Big-city hall marks

THE NATION GOT ITS PREEMINENT performing arts center through a slum clearance project. That was the name of the New York panel, the Committee on Slum Clearance, that in 1955 was looking for better uses for a chunk of land on the city’s West Side. It so happened both the Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic needed new homes, and before long another committee, headed by John D. Rockefeller III, was working to create a cluster of facilities that would represent nothing less than “the importance of the arts to the American people.” That was Lincoln Center.

The year before President Eisenhower broke ground for that project, federal officials decided there should be a similar “National Cultural Center” in Washington, D.C., the capital known more for its politics than its music or theater. That became the Kennedy Center.

In Los Angeles Dorothy “Buffy” Chandler and her friends were not about to be left behind in a cultural wasteland. Thus was born the Los Angeles Music Center.

Those performing arts complexes were conceived in the ‘50s, when the country was puffing out its civic chest and no one quite knew what burgeoning suburbs would mean for the cities they surrounded. It was a time when high art was unapologetically associated with awe-inspiring chandeliers, fur-coat galas and performance halls that tried to update the classical look of the Greeks and Romans in structures often perched above the streets where the common man trod. “An Acropolis of the West,” one writer called Los Angeles’ new symphony hall.

By the time the first of the complexes was ready for audiences -- Lincoln Center in 1962 -- there were 68 others under construction, or planned, around the United States. Many were seen as tickets to legitimacy, playing the role that sports stadiums and museums would assume in later years.

Now, decades later, the leaders of these monuments to the arts find themselves searching for new uses of aging halls and for more diverse new generations of patrons, all while spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make their fortress-like campuses more open. The performing arts center is being rethought, if not reinvented.

LINCOLN CENTER

“I don’t look at things as blows, I look at things as opportunities,” Beverly Sills was saying. The soprano-turned-arts-administrator -- who until last year was chairwoman of the board of Lincoln Center -- kept repeating how recent events posed an “opportunity.” The opportunity? All the space that will be available, and time on the calendar, when the New York Philharmonic says goodbye. The nation’s oldest symphony orchestra announced last month that it will return in three seasons to Carnegie Hall, the very space that seemed doomed to the wrecking ball when it left to become an original Lincoln Center tenant.

Oh, another opportunity: The New York City Opera is hoping to leave, as well, if someone will build it a new hall in lower Manhattan. This time it’s the president of Lincoln Center, Reynold Levy, who insists that would not be a blow either. “No,” he says, “we call it change.” Levy goes on about how Lincoln Center will be able to use Avery Fisher Hall, the space being abandoned by the Philharmonic, to bring in guest orchestras for weeks at a time. Of course, he’ll first have to find someone new to oversee the needed renovations, given how the chairman of that project just resigned in frustration amid delays and cutbacks in what once was to be a $1.5-billion overhaul of Lincoln Center.

Other arts executives may have a hard time sympathizing with the New York complex, which sells 3.2 million tickets to its performances a year and draws 2 million others for free events or merely to see the place. Even if the Philharmonic and City Opera leave, it will have 10 resident companies, including the country’s most celebrated opera (the Met, which Sills now chairs) and music school (Juilliard).

But in addition to the tangible losses -- the subscribers and fund-raisers the companies would take -- is the symbolism of the departures for a place that was promoted from the start as “a symbol.” Rockefeller pronounced Lincoln Center that after leading First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy into the Sept. 23, 1962, opening of the first symphony hall built in New York since 1908. . The day after Leonard Bernstein led the Philharmonic in Part 1 of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, the New York Times termed it a symbol too “of the cultural coming of age of the United States.”

New York had experienced a spurt of cultural development after the Civil War, when landmarks from the Metropolitan Museum to the Bronx Zoo were built. But Lincoln Center clustered eight arts buildings on one site.

