The phrases “famous,” “renowned,” and “celebrated” appear frequently in articles about just the Lincoln Center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
The art-house movie theatre, whose owners are credited with exposing Susan Sontag as well as Woody Allen to select independent and international films, will close in January after the building’s owner declined to extend its lease.
The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (commonly known as simply Lincoln Center) is a 16.3-acre (6.6-hectare) complex of buildings in Manhattan’s Lincoln Square district.
It features thirty outdoor and indoor attractions and attracts 5 million tourists each year. It is home to the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and the New York City Ballet, among other nationally and globally famous performing arts groups. The Lincoln Center complex now includes the Juilliard School of Music.
During Robert Moses’ urban renewal effort inside the 1950s and 1960s, a group of civic leaders and many others led by and is under the initiative of John D. Rockefeller III erected Lincoln Center as part of the “Lincoln Square Renewal Project.”
The primary structures upon that site were designed by well-known architects, and over the following thirty years, the historically varied working-class region surrounding Lincoln Center was supplanted with the a conglomerate of high culture to suit the consortium’s preferences.
In 1956, Rockefeller was named the Lincoln Center’s first president, then after resigning, he became its chairman in 1961. He was credited for generating more than half of both the $184.5 million in private funding required to construct the complex, notably using his own money; the Rockefeller Brothers Fund also contributed.
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