He’ll Preside Over the Remaking of Lincoln Center

Gordon Davis, who will become president of Lincoln Center at the beginning of the year, is not daunted by the prospect of his new job.

“I could probably go to my office and go to sleep and nobody would notice anything wrong for months and months,” he said with a laugh.

Lincoln Center is an efficient organization, but Davis, a real estate lawyer, a New York City parks commissioner under former Mayor Edward Koch and the first chairman of Jazz at Lincoln Center, will still have plenty to do.

Wearing a dark suit, a purple shirt and a purple knit tie, and slumped in a leather office chair that looked suddenly puny under his 6-foot-5-inch frame, Davis bantered cheerfully about the prospect of running a $70-million-a-year institution that will probably spend the next decade in the throes of ever-shifting construction.

Davis succeeds the outgoing president, Nathan Leventhal, as Lincoln Center is about to embark on a mammoth rebuilding, a potential $1.5-billion project. The campus is an intricate conglomerate of 13 organizations, ranging from the Film Society of Lincoln Center to the Metropolitan Opera, all of which have a voice in the renovation.

Davis will head the umbrella entity of Lincoln Center Inc., but he emphasized, “My role is not, ‘Hey guys, follow me and I’ll show you what to do.’ ” Indeed, it will be much more difficult: to keep the peace among organizations with conflicting agendas and irreconcilable demands.

The process of pooling visions and forging consensus “is not a new experience,” Davis said. “That’s how Lincoln Center was created. What makes it more complex than the original effort is that then there was nobody in the halls.”

The prospect of disruption that is likely to last a decade or more means that Davis will have to wrestle with some wrenchingly specific questions: Where will the New York Philharmonic play while Avery Fisher Hall is being gutted? Will the New York City Opera decide to abandon the New York State Theater altogether and find a home in some other part of town? How will the 4-year-old Lincoln Center Festival be able to sustain its momentum amid the rubble?

To help navigate these issues, Lincoln Center will have to be enormously inventive, said Davis, who sees in his own appointment the sign that a once staid institution has become a flexible one. He cited the leap from a 1984 report that recommended Lincoln Center keep its distance from jazz to the day in 1996 when Jazz at Lincoln Center became a full-fledged constituent organization.

“What happened was that one day Wynton Marsalis walked into Nat Leventhal’s office. When you’re confronted with genius, anything becomes possible.”

And Lincoln Center is determined not to get left behind with an aging campus, predictable repertoire and a narrowing audience. Programming, he pointed out, has become so creative that “we have programs coming out of our ears.”

With the renovation now firmly on the docket and a master plan due next spring, the last prong of his responsibilities as president will have to do with broadening the center’s public.

“You do what you do better when you invite people into the house,” Davis said. “And if your people can’t get there because of racial, geographic, economic and ethnic barriers, then you better go out and find them.”