To Michael Tilson Thomas, the Los Angeles-born pianist and conductor, it had a “creative critical mass” he had experienced only in a few places, such as Vienna, where it was a short walk from the opera to the concert hall or the cafes where you would go to “debate the merits of what you’d heard.” Around Lincoln Center, he marveled at the shops that opened to sell ballet memorabilia and old music scores, and at the scene at the central plaza, where 10,000 people would be “perambulating around” on prime nights, some there for a ballet set to “Lennie’s” music, others to hear Franco Corelli at the Met, and where you might run into Aaron Copland by the fountain. But even then there were hitches: from how the musicians grumbled about the acoustics in the symphony hall to the rivalries among resident companies. Then came a phenomenon noted by English economist Adrian Ellis, a specialist in arts facilities: how it’s easier to raise money for new buildings than for the “extraordinarily expensive” task that follows, “to keep it going.” Who wants to pay to fix air conditioners?

Even in the flush ‘90s, Lincoln Center found itself floating the idea of selling a Jasper Johns painting that adorned the lobby of the New York State Theater. The backlash killed that plan to raise $15 million, but the center soon after unveiled a $1.5-billion project to cover everything from the needed “cosmetic work” around the campus to erecting a Frank Gehry-designed atrium over the plaza.

Sills now calls that 1999 plan “always a pipe dream.” The stock market crashed first, and then came Sept. 11.

Levy, the center’s president, says he currently is in the “quiet phase” of fund-raising for a $600-million project that among other things would create a bustling mall on the north side of the complex, along 65th Street, where the stark walls of its buildings now rise above the street like sides of a cavern. Work on Avery Fisher Hall is also planned -- but too little, and too late, to keep the Philharmonic.

Zarin Mehta, the executive director of the orchestra, says that the superior acoustics of Carnegie Hall was the main motive for the move, along with being a partner there, not just a tenant. But Mehta also questions the premise of places such as Lincoln Center.

“I think the idea of having all the stuff in the same area is not good from a civic standpoint,” he says. “To have them dispersed helps the development of [the] city.”

Lincoln Center officials say they will let the Philharmonic go without a fight -- once they settle the orchestra’s “breach” of its constituency agreement, which calls for it to lease Avery Fisher Hall through 2011. After that, no hard feelings. Except Sills does offer one provocative idea for how Lincoln Center might fill that space: Perhaps they can do more than bring in guest orchestras. Why not form their own to compete with the stodgy old Phil?

“There are some wonderful new young conductors out there today that we could recruit,” Sills says, mentioning the likes of Tilson Thomas, now a fixture at the San Francisco Symphony. “A new symphony? Absolutely!”

Soon after she toys with that longshot, the experts who count have their say. “Taking away the prestige of one of the five best orchestras in the world has to be a blow,” says Jerry Unger.

He and his wife, Bette, travel from Long Island up to five nights a week for jazz at the 92nd Street Y, chamber music at the Metropolitan Museum and to ballet and the Philharmonic at Lincoln Center. The 70-year-olds will follow it to Carnegie Hall, though, a move they call “fabulous.” They’ve noticed how Carnegie needs only three microphones above the orchestra, and “here there are 16,” Jerry says.

Still, Lincoln Center remains hard to match at times like the weekend before last. Friday, the Ungers had $120 tickets to see Nina Ananiashvili dance “Swan Lake” with the American Ballet Theatre. Saturday, they caught Loren Maazel conduct the Philharmonic in Mahler’s epic Second Symphony. “Breathtaking, thrilling” Jerry said after the second night of standing ovations, the last after the huge chorus behind the orchestra delivered Mahler’s message of resurrection.

“Rise again, yes, you will rise again.”

KENNEDY CENTER

“Do you see that traffic light?” asks Michael M. Kaiser, president of the Kennedy Center, gesturing out his window. It’s five blocks away but seems more distant, and that’s the problem -- a geography that translates into the last message an arts center wants to send these days, remoteness.

The light is by the State Department, up where government workers and tourists roam. But to get here, they have to cross the Potomac Freeway, which sits like a moat protecting the center authorized by Congress in 1958.

The original idea was to build it on the Mall, near the Smithsonian Institution and the monuments that attract visitors from around the world. Then “it was deemed not important enough,” Kaiser says, “and they put it here.”

