Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll find out about where old wood from some apartment house water tanks is going. We’ll also find out about yet another corruption investigation involving City Hall.
Where does the wood from the water tanks atop apartment buildings go when it reaches retirement age?
One place is the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, the home of the Public Theater’s summer staple, Shakespeare in the Park.
The Delacorte has been closed for a full-scale renovation since the end of the 2023 season. The $80 million project involves updating and upgrading a 62-year-old structure that was showing its age: The last major refurbishing was completed in 1999. Performers like Al Pacino and Meryl Streep — and the wardrobe and makeup people who worked behind the scenes in dressing rooms beneath the seats — learned to dodge leaks. “If it was raining outside, it was raining inside,” Patrick Willingham, the Public’s executive director, said.
Now there is a new drainage system, but audiences will recognize the theater’s familiar semicircular shape. The design, by Ennead Architects, kept to the same footprint, which Willingham said shortened the time needed for approvals and permits from city agencies.
“But it’s going to be way prettier and way cleaner,” Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director, said. Before, as Francelle Lim, a principal at Ennead Architects, said, “the building didn’t say this is where you go for first-class theater.”
Once the renovation is completed next summer, the Delacorte will also be “infinitely more accessible for anybody with mobility issues,” Eustis said, because the design made room for 28 seats for audience members who use wheelchairs.
There are also behind-the-scenes changes for accessibility, like the addition of an elevator to the booth behind the seats “so somebody in a chair can be the stage manager or the sound or light board operator,” Eustis said.
“That’s all it’s there for,” he added, “but it was really important to us to say those jobs can be available for those who can’t walk.”
Audiences may notice that the notorious bathrooms next to the theater are much improved. Six lighting towers have been replaced, and audience members may feel more comfortable in the more spacious seats. “We’re all wider than we used to be, in 1962,” Willingham said.
One element of the renovation that audiences will not see from their seats is what Willingham called the “raccoon wall,” a new cinder block partition intended to keep animals that inhabit the park from working their way into offstage spaces.
Outside, there will be a new facade, which is where the reclaimed redwood from decommissioned water tanks comes in. The wood slats — cleaned, dried and planed to take off the roughness — will be attached to metal brackets surrounding the original structure from 1962. The design by Stephen Chu, a partner at Ennead, highlighted sustainability: No more trees had to be cut down.
The Public scaled back its ambitions for the renovation and changed architects after announcing in 2018 a more expensive plan that was to be designed by the architect Bjarke Ingels. When asked what that would have cost, Eustis said, “Let’s just say, a lot more.” The Public had put the price tag at $110 million in 2018, when it expected to begin work in 2020.
Then the Covid pandemic hit. “We had some fantastic plans,” Eustis said, “and it became apparent that it was mistake to raise the amount of money we would have had to raise to realize the grandness of the ideas we were coming up with, and that architecture was not what we should be spending our money on coming out of Covid.”
“That was the right call,” he said.
Now the timetable calls for the work to be finished by midsummer in time for one play, not the usual two. The one-play plan was hatched to account for possible construction delays: “If we had to flex” and delay the production by a week or two, “it doesn’t become a problem,” Eustis said. But, he added, “I don’t think we’re going to have to flex.”
“We’ll have this single beautiful show next summer and then a really grand reopening in 2026,” he said. “I would say we’re going to blow the roof off in 2026, but the roof comes preblown off.”
Weather
Expect sunshine and a high near 70. Tonight, the sky will be clear, with temperatures in the high 50s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Saturday (for Yom Kippur).
The latest New York news
A 100-foot-wide Trump sign: The chief executive of a company that makes novelty T-shirts put a massive sign that said “VOTE FOR TRUMP” on its headquarters in Amsterdam, N.Y. It set off a debate about mixing business and politics.
October Trump rally: Former President Donald Trump announced he was planning a rally at Madison Square Garden in October as part of his campaign’s efforts in mostly Democratic states. Few polls suggest that New York could swing red.
Supporting “armed resistance” by Hamas: The pro-Palestinian group that sparked the student encampment movement at Columbia University in response to the Israel-Hamas war said it now supported “liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance.”
Pleading guilty to a hate crime charge: A 24-year-old New Jersey man charged with breaking into an Islamic student center at Rutgers University and vandalizing religious artifacts pleaded guilty to committing a federal hate crime.
A new City Hall investigation focuses on leasing
The Manhattan district attorney’s office has opened yet another corruption investigation into City Hall, this one involving the city’s leasing of commercial properties.
The inquiry comes as federal prosecutors continue their separate investigations into Mayor Eric Adams and his top aides. The district attorney’s investigation brings to five the number of corruption investigations swirling around City Hall.
Three of my colleagues — William Rashbaum, Dana Rubinstein and Michael Rothfeld — write that the district attorney’s investigation has focused at least in part on possible bribery and money laundering. Investigators have seized the phones of at least five people, including Ingrid Lewis-Martin, Adams’s chief adviser; Jesse Hamilton, a city real estate official; and Diana Boutross, vice chair at Cushman & Wakefield, the commercial real estate services firm.
Lewis-Martin and Boutross are close friends, according to people who know them both, and Boutross also appears to manage her firm’s lucrative account with a city division run by Hamilton. All three were returning from a vacation in Japan on Sept. 27, when investigators from the district attorney’s office seized their electronic devices at Kennedy International Airport. The investigators told Lewis-Martin that they were also searching her home in Brooklyn.
Lewis-Martin’s lawyer, Arthur Aidala, said in a statement, “These searches and any negative connotations associated with them or this preplanned vacation are baseless.” Boutross could not be reached for comment. Someone who answered the door last weekend at Hamilton’s home told a reporter to leave the property.
METROPOLITAN diary
Dragon’s breath
Dear Diary:
I don’t remember if it was June 1989 or July or maybe August. I know it was Manhattan and my first stay there, for a summer study program during college.
I was on a bus. I’m pretty sure it was traveling on an avenue on the Upper West Side. Was it going uptown or downtown? I’m not sure.
This I remember: As I stared out the window into the dark of the evening, we passed a side street where a one- or two-story tall creature was breathing fire.
It was not a paper dragon with red ribbons and dry ice smoke, but something I couldn’t define astride a horse and with plumes of fire shooting from its gaping maw.
I craned my neck to hold on to the view for just a moment longer as we kept going. Then I looked at a fellow wide-eyed passenger.
“You saw that too, right?” I asked him.
“Oh, I saw it,” he said.
We laughed and shook our heads.
No one else on the bus seemed to have noticed what looked like a fire-breathing dragon riding a horse on a side street in New York City.
Two years later, now living in New York, I was in the darkness of a movie theater when something on the screen caused me to jump in my seat and squeal.
No one else reacted the same way, but several people did turn to look at me.
I didn’t care: I had just seen my fire-breathing dragon again. It was the Red Knight from “The Fisher King.”
— Alia Covel
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you Monday. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post The Wood That’s Starring in the Delacorte Theater Renovation appeared first on New York Times.