On the City Stage

On the site of the former World Trade Center, a gleaming gold box sits amid the carefully landscaped green and concrete memorial patch in Lower Manhattan. The Perelman Arts Center (PAC NYC) opened in September 2023, the result of a two-decade effort to turn the site into a symbol. What better way to assert New York City’s endurance and global prominence than by putting a building dedicated to the arts — to individual creativity and expression — at the place of such a tragic assault on the city and nation’s ideals?

New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs contributed $100 million to the building’s $560 million cost; billionaire and former mayor Michael Bloomberg gave $130 million; and businessman Ronald Perelman’s donation of $75 million secured his name to the building. PAC NYC is the latest in a long line of buildings through which New York City has enacted its commitment to the arts. Most often, private citizens have rallied the funding to create museums and theaters. Buildings like PAC NYC have helped maintain their exclusive nature and often hijacked the resources that might otherwise go to the artists working inside them. Whether through high ticket prices or grand ascending staircases like those of PAC NYC (with an elevator for those who need it hidden under the stairs) the arts have predominantly remained the purview of the privileged.

Eighty years ago, the City attempted to counter that exclusivity through a theater guided by a public mission. When it opened on Manhattan’s 55th Street in December 1943, City Center for Music and Drama offered opera, symphony, dance, and theater performances at low ticket prices with the promise to bring the arts to more people. Creating a municipal arts center that would not require direct taxpayer subsidy required creative political footwork. The makeshift theater that resulted heralded a new commitment by local government to the arts — hard-won but incomplete.

A People’s Theater

When Fiorello La Guardia became mayor in early 1934, the city was reeling from unemployment, hunger, and economic insecurity. A short rotund man with a vision that eclipsed the skyline, La Guardia understood New York from the vantage point of workers and immigrants. He successfully steered the city through the depths of the Great Depression by working with the federal government to direct vast funds for New Deal housing, transportation infrastructure, and parks projects. He also instituted meritocratic ideals of civil service in City hiring, replacing the 19th century patronage system in which Tammany Hall filled political jobs as either a gift or payback.

La Guardia’s vision of a New York for everyone included the arts as an “everyday essential,” as he put it. His love of music stemmed from his immigrant background; the arts were a realm of expression and pleasure not tied to social status and high society. Within weeks of his inauguration, La Guardia created the City of New York Municipal Art Committee, appointing wealthy elites to commandeer resources and attention to the arts. La Guardia directed their focus to be on those who could not afford tickets to the Metropolitan Opera or the New York Philharmonic. He believed that audience should include young people, so the committee set out to create a high school to cultivate the next generation of performers. Within two years, the Board of Education opened the High School of Music & Art, which would eventually merge with the High School of Performing Arts in 1961 and be re-named in La Guardia’s honor in 1969.

But only a brick-and-mortar municipal arts center could fully capture his aim for the arts in the city. La Guardia claimed that it was “no fantastic dream” but, instead “so necessary, that after it is built, everyone will ask why it had not been built before.”

La Guardia wasn’t the first to try. Plans for a City-initiated theater had met with failure after failure. Mayor John Hylan had seen an opportunity to construct an arts center as a “peace memorial” after World War I, but New Yorkers rejected the proposal to build it on a slice of Central Park. Private ventures for new theaters fared no better. A push to design a new and improved home for the Metropolitan Opera at Rockefeller Center crashed with the stock market; the site instead became a home for the more profitable entertainments of radio and cinema.

When La Guardia’s Municipal Art Committee could not get an arts center off the ground, the mayor turned to Newbold Morris, wizened City Council president.^[1] Morris was an heir to longtime political prestige; his ancestor had signed the Declaration of Independence. Ensconced in the wealthy white Protestant elite of the city, he wielded a different level of power than La Guardia. Morris’s talents were not artistic but for behind-the-scenes matters, pragmatism, and political doggedness. He knew how to get results on the city stage. He lived in the world of what was possible, not what could be dreamt. But both men believed in the power of the arts, waxing on about the “vitality” art provided.

Even if a City-owned plot of land could be agreed upon, Morris warned, the cost of construction would be too high to cover. But both Morris and La Guardia agreed that a building did matter. A committee could realize smaller artistic initiatives, public schools could teach the arts, the mayor could expound on their importance. But a building gave form to aspiration: it offered a foundation for what would come and go on stage. It lent permanence and legitimacy to the arts.