The site is scenic, perched atop the Potomac River. But while a perch can be a positive symbol, of human aspiration, it also can signal elitism. Kaiser thinks “all the hoopla” surrounding its opening in 1971 may have reinforced “the impression that this was not a place for everyday people.” Government leaders gathered to hear Bernstein’s “Mass,” which was written for the occasion, though he did not conduct this time -- he was in a center box, near Rose Kennedy.

To Ellis, the arts economist, the Kennedy Center reflects a common problem of facilities conceived in one era and completed in another. “When a lot of these buildings were designed, they wanted imposing civic architecture [like] the august buildings of the 19th century, and the Washington center is a classic example. It’s big and pompous, it’s away from the city,” he says. “What one wants to do with architecture now is to do exactly the opposite -- create something that invites people.”

That’s why Lincoln Center is opening its north flank--and why Congress last year set aside $400 million to create a pedestrian and bicycle plaza from that light to the Kennedy Center. Center officials have since picked a design by architect Rafael Vinoly calling for fountains set between two curved buildings, one for interactive displays on American arts, the other enabling visitors to watch rehearsals.

Democratization is a goal preached by most all arts administrators nowadays, both as a just policy and a potential route to solvency. “The arts are meant to inspire people and not just inspire rich people, not just to inspire white people,” Kaiser says.

Last month, he delivered the keynote speech at the San Francisco convention of the American Symphony Orchestra League, on the “crisis” in classical arts. A handful of orchestras are close to bankruptcy, major donors are hurting, and government funds are going elsewhere. But what worries Kaiser most is how arts institutions get scared into “thinking small” in such times, “knee-jerk reacting to short-term fiscal problems by drastically cutting artistic programs and marketing,” when they should, in his view, do the opposite.

Kaiser called for “daring projects” and “important programming,” like his center’s Sondheim festival and one coming up with a Tchaikovsky theme, in which the resident National Symphony Orchestra will perform along with the visiting Kirov opera and ballet companies.

The Kennedy Center has a built-in advantage over other facilities -- the million visitors who come to see its memorial to an assassinated president, in addition to its 1 million ticket buyers. Even so, expanding audiences remains easier in rhetoric than practice.

The Washington center does not compile demographic breakdowns of audiences, but a Lincoln Center survey found its Great Performers series attracted a 90% white crowd, with an average income of $92,000 and average age of 59. The Philharmonic’s Mehta is amused by those who preach that “if you play contemporary music the young people will come.” He says, “One hundred fifty of these young people will come, but not 3,000.”

Everyone keeps trying, nonetheless, with programs in the schools and free shows, like the “Millennium Concerts” the Kennedy Center offers each 6 p.m. in the Grand Foyer that displays Robert Berks’ 7-foot bust of JFK.

A spokeswoman gushes about the time Columbian singer Juanes, “the Latino Bruce Springsteen,” drew 7,000 youngsters. The Friday before last, however, a crowd of 200 turned out singing storytellers from Mali, Appalachia and Scotland. They sat on folding chairs or stood on the red carpet: young professionals in their work clothes, retired couples with their grandkids, dreadlocked backpackers.

Ruth Everhart had taken her two teen-agers to one other free performance, a tuba concert at Christmas. Johanna Eckerson, a summer intern from Pittsburgh, doesn’t have the money for “the big shows.” A few toddlers danced to the folks beats as ushers looked on in red blazers. “It’s a slice of life that’s there,” said one, Roz Freund, as she gazed upon the Kennedy Center’s audience, it hopes, of the future.

THE MUSIC CENTER

As the son of a plumbing supply salesman in the San Gabriel Valley, Stephen Rountree rarely ventured into downtown Los Angeles. He recalls going “a couple of times a year” to sample Chinatown or one of the department stores, before those left. But the Los Angeles Music Center scared him off as an “awesome, grand, imposing edifice

The man who heads the Music Center as it prepares to unveil its hope for the future -- the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall -- now understands that the complex was there to send a message beyond Los Angeles, as well, as “an expression of this kind of ambition, ‘We are going to show the world that we are a real city.’ ”

Civic leaders had begun promoting such a project after World War II, but four bond measures failed to get the necessary two-thirds vote. So on St. Patrick’s Day, 1955, Dorothy Buffum Chandler, of the family that owned The Times, gathered her friends for her “Eldorado Party” and raised $400,000 seed money. In 1959, the county set aside 7 acres on Bunker Hill for what she called “The Music Center, a Living Memorial to Peace,” though its centerpiece, a symphony hall, eventually took her name.

