Making Overtures

A pair of new public-art projects by Nina Chanel Abney and Jacolby Satterwhite explore the untold history of New York's Lincoln Center-and herald a very different future

- By Stephen Mooallem

Before Lincoln Center was a place, it was an idea. Hatched in the 1950s as part of a controversial "urban renewal" project shepherded by then New York City planning commissioner Robert Moses, the concept was to build a new campus to house the city's top arts organizations, modeled on the great cultural squares and kunsthalles of Europe: a stage-or rather a series of them-upon which American excellence in the classical arenas of music, theater, opera, and dance could be performed. Moses, once described in a 1939 profile in The Atlantic as a "Paul Bunyan of an official," earmarked a piece of land for the development in San Juan Hill, a bustling neighborhood with large Black and Puerto Rican communities nestled between 59th Street and 65th Street on Manhattan's Upper West Side. San Juan Hill was already teeming with artists-great ones, in fact, who were in the process of shaping some of the 20th century's most distinctly American forms of creative expression. Eugene O'Neill lived there. So did Thelonious Monk. It was the birthplace of bebop and the Charleston. Moses, though, had the entire area demolished to make way for the construction of Lincoln Center, which broke ground in 1959, displacing more than 7,000 families and 800 businesses.