $25 million today), he came to know Volpe well.

Crawford dined regularly at Grenouille. Volpe preferred red sauce Italian. Crawford’s high-end shoes were never unshined. His clothing was impeccably chosen and worn. Joe’s suits and shirts were not just off the rack and the shelf; they seemed to come entirely from someone else’s closest, usually a size or two larger than he needed. Crawford is mild-mannered, rational, and even-tempered. Volpe is highly volatile. During his tenure at the Met, Bruce put the place back on a firm financial footing in a little less than three seasons. He then resumed his position as an important Met Opera board member and returned to corporate life as the president and CEO of Omnicom.

After a brief interval with a failed successor, Hugh Southern, Crawford neatly orchestrated Volpe’s succession. They have been friends ever since, and Joe’s treatment of Bruce in his own memoir—
The Toughest Show on Earth: My Rise and Reign at the Metropolitan Opera
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—is little short of laudatory.

Perhaps the most difficult issue to negotiate with Volpe and Morris was whether 65th Street would have any garage access at all and, if so, what kind. Some constituents wanted none. The Met wanted
as much as possible. Volpe, supported by Morris, argued that the entrances on 62nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue were totally insufficient to satisfy Met patrons. Without a convenient way to enter and exit Lincoln Center’s underground garage from the major west to east block, 65th Street, the Met feared that it would lose business. A lot of it.

Actually, it was impossible to know for certain. The Met felt strongly that those most concerned with the safety of pedestrians were exaggerating. After all, multiple points of ingress and egress all across 65th Street on its south side had been totally eliminated. Ninety-four feet of curb cut in all was to be reduced to eleven feet only, with one point of ingress being proposed on the southwest side of the street. Others felt equally strongly that the Met’s representatives could hardly with a straight face claim that the future of its box office depended on the outcome of this one issue. The parties had squared off. Intransigence seemed to take over.

I offered Bruce several fresh options to consider negotiating as Lincoln Center’s emissary. A compromise was struck. One point of entry. Ingress only. But not just pre-curtain for a couple of hours. Rather, the entrance would be open all day, with a guard posted at the curb at all times to check car trunks and to control traffic.

After a lot of hemming, hawing, harrumphing, and the generation of other sounds common to tough negotiations, the solution was accepted by all parties. It has been in effect ever since.

Not a single word ever reached me about either problems with pedestrian safety or any adverse effect of the arrangement on Met Opera patrons. Compromise worked well. Someone should tell the leadership of Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate.

All praise goes to my friend, Lincoln Center chair and ambassador at large to the Met Opera, Bruce Crawford. His successor, Frank Bennack, also recognized the importance of maintaining personal relationships between and among trustees. Only by building trust could difficult agreements be reached. Toward that end, Frank twice invited all constituent chairs and their spouses or partners for weekend trips to his formidable ranch in Texas. There, in Kerrville, one hour northwest of San Antonio by car, bonds were formed amid the skeet shooting, the hikes, the stargazing, the horseback riding, and the picnic barbecues.
These forays, on which Frank and his wife Mary Lake played gracious hosts, were nowhere to be found in a chair’s job description. But, wow, did they help to engender closer relationships and open up personal lines of communication.

Apart from reminding us how much relationships matter, Bruce’s and Frank’s success was attributable to their natural sense of pragmatism. They believed that at a high level of abstraction, differences are accentuated. But by moving to facts, to on-the-ground realities, they often can be bridged. The redevelopment of Lincoln Center is a series of such practical settlements. Moving trustees and staff from dogmatism to practical alternatives, trade-offs could be formulated that all parties found reasonable. Lincoln Center became a specialist in identifying that third way between contending groups.

Trustees enjoy accomplishing things, making a difference, contributing to a determination of Lincoln Center’s direction, and helping it find the way across a finish line. They also enjoy being educated and having a little fun.