Women wore mink stoles under the 17-foot chandeliers when it opened Dec. 6, 1964. Jascha Heifetz played the violin, and Zarin Mehta’s brother, Zubin, conducted the orchestra before a crowd including an archbishop, Rock Hudson and Bob Hope. For their “most unique city,” Mehta told them, “it is not too late now, in mid-century, to begin a new cultural life.” UCLA’s chancellor, Franklin Murphy, wrote at the time that “no longer is Los Angeles ’21 suburbs in search of a city.’ ”

But others questioned the thinking behind such centers. One observer thought they reflected “the American Dream of building great structures, of presenting the shell without the substance.” And a Berkeley professor, Catherine Bauer Wurster, saw how in many cities, “old central areas are generally decaying, and downtown interests are making desperate efforts to improve them.” But why must they have “an important downtown center?”

Decades later, Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi notes how we still believe high culture should be downtown -- while low culture belongs elsewhere. Tschumi has designed several halls in Europe with capacities from 6,000 to 8,000 for “pop music, rock music.” One is in a former airfield, another in the woods.

“When it’s a pop facility [attracting] thousands of teenagers and loud noise and bad-boy attitudes, they always choose a location on the outskirts,” Tschumi saysThe boonies get the moneymakers, the city centers the hard sells.

Though the Music Center sells 1.3 million tickets a year, and gets county subsidies, it needs to take in a few bucks any way it can, whether from movie shoots, corporate meetings or wedding receptions after ceremonies at the new downtown cathedral.

Even Gehry’s new hall can be rented -- just not used for rock concerts, under the Disney bequest. But more of those may now be booked in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

As at Lincoln Center, the Music Center has to figure out what to do with the hall being vacated by its symphony. While some of the slack will be taken up by Placido Domingo’s opera company, which will be expanding its schedule from 65 performances to 85 or 90, Rountree says he also has been having “conversations” with two potential promoters, Clear Channel and House of Blues, about bringing in “incoming producing” pop acts.

Ellis, the economist, sees this as typical of such centers, where over time “programming becomes increasingly commercialized as you look more and more on the margin for whatever will cover its costs.”

But the Los Angeles center has its own advantage looming -- the festivities that will reprise the spirit that spawns such places, what Ellis calls “the initial burst of civic euphoria.” Gehry’s museum in Spain inspired a name for the benefits, the “Bilbao Effect,” and Rountree and his staff expect up to 400,000 daytime visitors the first year.

Part of the strategy is to turn as many as possible into customers, and not only for the new architectural showpiece. The tours will start on the Music Center’s old plaza, where the elder statesman of the complex, theater impresario Gordon Davidson, hopes the Mark Taper Forum and Ahmanson Theatre can take advantage of the crowds.

“We don’t want to be the stepchild or the orphans over here on the plaza,” Davidson says. “We’ll just say, ‘Hey, there’s a lot of stuff going on here. Come and partake.’ ”

As in New York and Washington, they’re trying to make the old campus more inviting. A Grand Avenue Pedestrian Improvement Project will create “wider, unobstructed sidewalks, pocket parks and ... outdoor dining.” Yet as at Lincoln Center, there are moments when it seems like there is no need for such reinvention -- that the past has never passed. One comes during a June tour of Disney Hall for donors and the “gala ladies,” the committee preparing October’s parties.

Gehry’s swirling building sends a different message than the aging, block-like arts centers, “less grand,” Rountree says, “represent[ing] a kind of fragmentation and diversity and complexity of temporary life in the city.” Inside, flower-patterned seats help make the auditorium “warm and uplifting.” But on this tour, the focus is on where to put catering tables and after-concert entertainment, where Richard Riordan will sit, and can someone open the Founders Room? “What names are going up there?” one of the gala ladies asks before the wall that will memorialize major donors.

