While it’s hard not to despair about the city’s housing shortage and other troubles, a stream of architecturally ambitious civic and cultural projects have been steadily remapping swathes of New York in recent years. The sheer number of them, public and private, is surprising: Moynihan Train Hall, Barry Diller’s Little Island, Sunset Park Library, Far Rockaway Park in Queens.
The Davis Center opened last month, transfiguring six acres at the north end of Central Park. The refurbished Frick Collection on Madison Avenue is a triumph. A renovated Delacorte Theater debuts this summer in Central Park. A new Studio Museum arrives in Harlem shortly after that.
The list goes on.
Lincoln Center just added to it, unveiling a $335 million plan to overhaul Damrosch Park on the center’s southwest corner.
It’s about time. The park has long been in decline, with its decrepit band shell, which has required the performing arts complex to spend a fortune each summer setting up, then taking down, a temporary stage for outdoor concerts.
Some $218 million has already been raised for the renovation project, with $75 million of it coming from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Part of the whopping figure will go to repair the aging site, which occupies the roof of a leaky garage, as well as to build a new amphitheater that will eliminate the annual cost of erecting the temporary one.
But by far most promising aspect of the plan is to open the park up to a neighborhood it has long walled off. It aims to rectify an approach to city building from the bad old days of urban renewal.
Unless you’ve been to those summer concerts, it’s possible to have frequented Lincoln Center but never stumbled on Damrosch, which, for most of the year, is hidden in plain sight. I crisscross the campus all the time but rarely end up there. If you’re facing the Metropolitan Opera, it’s to the left.
You’re more likely to glance the other way, north, toward Hearst Plaza, with Eero Saarinen’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater alongside a reflecting pool and a restaurant with an angular, look-at-me rooftop lawn. Urban planners have a term for park paths we incline to take: “desire lines.” Your eye’s desire line, staring at the Met, tends north.
Damrosch, to the south, has no such beckoning landmark. The western wall of the garage that the park squats on looms, fortresslike, over Amsterdam Avenue. Travertine planters obscure views of the band shell across a windswept plaza.
In 2022, Geffen Hall, home to the New York Philharmonic, reopened after a $550 million makeover. Nearly all of Lincoln Center had been renovated by that point, but Damrosch remained a Cinderella. Then Henry Timms, the center’s president at the time, decided it was the park’s turn, and community meetings were organized with West Siders, including residents of the Amsterdam Houses, a postwar public housing development directly across the avenue.
Walter Hood, a celebrated landscape architect from California, and Weiss/Manfredi, the New York firm that designed the fine waterfront park at Hunters Point South and is redoing La Brea Tar Pits and Museum in Los Angeles, were hired to collaborate on a redesign for Damrosch.
The plan they’ve cooked up, in tandem with Moody Nolan, the project’s architects of record, packs a lot into a modest 2.4 acres. The architectural details will become clearer as the project moves forward. The goal is to complete it in 2028. It imagines the amphitheater on the site’s eastern end, with porches doubling as shady public retreats when there aren’t concerts. A curved, trellised bleacher, facing the amphitheater, will complete an oval plaza for some 1,800 concertgoers.
On the park’s west side, tiered gardens will rise from the sidewalk along Amsterdam Avenue, up to groves of trees, a lawn and a pool similar in scale to the fountain at Hearst Plaza, all of which respond to desires that neighbors expressed during those community meetings.
A couple of decades ago, renovations to Hearst Plaza troubled preservationists because the changes tampered with Dan Kiley’s original concept. A revered midcentury landscape architect, Kiley during the later 1950s and ’60s devised an austere, modernist geometry of open spaces for Hearst and Damrosch. I gather the Damrosch upgrade plan has raised some eyebrows because its tiered gardens unmake part of Kiley’s vision for the park, demolishing a stretch of the garage wall along Amsterdam.
Bringing down that wall is the heart of the project, however. And it’s a good thing. For all its virtues, the center emerged from an urban renewal campaign by Robert Moses, New York’s midcentury planning czar, which steamrolled a largely Black, Afro-Caribbean and Puerto Rican neighborhood called San Juan Hill, home to musical greats like Benny Carter and Thelonious Monk.
Moses deemed the area “the worst slum in New York,” evicting residents and demolishing whole streets along with homes and shops on Amsterdam Avenue, between 62nd and 65th Streets, where Lincoln Center and Damrosch Park rose in their stead.
Michelangelo’s Campidoglio in Rome was the obvious inspiration for the performing arts complex: an exalted plateau, from which elites could gaze serenely down on their surroundings. The center’s siting on a granite podium sent a clear message, and allowed room underneath for a street-level garage.
These were the postwar decades, the era of white flight and suburban development, and Moses and the complex’s great master planner, Wallace K. Harrison, believed that attendance at the center, not to mention the city’s economic future, rested on cars and suburban convenience.
What resulted was a campus that, architecturally, turned its back on the neighborhood to the west. Over time, memories of San Juan Hill naturally faded. Lincoln Center blended into an increasingly gentrified district. Yet the division along Amsterdam Avenue persisted.
It’s notable that Hood adapts, as a geometry for his proposed gardens, not Kiley’s original grid plan, but the 50-foot grid that organizes the landscape at Amsterdam Houses. The gesture is symbolic, and subtle, implying a new civic orientation. But it is more than that.
Demand for green space in the city is limitless. The neighborhood to the west of Lincoln Center has grown and diversified. The revamped park will make the arts complex more accessible. There may not be as much foot and subway traffic to the center from the west as there is from Broadway and the east. But opening Damrosch in that direction invites a new desire line.
It’s also a reminder that, despite all the brick, stone and concrete, cities are fluid. A wall cleaves a neighborhood and a community, but it can come down. Change begins with a deceptively simple question: Why is that wall (or parking lot or empty storefront or highway, you name it) there in the first place? Searching for an answer is a first step toward progress.
New York is facing big problems and they’re not going away anytime soon. But one park and garage wall at a time, the city is addressing a few old ones, and not all the news is bad.
Michael Kimmelman is The Times’s architecture critic and the founder and editor-at-large of Headway, a team of journalists focused on large global challenges and paths to progress. He has reported from more than 40 countries and was previously chief art critic.
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