While La Guardia pursued an arts center, he also ended licenses for street musicians, which reminded him of the taunting he received about an organ grinder with a monkey who stereotyped his Italian heritage. (Morris would crack down on folk musicians in Washington Square Park in the early 1960s.) A building became a way to sanction — and continue to stratify — the arts while aiming to welcome more people to them.

Morris looked for a building, existing but unused, to house the arts center. One caught his eye: a Midtown Manhattan Masonic Temple awaiting demolition. A victim of rising debt brought on by the stock market crash, it had been languishing on the City’s tax rolls and was foreclosed in 1942. Just north of Rockefeller Center and the Museum of Modern Art — the ventures of the wealthy — the temple lay in the center of a block in the center of the city.

The Ancient Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine was an offshoot of the Order of Freemasons. They operated as a social and philanthropic entity, using the temple auditorium for fundraising performances and theater rentals. The building, designed by fellow Shriner Harry P. Knowles and completed in 1924, had an understated grandeur. It was a lopsided structure with a twelve-story tower fronting 56th Street housing club rooms and offices. On 55th Street was the more distinctive, neo-Moorish auditorium with a banquet hall beneath it. Knowles created “two facades in one,” as the Landmark Designation report later put it. A cube-like shape topped by a dome could be seen from Sixth and Seventh Avenues, announcing a large gathering space. Alfiz entrances, decorative and human-sized, greeted passersby with a decorative but human-sized entry.

The Depression wiped out the rental income the Shriners relied upon for the building’s maintenance. The mortgage lender foreclosed in 1937 and the City took over the property. When Morris investigated the building, it needed plumbing and electric repairs, attention to acoustics, cleaning, and repainting, all relatively minor costs. But it had what was most necessary for La Guardia’s people’s theater: an auditorium that seated nearly 3,000.

The more difficult task would be figuring out how to operate it. The City historically fled from long-term financial commitment to the arts; it either supplied land under its domain or discrete funding for one-off events like free concerts in public parks. Buildings, operations, and programming for the arts were paid for by individual donors and run as private organizations. This was not only a financial practice, but an ideological one. The involvement of the federal government in the arts during the 1930s had breached the barricade that had kept the arts free from government intervention and reliant on the funds, interests, and noblesse-oblige of the wealthy. The New Deal projects in New York had generated music, visual arts, writing, dance, and theater; concerts, art classes, exhibitions, and performances exploded, all free or low-cost. The initiative was originally passed to employ artists, but ended because of accusations that the projects harbored Communists. Politicians now saw the arts as vulnerable either to political propaganda from outsiders or to censorship from the government itself.

Morris turned to tax lawyer Morton Baum to figure out what might be possible politically. He and Morris had served together on the City’s Board of Aldermen in the 1930s and Baum worked with La Guardia on the City’s first sales tax. Like Morris, Baum was an operations man with financial acumen. Like La Guardia, he was the son of immigrants with a passion for music. His parents had fled the anti-Semitism of central Europe for New York City, and their Jewish household in the German-immigrant enclave of Yorkville was filled with music. “My brother was a fiddler. My sister sang,” Baum recalled, and he played piano.

Baum was appointed to head City Center’s finance committee and oversee the day-to-day operations. While La Guardia rhapsodized to the public about the arts and Morris mobilized city leaders behind the idea, Baum looked for precedents in state law and city practice for governmental funding for the arts beyond the temporary federal relief funded by the New Deal. He could not find any.

The most straightforward option would have been to set up a City department devoted to the arts with a dedicated, if modest, budget line and staff. Morris attempted to spin the New Deal ventures to his use: “The WPA music projects, now terminated, proved that there were large numbers of music-lovers in the city who would gladly patronize opera, concerts, and plays if the prices were brought within their means.” But even these accomplished politicians could not pull that off. They worried that the City’s direct support or operation of a theater might result in a “taxpayer revolt” — seen as a luxury, a frivolous leisure time activity, or a propagandistic operation. So he concocted a run-around.