Nights before, Rountree had lined up two more, at $100,000 each, at a dinner in a club along the Pacific. And there are “naming opportunities” left, including, for $500,000, the private dining room where conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen might entertain the likes of Yo-Yo Ma.

You have to get this money while you can, Rountree knows, for in a few years, “How do we go about raising money for a boiler?”

That game never changes, but it would be a mistake to dismiss these centers as relics of the past -- new ones are in the works, after all, from Omaha to Miami. While Miami’s orchestra may be struggling and its grand opening delayed, the rhetoric sounds familiar. “This city is being created right in front of us,” goes the quote from the CEO of the complex there.

Says Los Angeles’ Davidson: “The question that’s been looming over all our heads is, ‘Can these institutions survive? Are they meant to survive? Do you have to tear things down to build again?’ ”

But one local group thinks we don’t need to move on to the new “new thing” -- we need to appreciate what we have.

A “Modern Committee” of the Los Angeles Conservancy is fighting the tendency to belittle, or demolish -- or even to “gussie up” -- the postwar architecture that may seem passe, too institutional for today’s tastes. Linda Dishman, the executive director of the conservancy, knows it’s far easier to rally support for the “warm and fuzzy” Victorian buildings that once abounded in L.A., then fell out of favor. But why couldn’t we someday develop similar affection for “New Formalism” structures, like the Music Center’s, as reflections of the leading architects of their time-and of the “aspirations” of a city?

Ken Breisch, an architecture professor at USC, predicts that, if we’re patient, the “next generation” will embrace these centers. “I can see where there will be a growing nostalgia for that era,” he says. “They may have their heyday again in revival.”

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Kennedy Center

In the beginning: President Eisenhower signs legislation creating a National Cultural Center in 1958. Though it was intended to be privately funded, Congress authorized $23 million to help build it as a “living memorial” to the assassinated President Kennedy. Opened in September 1971.

Architect: Edward Durrell Stone

Up till now: Home of the Washington Opera, Washington Ballet, Washington Performing Arts Society and the National Symphony Orchestra, which performs in a 2,518-seat concert hall. A separate opera hall is being renovated.

Challenges: Connect Potomac River-front site with the city’s Mall area with a pedestrian friendly plaza over a tangle of highways that isolates the center.

Price tag: Built for $70 million in 1971. Current project calls for $400 million in federal funds and $250 million in private money.

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Lincoln Center

In the beginning: In 1955, New York’s master builder Robert Moses heads committee looking to redevelop “slum” land. John D. Rockefeller III forms group to raise $75 million privately. Ground broken in May 1959 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Architects: Philharmonic Hall (renamed Avery Fisher Hall in 1973): Max Abramovitz. New York State Theater and the Lincoln Center fountain: Philip Johnson. Vivian Beaumont Theater and the Forum (renamed the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater): Eero Saarinen. Metropolitan Opera House: Wallace K. Johnson. Alice Tully Hall and the Juilliard School: Petro Belluschi. Buildings opened 1964-1969.

Up till now: Home to the New York Philharmonic, New York City Opera, the Metropolitan Opera, the Juilliard School and the New York City Ballet.

Challenges: Losing the Philharmonic and potentially City Opera; Avery Fisher needs acoustical improvements; planned opening up of complex’s north side with mall lined by theater marquees.

Price tag: Billed as a $142-million project when the first building opened (its Beaumont Theater cost $9.6 million). Today’s estimated cost of renovations: $600 million.

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Music Center of Los Angeles County

In the beginning: Original donors headed up by Dorothy Buffum Chandler, who raises $20 million. County mortgage revenue bonds provided remaining $14 million. The complex is completed in 1967 as a public-private partnership with the county, which owns the facility.

Architect: Welton Becket

Up till now: Includes the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Mark Taper Forum, Ahmanson Theatre and Walt Disney Concert Hall, opening in October. Home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, the Center Theatre Group, Los Angeles Master Chorale.

Challenges: New programming for the Pavilion once Disney Hall opens; overcome insularity of the Music Center plaza. Parlay excitement over Gehry-designed building into audience growth.

Price tag: Disney Hall: $272 million.

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Times staff writer Susannah Rosenblatt contributed to this report.