Lincoln Center breaks ground on freshly welcoming vision for campus
Though it’s set in the middle of New York’s urban grid, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts campus, as laid out in the 1950s, has a clear “front” and “back.” The “front” faces east, toward the tony precincts abutting the southeast corner of Central Park. The “back” faces the New York City Housing Authority’s Amsterdam Houses.
A new initiative seeks to close the distance between notional access to a public space open to all and a practical welcome that makes that space inviting, convenient, useful, and appealing to people at all stages of life.
The Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Lincoln Center West Initiative, in which SNF is a Founding Partner, recently broke ground on the construction component of the initiative, which will remove the barrier wall along the western edge of campus, add new venues, and, based on feedback from thousands of local residents, redesign public spaces in the newly minted SNF Gardens to host a broad range of new programming.
The first built manifestation of that public feedback is the colorful artwork already on the fencing around the construction site, The Future We Create, a mural co-designed with members of neighboring communities.
SNF’s relationship with Lincoln Center has its roots 60-odd years ago in its founder’s early support for programming at the cultural institution. More proximately, recent SNF grants supported Lincon Center in reimagining public space in the pandemic, pairing its public space with that of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens, welcoming hundreds of thousands of visitors to exhilarating free programming each summer with Summer for the City, and shining light on how its creation was intertwined with the destruction of the vibrant neighborhood of San Juan Hill.
Read more about the partnership between SNF and Lincoln Center and browse a timeline of SNF support.
“We are honored and very happy to be able to contribute—as our founder did in the institution’s earliest years—to a generational change at Lincoln Center, a new beginning delivering a more engaging, more open, more all-embracing public space,” said SNF Co-President Andreas Dracopoulos. “We’re proud to be a Founding Partner in this very important initiative, and we can’t wait to share in the joy and delight New Yorkers and visitors from around the world will take in the reimagined campus."
Construction, which will include resources for neighbors looking to join the construction trades for this and other projects, is set to be completed in 2028. After that, if you ask someone to meet you in “front” of Lincoln Center, you might need to be more specific.
“We are honored and very happy to be able to contribute—as our founder did in the institution’s earliest years—to a generational change at Lincoln Center, a new beginning delivering a more engaging, more open, more all-embracing public space,” said SNF Co-President Andreas Dracopoulos. “We’re proud to be a Founding Partner in this very important initiative, and we can’t wait to share in the joy and delight New Yorkers and visitors from around the world will take in the reimagined campus."
Construction, which will include resources for neighbors looking to join the construction trades for this and other projects, is set to be completed in 2028. After that, if you ask someone to meet you in “front” of Lincoln Center, you might need to be more specific.