Morris designed a gap between City Center and city government. The government would not administer operations and produce programs, as it had in the New Deal projects. But individual patrons would not set the center in motion, as they had with institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Morris established a private nonprofit corporation with ties to the local government. The Mayor served as honorary president and the City Council President as chair of the board. Both would oversee the selection of board members. Morris peppered the board with wealthy people who could supply funds for programming and operations, as was convention. But he also added heads of labor unions, a sector more often in an antagonistic role, to ensure their cooperation come bargaining time.

Morris pulled together a financial plan that would offend the least number of people. The City would be the building’s landlord, while daily operations would be controlled by the nonprofit corporation. The corporation would receive a long-term lease of the Masonic Temple and renovation funds with favorable terms from the City, but it would in turn contribute revenue to the City by paying taxes on the building. Morris concocted a loan agreement with the City as guarantor. He asked the major theatrical unions, who would benefit from a cultural center, for donations and used those funds, in turn, to convince wealthy donors to contribute, extending the forced partnership between these two sectors that he had engineered with board membership.^[2]

City Center required a broader leadership of public-spirited citizens. It had the support of “right and left-wing labor,” as Morris put it, both the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the Greater New York Industrial Union Council, a newer organization that was gearing up to fight communism. Morris then noted that “right and left-wing capital” supported City Center as well, from Marshall Field III on the left end of the spectrum to John D. Rockefeller Jr. on the right.^[3] Morris capitalized the center, triangulating from the ends of the political spectrum. It was like financing as theater production, putting the pieces together one at a time, coaxing difficult actors to work together, all to get to opening night.

A modest budget of $65,000 from the Board of Estimate allowed for the elimination of top balcony seats too far from the stage to see much, a general buffing of the interior decorations, a cost of fresh paint, and new red plush cushions for the seats.^[4] It was an echoey auditorium remade into a theater with limited space around the sides and back of the stage for the movement of actors, dancers, and scenery.

After decades of plans, failures, and obstacles, City Center for Music and Drama opened on December 11, 1943, less than six months after the City had plucked the building from foreclosure. The New York Philharmonic played for no fee at the opening, La Guardia conducted the orchestra in “Star Spangled Banner,” and the nearly 3,000 viewers paid just over a dollar for admission.

City Center Takes Root

City Center had to prove its worth immediately. The Center began planning a 30-week season of music, drama, and dance. A Broadway revival, Susan and God, featured the theatrical star Gertrude Lawrence, who established the precedent that acclaimed stars take no more than Actors Equity minimum salary when they performed at City Center. Tickets did not exceed two dollars, half the price of a production on Broadway. A revival of the opera Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin followed, with the African American stars Etta Moten, Avon Long, and William Franklin. Dance offerings ran the gamut from performances by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and Russian star Alexandra Danilova to the tap sensation Paul Draper. The opera Carmen Jones, featuring Paul Robeson, attracted 50,000 people over three weeks in spring 1945. The Center initiated an opera company, then a symphony, and eventually persuaded George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet Society to become the resident ballet company under a new name, New York City Ballet.

To keep prices down, City Center did not offer subscription packages. Pre-sold tickets offered a more predictable cash flow, a practice which dominated the sales at opera and symphony concerts, but it kept the best tickets in the hands of the elite. All City Center tickets were sold directly at the box office on 55th Street, and the best seats were available to all. That also meant forecasting the budget based on ticket sales was at best a guess.

The first year gave City Center’s organizers a reason to gloat, however. Baum tallied the numbers: nearly 350,000 people had attended performances and the Center made a small profit. Audience composition is notoriously difficult to deduce from historical sources, but Center directors maintained that its audience was young, not from high society or out of town. The Center reached out to school classes, working with the Board of Education to appoint a liaison. But the audience — mostly middle-class professionals — was also not quite the working classes first envisioned.

Different art forms appealed to different people. Baum observed that the opera drew Europeans who had recently fled rising authoritarianism. He opined that they had “a sharp and discriminating taste” — coded language for an audience with a notable number of Jews, which matched the leadership composition of the Center as well (such as Lincoln Kirstein and Baum himself). “The [Metropolitan Opera] board was rich, well-born and Gentile. The City Center appeal[ed] to a rising middle-class audience which was deeply musical, often Jewish and insurgent in musical taste,” a City Center report stated.^[5] The ballet attracted the “most exotic and well to do” and revivals of musicals had the “widest and broadest public.”^[6] Yet the evidence suggests that the audience remained largely white and middle-class, although with appeal to some immigrant groups and occasional offerings aimed at African American audiences.

