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November 9, 2003
TT: Among the fortresses
I wrote about the arts for Time magazine from 1997 to 2001--mostly about music, though I also published a number of articles about dance. The experience was fun and frustrating in like proportions, for those were the years when Time was slowly winding down its century-long commitment to full-scale coverage of the fine arts. I didn't realize it, but Time's decision to outsource its coverage of classical music and dance to a freelance writer was itself an ominous sign of things to come. It grew harder and harder for me to get pieces into the magazine, and after 9/11 it became impossible. (Watching Time walk away from the fine arts, by the way, was part of what gave me the idea to start "About Last Night.")Even during the good years, writing for Time could be exasperating, especially when one of my stories got bumped for lack of space, then killed outright, usually because it had gone "stale" in the preceding week. I still hold it against Bill Clinton that my 50th-birthday profile of Mikhail Baryshnikov ran only in the Latin American edition of the magazine--the U.S. edition required a couple of extra pages that week to cover the first installment of Monicagate. And even though I'm a great fan of Robert Hughes, it irked me no end that his big piece about the opening of the Guggenheim's Bilbao branch squeezed out my own one-pager about the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.
I hung onto that piece, hoping I'd be able to do something with it someday. I just returned from a Sunday matinee at NJPAC, and it struck me on the way home that today might be a good time to revisit what I wrote about the center when it opened its doors in 1997. It appears here for the first time:
On paper, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center looks like a sure thing. The 250,000-square-foot facility, built at a cost of $180 million, contains two handsome theaters--a 2,750-seat multi-purpose auditorium and a 514-seat "performing space"-- and a full-service restaurant....Easily accessible via four major highways, NJPAC has a potential audience of 4.6 million people living within 25 miles of its front door. There's just one catch: It's in Newark.
Thirty years ago this July, two white policemen from Newark's Fourth Precinct arrested a black cabdriver. They said he resisted arrest; he said they beat him up. The people believed the cabby, and took to the streets. Five days later, 26 people were dead, and Newark had acquired a bad name it has yet to lose. White flight was already well under way by 1967, but no sooner had the smoke of the riots cleared than the diaspora to the suburbs became multi-ethnic, and between 1967 and 1994, the city's population shrank by more than a third, from 406,000 to 259,000. You don't need a demographer to know something is still terribly wrong with Newark: All you have to do is take the five-minute walk from the train station to NJPAC, noticing along the way that none of the newer, post-riot buildings has street-level windows. The architecture of Newark is a fever chart of middle-class fear.
Can a stiff dose of the fine arts cure the malaise that has gripped New Jersey's largest city for three decades? To stay in business, NJPAC must coax hundreds of thousands of nervous suburbanites back to downtown Newark, and every aspect of its operation has been planned with that uphill battle in mind. Architect Barton Myers has created a building in which beauty and practicality are shrewdly combined in a style less dazzling than comfortable: The brightly lit brick-and-glass facade is warm and inviting, while the main auditorium, done in cherry wood and copper, is unexpectedly intimate. "It feels like being inside a cello," says NJPAC president Lawrence P. Goldman.
Perfect sight lines (even in the cheap seats) make Prudential Hall a near-ideal venue for ballet and modern dance, and as the cost of performing in New York continues to soar, touring troupes are taking note of the center's close proximity to midtown Manhattan, a 15-minute train ride away....
Unlike more traditionally minded arts centers, NJPAC is making a highly sophisticated effort to attract the widest possible audience, a must in so ethnically diverse a community. "It's not enough just to put artists on the stage," says programming vice-president Stephanie Hughley. "We've got to figure out ways to facilitate conversations between people who think they're different." The center's offerings are as inclusive as a stump speech by Bill Clinton--André Watts, the Israel Philharmonic, the Peking Opera, the Chieftains, even the New York City Gay Men's Chorus. From its "African-American Culture" subscription series (which includes Jessye Norman, black concert pianist Awadagin Pratt, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, and Donald Byrd's "Harlem Nutcracker") to the multicolored mosaics installed in each bathroom (modeled after African kente cloth), NJPAC is seeking to send an unambiguous message of welcome to potential attendees who, as Hughley points out, "are not necessarily familiar with going to performing arts centers."
But none of this will matter if New Jerseyans, whatever their color, prove unwilling to drive into Newark after dark. The fear factor is the great unknown hanging over the center's inaugural season, and it is readily acknowledged at NJPAC, even in the center's newspaper ads, which unashamedly tout its "safe and secure" parking. Similar ventures have revived other near-dead urban areas--most famously New York's Lincoln Center, which turned the Upper West Side from a decaying slum into Seinfeld country--but few have sought to stem so high a tide at so late a date. As a result, far more than $180 million is riding on the outcome of this risky exercise in urban renewal through the arts. In the paranoid age of the gated community, every pane of glass in the glowing facade of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center is an act of faith in the future of America's cities.
