Before Lincoln Center was a place, it was an idea. Hatched in the 1950s as part of a controversial “urban renewal” project shepherded by then New York City planning commissioner Robert Moses, the concept was to build a new campus to house the city’s top arts organizations, modeled on the great cultural squares and kunsthalles of Europe: a stage—or rather a series of them—upon which American excellence in the classical arenas of music, theater, opera, and dance could be performed. Moses, once described in a 1939 profile in The Atlantic as a “Paul Bunyan of an official,” earmarked a piece of land for the development in San Juan Hill, a bustling neighborhood with large Black and Puerto Rican communities nestled between 59th Street and 65th Street on Manhattan’s Upper West…
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Harper's Bazaar (Digital) - 1 Issue, October 2022