All this occurred in a building often labeled “an architectural and acoustical mess,” as one critic put it, with sightlines that cut off the performers at the knees in its first seven rows.^[7] The skimpy backstage and narrow wings made maneuvering scenery and large groups of people to and from the stage difficult. The old air-cooling system became a drawback when newer theaters began to provide more powerful air-conditioning. And the City often ignored pleas for repairs it had promised. Morris proved cunning on this point. In 1954, he invited Mayor Impellitteri to a performance on a rainy night and placed him in seat G1 where water would drip on him. The roof soon got fixed.^[8] Despite the obstacles, articles in the press argued that City Center had “proved its cultural worth and popular appeal.”^[9]

City Center struggled to stay afloat at the end of its first five-year lease. The City declared that the property would be sold because of the constant financial needs of building maintenance even as foundations and private donors covered the costs of theatrical productions. City Center took the battle to the press, scolding critics, donors, and City officials for their lack of support for a public-minded initiative, winning another five-year lease. At the end of the second contract, Morris fought for a more significant change. City Center directors successfully lobbied New York State to give the City the right to lease the property to City Center rent-free and appropriate money as necessary for maintenance and support.^[10] Now that the theater had operated successfully for ten years, City officials could not willfully let it die without prompting outrage.

Building the Arts

When ideas for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts began bubbling in the mid-1950s, City Center was a model for what could be. It was a platform for all the performing arts — dance, drama, music, and opera — aimed at a wide public in the belief that the arts were vital to the city and all its residents. But for the backers of Lincoln Center, led by John D. Rockefeller, 3rd, a renovated auditorium would not do. Lincoln Center would serve as an announcement to the world of the rise of New York City and the US as a cultural power that matched its political dominance. Lincoln Center worked hard to move City Center’s two most successful resident companies — New York City Ballet and New York City Opera — to its new complex, and conceded to maintain City Center’s low ticket prices for those companies. But it was a promise  Lincoln Center did not keep. City Center lost its foothold at the complex as each company became individual constituents at Lincoln Center in the mid-1970s.

In the 1970s, City Center changed its governing structure to a nonprofit organization independent of the City to weather the fiscal crisis. In 1981, nearly 40 years after its founding, City Center became part of the Cultural Institutions Group, a select group of organizations (now 34) with their own guaranteed funding line in the City budget — if still meager and in support of buildings over programming. It took decades for City Center to reach the status of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Botanical Garden, and Brooklyn Academy of Music, institutions the City had deemed essential.

City Center was an ambitious — and barely adequate — adaptation of an existing building into an arts center rather than a festooned object built anew. Renovations occurred in pieces, decades apart. The City coughed up funding for new air conditioning, rewiring, and repainting in 1967. A private development purchased air rights from City Center’s 56th Street tower in the 1980s, which prompted another renovation. The center removed seats and staggered them to improve sightlines, rebuilt the balconies, expanded the lobby, and constructed new storage areas backstage. The Bloomberg administration supported an even more thorough renovation in the late 2000s. The newly named New York City Center spiffed up its lobby, backstage areas, restored historical decoration and paint colors, and entirely re-raked the orchestra level floor.

City Center is no longer the workman-like public housing of the arts of its origin, and its ticket prices have risen. Now there are only occasional low-cost programs, such as its Fall for Dance series, that sit amid high-priced productions like those at Lincoln Center or at PAC NYC. The story of its birth as a municipal arts center in a building adapted to that use rather than constructed anew prophesied an expansion of the arts buffeted by public subsidy. But, instead, the raft of new buildings — first Lincoln Center and more recently The Shed and PAC NYC — have reinforced the idea that the arts can only thrive in ever grander buildings. The buildings threaten to co-opt the arts and artists inside them.

City Center found its mission in its name and place: opening the door to the arts in the center of a block in the center of the city that thrives when the arts and cultural expression are the attraction rather than the building in which they appear. The arts deserve functional buildings. The history of City Center is a reminder of what can be accomplished by focusing on a public mission to expand audiences and lower ticket prices — a commitment to see and spotlight more people on the city stage.