Foulkes ââåthe Other West Side Story Urbanization and the Arts Meet at Lincoln Centerã¢ââ

Guests applaud President Dwight D. Eisenhower (to the left of the podium) at the ground-breaking anniversary for the Lincoln Square projection in 1959. Straight behind him is Laurence J. McGinley, S.J., the president of Fordham University at the time. Fordham received a significant piece of property at Lincoln Square to build a downtown campus. (Library of Congress)

The seminal, finger-snapping musical "West Side Story," which fabricated its Broadway premiere at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York in 1957, has recently been revived by the Tony Honour-winning director Ivo van Hove at the Broadway Theatre. (See a review of that production from America regular Rob Weinert-Kendt.) The show, a touchstone of the American theater adapted nearly 50 years ago into a 10-time Academy Award-winning film, was greeted with effusive praise and loftier-flying superlatives when outset unleashed on theatergoers.

Writing in 1957 for the New York Herald Tribune, Walter Kerr—the namesake of a Broadway theater—describes a dust-up between rival street gangs, the Sharks and the Jets.

"There is a sneer, a hiss, a tempting and tantalizing thrust of an arm, and so—with a powerhouse downbeat from the orchestra pit—the pitiful and meaningless frenzy is on," writes Kerr. "From this moment the show rides with a catastrophic roar over the spider-spider web fire-escapes, the shadowed trestles, and the plain dirt battlegrounds of a large city feud."

What ever happened to those shadowed trestles, that neighborhood where Tony crooned his honey for Maria? What ever happened—if you'll let me a John Stewart reference—to those faces in the onetime photographs? The reply, in a nutshell, is urban renewal.

What ever happened to those shadowed trestles, that neighborhood where Tony crooned his love for Maria?

The setting of "W Side Story" is San Juan Loma, the nickname of the Lincoln Square area of the Upper W Side of Manhattan—an area bulldozed and redeveloped into the Lincoln Center performing arts complex in the early 1960s. The U.Due south. Housing Act of 1949, passed during the Truman assistants, gear up the stage for the destruction of the San Juan Hill neighborhood, afflicted by poverty and urban decay. The act provided for the revitalization of slums every bit part of a wider vision promoting public housing.

Co-ordinate to a report past Alexander von Hoffman of Harvard University on the 1949 Housing Deed, information technology "set lofty goals—to eliminate slums and blighted areas and provide a decent home for every American family—merely provided the limited mechanisms of public housing and urban renewal to meet them."

Slum clearance likewise adversely affected low-income residents. Signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Housing Human action of 1937 sought to "provide financial assistance to the States and political subdivisions thereof for the elimination of unsafe and insanitary [sic] housing weather...and for other purposes." This New Deal-era program, also known as the Wagner-Steagall Deed, fostered an approach to public housing, "albeit a narrow one that targeted the slums and the slum-abode poor," von Hoffman notes.

In New York City, the controversial urban planner Robert Moses, subject of Robert A. Caro'southward massive 1,300-page tome "The Ability Broker," came to prominence with near mythological influence as chairman of the Mayor's Commission on Slum Clearance. Citing Championship I of the 1949 Housing Act, which provided capital grants to public agencies for the redevelopment (i.due east., razing) of slums, Moses finished 17 urban renewal projects between 1949 and 1960.

Before a oversupply of some 12,000 people in May 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower broke ground in New York for the $75 million Lincoln Center projection. (Adapted for inflation, that'south a nearly $665 million cost tag.)

Before a crowd of some 12,000 people in May 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower broke ground in New York for the $75 million Lincoln Eye project. (Adjusted for inflation, that's a nearly $665 million price tag.)

"Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts symbolizes an increasing involvement in America in cultural matters also as a stimulating approach to ane of the nation's pressing problems—urban blight," said Eisenhower at the ground-breaking ceremony, also attended past and then-Mayor Robert F. Wagner, John D. Rockefeller 3 and Leonard Bernstein—who wrote the music for "W Side Story."

A preliminary study on the Lincoln Foursquare projection, released by the Committee on Slum Clearance in July 1956, proposed multiple venues, including what is at present the Metropolitan Opera House, the New York Philharmonic and a Fordham University campus. Co-ordinate to The New York Times, the inclusion of a campus for a Jesuit-run institution concerned some who viewed the human relationship betwixt the university and the city as violating church building-state separation. Monsignor Thomas J. Shelley, in his book on the history of Fordham, writes that the university purchased around vii-and-a-half acres "between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues from 60th to 62nd Street" for $2,242,610.

The preliminary report also fabricated room for the inclusion of "moderate income housing for four,000–five,000 families," while The Times referred to to an American Red Cantankerous headquarters.

Detailing decay in the neighborhood, the written report stated that 478 of 482 residential buildings were " in need of major repairs" and that poor urban planning, which congested the neighborhood with one multi-story walk-upwardly afterward some other, had led to overcrowding. The study emphasized the need for affordable housing in the metropolis, already a growing issue by 1956, and noted that center-income families had been driven away from San Juan Loma considering of its substandard living atmospheric condition.

While San Juan Hill was characterized by city officials as a dirty, run-down slum, the neighborhood's cultural significance should non be neglected.

The redevelopment of Lincoln Square, however, led to the eviction of its majority blackness and Hispanic tenants, who then found themselves in Harlem or the Bronx and non in new housing units proposed by the Committee on Slum Clearance. The New York Times estimated that 7,000 lower-course families and 800 businesses were driven out of their old community.

"You cannot rebuild a metropolis without moving people any more than than you lot can brand an omelet without breaking eggs," said Moses during the 1959 ground-breaking ceremony. "We do, indeed, sympathise with tenants and practice everything possible to help them. But we cannot give everybody and his lawyer what they desire," he said.

While San Juan Hill was characterized by urban center officials as a muddied, run-downwardly slum, the neighborhood'southward cultural significance should not be neglected. Information technology was the birthplace of the Charleston and a haven for New Orleans jazz music, the identify pioneering jazz pianist Thelonious Monk called home.

"Lincoln Square also had a rich history of theater and the visual arts that long predated Lincoln Eye," said John Strausbaugh, the host of The New York Times' Weekend Explorer video series, in a 2008 video on the history of Lincoln Center. Mae Westward performed at the Colonial Theatre on Broadway and 62nd Street; playwright Eugene O'Neill and painter George Bellows were roommates at the Lincoln Square Arcade on Broadway and 65th Street.

Philharmonic Hall, now called David Geffen Hall, was the first building to open at Lincoln Centre in 1962. While the center is now 1 of the crown jewels of the Upper West Side, the history of yesterday's neighborhood is out of sight. Today, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, located to the right of the Metropolitan Opera, allows the public to watch recordings of past productions of "W Side Story," perhaps the lasting legacy of San Juan Colina, where those shadowed trestles in one case stood.

Correction, February. 25: A previous version of the article stated that Fordham Academy paid $25 million dollars for their Lincoln Center property. The university paid $ii,242,610 for that property, which adjusted for inflation, is around $20 meg. Too, this article referenced Avery Fisher Hall, which is now called David Geffen Hall since 2015.

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Source: https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2020/02/25/story-behind-lost-neighborhood-where-west-side-story-set

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