Katherine Farley regularly invited a single constituent to each meeting of the board of directors. The artistic or educational leaders of all resident organizations personally appeared before the board. They spoke about their accomplishments, their priorities, and their aspirations. Wynton Marsalis, Peter Martins, Peter Gelb, Joseph Polisi, Marjorie Van derCook, Andre Bishop, and Wu Han are among those who offered remarks and then engaged in a dialogue with trustees. These sessions built mutual understanding and a sense of community.

I endeavored not only to edify through extensive precirculated reading material and often through presentations by board committee chairs and senior staff, but also to lighten up the boardroom. Why just leave brochures on the seats of trustees, when staff costumed to impersonate a Shakespearean character, or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or a jazz trombonist could hand the relevant literature to trustees as they came off the elevator?

Why just announce the renewal of the Big Apple Circus residency in Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center, when one could have the silent clown Grandma suddenly enter the boardroom, sit on the laps of selected trustees, engage in some hijinks, and unfurl a “Thank You Lincoln Center” banner?

Why not encourage a Lincoln Center staff a cappella group I named “The Donations” to thank Frank Bennack for his distinguished service as chair of the board for five years by singing, complete with bath towels at the ready, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “We’re Going to Wash That Man Right Out of Our Hair and Send Him on His Way.” That’s a lot better than reading aloud a three-page resolution of gratitude, wouldn’t you say?

Farley’s regular meetings with all board chairs as a group, her special nights out together with a judicious mixture of Lincoln Center and constituent trustees, and her immediate response to the expressed needs of colleagues were all of a piece. These actions all aimed at building personal relationships and creating trust.

In her annual receptions at home for all Lincoln Center trustees, Katherine engaged in another form of personal diplomacy. Besides dinner parties, her calendar bulged with breakfast and lunch dates. Farley energetically reached out to secure the views of all trustees at Lincoln Center and among the constituents and to convey her own. These initiatives were respected. The investment of time and attention yielded dividends.

A
NOTHER DIMENSION OF
Lincoln Center’s massive renovation is how well D S + R coordinated their work with other distinguished architects. David Rockwell was assigned by the Lincoln Center Film Society to design the Eleanor Bunin Film Center, Hugh Hardy was commissioned to create the rooftop Claire Tow Theater, and Todd Williams and Billie Tsien were asked by Lincoln Center to work miracles on the privately owned public space soon to become the David Rubenstein Atrium.

Each of these architects drew inspiration and guidance from the context that D S + R had created. All worked closely together whenever necessary. Mutual support and mutual respect seemed to prevail.

That is quite a contrast from what transpired when Lincoln Center was originally conceived and constructed. There is an iconic photograph taken by Arnold Newman in 1959 that captures nine men sitting and standing around oversized models of what were to be the New York State Theater, the Metropolitan Opera, and Avery Fisher Hall. Attired in suits and ties, the original architects of Lincoln Center and its patriarch, John D. Rockefeller III, do not look happy.
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In 1985, Philip Johnson reported that when that picture was taken hardly anyone was on speaking terms with anyone else. “Everybody pretty well hated everybody.”
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A half century later, it was refreshing to witness a 180-degree change in the relationship of architects working for Lincoln Center and its constituents. Some important leaders even believed that vastly improved relationships extended well beyond the parties to redevelopment and the redevelopment process.

Truly present at the creation and a moving force behind Lincoln Center redevelopment, Bruce Kovner speaks with the authority of a major actor and with the detachment of an informed, insightful observer. What he has to say is very flattering and hopeful, particularly in view of the soon-to-be-described behavior of one constituent and the disappearance of another:

The renewal of Lincoln Center was much more than a renewal of physical space. It was a process that connected constituents together in a way that they had never been connected. In the past, Lincoln Center was famously a place of silos, and I don’t think it is anymore. Part of what happened during this whole process is we became much more of a community, a team trying to accomplish things that were important for all of us together. Speaking as a chairman of one of the constituent organizations [The Juilliard School], I can say there’s been a tremendous, almost revolutionary change in the relationship of the constituent organizations. We do more together and we help each other. A lot of that was born in the process of coming together for the physical renovation. It made a big difference.
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