Harrison’s vision of the Cold War included the Acropolis of the performing arts, which for Moses, Rockefeller, and their social circles meant Western classical music, musical theater, opera and ballet. The campus was on a pedestal above the neighborhood. I turned my back on the public housing development along Amsterdam Avenue.
At the time, American classical music was an ambitious brand of entertainment for the middle class. Cities across the country were unable to build concert halls large or fast enough. Lincoln Center touted itself as a cultural model for post-war urban renewal.Critics wept when Abramowitz’s hall was announced to have fewer people than Carnegie’s elitismLincoln Center ordered Abramovitz to pack 180 lodge seats in place of the box seats, and performed tasks such as reconfiguring the hall’s balconies. As Mr. Scabrough told me the other day, it was “a fateful decision” because the change exacerbated the hall’s acoustic problems.
Some time ago, I visited Scarbrough and his colleague Christopher Blair, Akustiks chief scientist, at their offices in Norwalk, Connecticut. Imagine a hinged box split vertically in the middle. I mentioned the word “sarcophagus,” and Blair indulged in gallows humor that the hall was a place where “sound engineers and architects lost their reputation.”
Leo Beranek, sound engineer at Abramovitz’s Philharmonic Hall, had ensured his new scientific approach would create an ideal auditorium, but was sidetracked by the decision to expand the hall. . “The sound engineer was expected to approve the architect’s plans. Indeed, the example of his hall in the Philharmonic proved why it had to be changed.”
Skip to the turn of the century. San Juan Hill’s pesticides have faded from the memory of many New Yorkers. Lincoln Center has come to be viewed a little more lovingly as a piece of civic furniture, an oasis in the urban grid, a facility in need of an upgrade. A plan to refresh the campus emerged and was initiated by Avery Fisher. Then, in 2003, the Philharmonic Orchestra suddenly informed Lincoln Center of its intention to return to Carnegie. A few months later the move was off, but the damage was done. Lincoln Center pushed Avery his Fisher to the back of the line for renovations, further degrading the drab halls and reshaping the rest of the campus.