Following a Trend, Downtown Looks to the Arts

When the World Trade Center was conceived in the 1960’s, its developers didn’t worry much about the absence of museums, opera houses, symphony orchestras or jazz clubs in Lower Manhattan. Yet almost all involved in the planning to rebuild at ground zero have agreed on at least one thing: whatever comes next should include cultural institutions.

By JULIE SALAMON NY Times

Developers have asked arts groups to submit proposals by today for the new world being formulated by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which is overseeing the rebuilding.

What has changed? Why are established uptown entities like New York City Opera and the 92nd Street Y now willing to consider a downtown location? Why are prominent theater people urging that a national theater be built there?

The answer can be found in part in Bilbao and Barcelona, Spain, and Manchester, England, as well as in Los Angeles and Detroit. By giving new urgency to notions of transformation, the destruction that took place on Sept. 11, 2001, has brought home to downtown Manhattan the phenomenon of urban renewal through culture.

"In the past 10 years or 15 years there has been a shift in terms of looking at the importance of culture," said Lynne B. Sagalyn, director of the real estate program at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. "There has been an emphasis on using arts districts as a focus of development. Museums are opening in all kinds of places where you wouldn’t expect to see a whole bunch of culture. This is an international trend."

In Manchester last year the opening of the Imperial War Museum North, designed by Daniel Libeskind, the master-plan architect for ground zero, was part of a $635 million dollar investment in culture over the last eight years. "What we see in Manchester, we can see in cities across the country," said that city’s culture secretary, Tessa Jowell. "In every place cultural institutions have combined with more traditional regeneration projects to inspire civic pride and give us all a sense of place."

In Bilbao the metropolitan area’s revitalization plan emphasizes the importance of cultural enterprises like the Guggenheim Museum and the Euskalduna Concert and Conference Hall. In Barcelona the socialist Catalan government has tried to revitalize a poor neighborhood with the construction of a new museum and a Center for Contemporary Culture. In Los Angeles and Detroit new symphony halls are part of the phenomenon.

Of course New York isn’t Manchester or Detroit or Los Angeles. But downtown developers have been looking at such places as role models for years. In the early 1990’s Carl Weisbrod was already trying to figure out how to enlarge the economy of downtown New York. Mr. Weisbrod, then the president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, collected recruiting materials from cities around the United States to see what they were doing to attract business. He said he was struck by how similar the formula was in almost every case.

"The need for cultural institutions stood out," he said. "Good schools and housing, which one would think would be very high on the list, were almost afterthoughts."

Mr. Weisbrod became president of the Alliance for Downtown New York, a business improvement group, in 1995. He began promoting downtown Manhattan as a cultural mecca with only modest success. A handful of museums opened, but the essential lure remained what it had always been: a trip to the Statue of Liberty and maybe Ellis Island, usually taken by tourists who bought some trinkets and T-shirts, ate a hot dog and went home. Hardly the stuff of an economic makeover. Even rudimentary marketing ideas like a tour package were stymied by the impossibility of buying advance tickets to visit the Statue of Liberty, making it difficult for visitors to plan other stops in the area.

But the horror of the Sept. 11 attacks turned attention downtown. In the discussions that accompanied the rapid push to rebuild, the quest for culture became an ideological demilitarized zone for local residents, artists, developers and their critics. The arts were seen as a shield protecting the reverential from the commercial and the tacky.

"In some respects it’s a sacred site," said Herbert Gans, the sociologist, referring to ground zero. "If it gets too commercial, it sounds too crass. You put some culture in there, it makes it more respectable and more community minded."

It doesn’t hurt that with business people interested, money will probably be available to help pay for building new arts centers downtown. "That’s why we have so many people bidding," said Mitchell Moss, professor of urban planning at New York University. The logic of using the arts as a lure is impeccable, he added. "The arts are to New York the way golf is to San Diego," he said. "No one goes to San Diego for the arts, and they don’t come to New York to play golf. People sort themselves out by the kind of activities that give them pleasure."

Michael Sorkin, an architect and critic whose office is downtown, expresses sharp disapproval of the reconstruction process in a new book, "Starting From Zero" (Routledge). Yet even he doesn’t object to the cultural part. "I don’t buy the whole package," he said in an interview. "I don’t think we need the office buildings or the shopping malls. But I’d be glad to have the culture."

The notion of culture as a force for urban renewal certainly isn’t new to New York City. In "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York," Robert Caro described the conception for Lincoln Center in 1957 as "razing 18 square blocks of slums, stretching north from the Coliseum and rearing on their ruins a huge, glittering cultural center that would house — in grandeur — not only university, opera and Philharmonic but a dozen other related institutions."

In retrospect the displacement of the 7,000 families living in those slums may seem cruel, especially so more recently as the Lincoln Center concept of a cultural cluster has fallen into disfavor. But it did alter a neighborhood almost precisely the way the planners envisioned.

"In that sense Lincoln Center was successful," said Alexander Garvin, who until April was the director of planning at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and is the author of "The American City," an important textbook on urban planning.

But he added: "Lincoln Center was conceived a half-century ago. Times have changed, and the arts like clothing have to be updated."

Just as the city’s planners stepped back and re-evaluated the West Side in the 1950’s, Mr. Garvin argues the same process is now underway downtown. He describes Lower Manhattan in developer’s terms, as the third largest "downtown" in the United States, after midtown Manhattan and Chicago. If you accept this view, he said, the area’s cultural resources are sorely lacking.

"It simply isn’t in the ballgame with smaller cities like Boston and San Francisco," he said. "It was a mistake not investing in cultural facilities in Lower Manhattan. They aren’t the only thing you need, but I’m saying they’re an essential ingredient."

The downtown renewal is far from a mirror image of the project that remade the Upper West Side. The people who have come to live and work downtown are not poor. Rather they are seen as potential consumers of culture.

"You talk to major employers in the city of New York and they will tell you, when they talk candidly, that they’ve moved most of the employees that they can out of the city because it’s a very expensive place," said Lawrence F. Graham, executive vice president of Brookfield Financial Properties, which owns the World Financial Center and is a significant player downtown. "So the people they have left are typically very high productivity, the people who can generate huge profits. Who are they? People between 25 and 40 who are smart and want to be in a very interesting urban place. Culture is part of the key to that."

Therein lies the future, until another idea comes along.