If this piece strikes you as tentative, it's partly because I wrote it prior to having seen any performances at NJPAC. Time originally planned to publish it the week before the hall opened, a typical piece of weekly-magazine scheduling that put the cart a couple of miles before the horse.
In addition, I was also skeptical about the power of performing arts centers, however well planned, to serve as engines of urban renewal (the renovation and revival of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, for example, have yet to transform BAM's surrounding community in any substantial way). And I was concerned about the potential confusion of artistic aims that occurs when such a center is viewed as a means, not an end. Few of the performing arts centers of the Sixties have come close to fulfilling their initial artistic promise. Lincoln Center and Kennedy Center are the most glaring examples, partly but by no means entirely because of their notorious architectural inadequacies.
Having spent countless hours attending performances in both centers and others like them, I've come to feel that it's almost always a mistake to try to centralize so many different kinds of urban artistic activity in one overgrown complex. Aside from everything else, it's way too risky to rely on a single architect or architectural concept, especially in the age of what David Sucher of City Comforts calls "starchitecture," in which the function of a building is ruthlessly subordinated to the desire of its designer to make a giant splash in the larger world of art. The catch is that a building isn't a painting or a statue. It's a space in which people of flesh and blood must live and work. Ideally, it should be both beautiful and convenient, but if you should happen to live or work in it, the second of these is by far the greater.
If there's a case to be made for building single-site performing arts centers, though, it might well be in medium-sized cities that have gone dead at the core, and Newark definitely fills the bill. By all accounts, NJPAC has overcome the "fear factor" to which I referred in my Time piece. The Mark Morris Dance Group appeared this weekend in the center's smaller auditorium (Miss Saigon was playing in Prudential Hall), and most of the people who came to see the company today were quite clearly from elsewhere. Too clearly, truth be told: the gray-headed audience was visibly older than the hip-and-happening crowd Morris' company normally draws when it dances in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Nor did these viewers strike me as especially receptive to what Morris had to offer. Yes, I went to a Sunday matinee, but even by the standards one normally applies to matinee audiences, this one seemed unresponsive. I'll write about the program tomorrow. In the meantime, suffice it to say that while the three dances performed by the Morris group were somewhat demanding, they were far from inaccessible.
The theater, like the rest of NJPAC, was as warm and inviting as I remembered from 1997 (though I noticed a number of minor but irritating design problems this time around--the entrances to the smaller auditorium aren't big enough, for instance). I felt six years ago that New York City couldn't claim a single fine-arts performing space as attractive as the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. I felt the same way this afternoon. If NJPAC were in Manhattan, I'd go as often as I could.
Be that as it may, we New Yorkers seem content to stick to our own unsatisfactory halls. Contrary to what I thought possible back in 1997, NJPAC now draws a trivially small percentage of its audience members from Manhattan and its environs. I went this afternoon because the Morris group was giving the first performance in the New York area of "All Fours," an important new dance set to Bartók's Fourth String Quartet. You'd have thought it would attract all the serious dancegoers in the region--and you'd have been wrong. Except for the company manager and the dancers, I didn't see a soul I knew. This was especially puzzling in light of the fact that NJPAC is so easy to reach via public transportation. It takes less time to get there from midtown than it takes to get to the BAM Opera House in Brooklyn, where the Mark Morris Dance Group normally performs when it's appearing in the New York area.
I've no idea why New Yorkers won't go to NJPAC, but I know why I don't especially like to go there. The five-block walk from Penn Station is perfectly safe--and perfectly depressing. I'm told that NJPAC has started to have some visible urban-renewal effects on downtown Newark, but all I saw this afternoon were the same windowless, fortress-like office buildings that lined the streets six years ago. As I walked past them today, I asked myself, as I did in 1997, How can so bleak an urban environment possibly be "renewed" by anything short of sufficient dynamite to blow it up and start all over again? It's one thing to persuade middle-aged suburbanites to drive to NJPAC, dine in the center's excellent restaurant, watch a performance, then drive straight home again. It's another thing altogether to make young suburbanites want to spend part of their spare time in downtown Newark, and so far as I can tell, NJPAC isn't bringing that about.
Of course you can't tell much from a single afternoon-long visit. Maybe it's too soon to expect dramatic changes. But, then, I never did expect them. The most I ever supposed was that the New Jersey Performing Arts Center might become a cultural oasis in the middle of a blasted urban heath. That's what it is, and it's no small thing to be. It's better to have an oasis than no water at all--but it's better still to have a spring that feeds a river that turns an inner city green with new life.
Lincoln Center has its crippling flaws, God knows, but it did succeed in transforming New York's Upper West Side almost beyond recognition. As of today, I'm still skeptical that NJPAC will do much more than make it possible for suburban New Jerseyites to see Miss Saigon without having to drive all the way into Manhattan. Somehow I doubt that's what its founders had in mind.
Posted November 9, 2003 8:37 AM
