By Jerry Tallmer
Forty-something years ago I was sent by a city editor to take a look at Lincoln Center, which was then nearing completion of the construction of its first building, the large hall of forgotten name that would one day, when Mr. Avery Fisher financed its gutting and restoration, be renamed in his honor (I covered that story too, when it happened).
So here I am, 1962 or whatever it was, staring at this vast roseate shell of a building, wondering what the hell to write about it, and it’s hot, and it’s midday, and I sit on a bench at the confluence of Broadway and Amsterdam, along about where the Avery Fisher ramp is today, and two hulking guys in hard hats, workmen on the project, are sitting there devouring their hero sandwiches.
“Whaddya think of it?” one says to the other, with a jerk of his thumb toward their work site. And his buddy, right off the top of his head, replies: “A great big pink white elephant.”
From that day to this, nobody has ever passed a purer verdict on Lincoln Center, nor has any evaluation stood up so well.
No, we do not want — I do not want — another great big pink white elephant to blunder into ground zero, geometrically, architecturally, or metaphorically, even if at this point I am (crazily) half in agreement with Herbert Muschamp, who wrote in the Times a couple of Sundays ago, what the hell, let’s just build the Twin Towers back again and forget all the rest of this nonsense.
But no, that’s just giving in to the edifice complex, the hubris, that built the Twin Towers in the first place, and, as I keep writing over the years, Harold Clurman taught us long ago that a theater doesn’t start with a building, it starts with an idea.
Well, James Houghton, founder/director of the Signature Theater that singles out one major American playwright each year, did and does have a fine idea, and I’m confident that The Drawing Center and the Joyce Dance Theater have their own meritorious raisons d’etre. But I’m afraid that by the very nature of the bidding and competition — let us not say infighting — which must have gone on, the selection of these three groups to go to the World Trade Center site has a disturbing, inevitable smell of careerism, and all the more so when, out of nowhere, or out of the horror of 9/11, hundreds of millions of dollars are now involved.
So okay, fellas, what now?
I go with Jane Jacobs. The lifeblood of any city, particularly New York City, is its humanity, its diversity, its irregularity, its heartbeat, its neighborhoods. We can’t go back and rebuild all the defunct neighborhood tobacco shops and move them down to ground zero; Smoke Tyrant Bloomberg would soon put a stop to that before it happens. But what we can do, might do, given the insight, given the leadership, is something like this:
At the center of ground zero let there be a small park, somewhat along the lines of Washington Square Park, and the more young people that (in time) assemble there, the better. In the center of this park, a memorial, simple and enduring in material, maybe 20 feet high.
On all four sides of this park, structures for the arts interspersed with premises for life in general — housing, wining and dining, grocery stores, drug stores (but no chain stores), newspaper and magazine stores, clothing stores, small hotels, everything.
Rule 1: No building except theaters to be more than three stories tall.
Rule 2: No theater space to be more than five NYC stories tall.
How to pay for all this? By not building all the other edifices now on the drawing boards, and putting those billions of dollars toward sustained low rentals and low purchasing prices for, say, the next 50 years.
Which solves everything except who’s going to get this thing on its feet and run it? What’s needed, obviously, is a czar. What’s needed is Joseph Papp, only he’s gone. What’s needed is a man (or woman) with balls and passion.
So here’s my suggestion. Rudolph Giuliani. Seriously. We did not need 9/11 to know about his balls and passion, but that certainly certified it. I know that he made an ass of himself about elephant dung, when he allowed his religion to get in the way of his brains, but for all that he is a proven lover of the arts (notably opera), and in this new job I would endow him with a governing board to keep him on the straight and narrow. And he’d get it done. He would be paid. They would not, except for reasonably generous expenses. They will not thank me for volunteering them for this service, but I have in mind independent-minded creative types (some young, some not so young) like Edward Albee, Sarah Jones, John Guare, Doug Hughes, Harold Prince, Susan Stroman, Crystal Field, Ellen Stewart, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, some other painters and sculptors, people from music, people from dance, and oh yes, James Houghton.
There you have it. Now let the wolves descend, and me go back to my peaceful dreams.
Jerry Tallmer, was the first drama critic at the Village Voice and covered theater for the New York Post. He is an arts writer with Downtown Express.
