BAM Cultural District

[billyblancoNYC]

http://www.theslatinreport.com/story.jsp?Topic=place&theStory=1208BAM.txt

WHAM, BAM!

Steve Garmhausen

For six weeks this fall, the third-floor windows of an abandoned building near Brooklyn's famous Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower became a marionette theatre, opening at the top of each hour for a short multimedia production based on an Arthur Miller play.

The little-publicized project was easy to overlook. But it was a harbinger of something that will be much harder to miss: a $630-million "cultural district" in Fort Greene, with a master plan by Rem Koolhaas and Diller & Scofidio. It promises everything from art studios to apartments to theatres and a visual arts library. Restaurants and cafŽs are planned as well.

Anchored by the 95-year-old Brooklyn Academy of Music, the district will boast 500,000 square feet of cultural space and 500 units of housing. The development is to take place on four underused lots where Fulton Street and Flatbush Avenue meet. The 430 parking spaces there will be doubled and put underground.

BAM Local Development Corp., chaired by former BAM director Harvey Lichtenstein, says its mission is to support arts organizations from around the city that have been threatened by escalating real estate prices and a difficult fund-raising environment. Two years ago, the Mark Morris Dance Group moved into a 30,000-square-foot former bank building a block away from BAM, which it bought from the state at a fire sale price of $200,000.

And the marionette building, also known as the 80 Arts building, is undergoing a $6-million renovation. Once the 30,000-square-foot, eight-story affair is finished early next year, it will be leased at below-market rates to as many as 20 arts groups.

Work on one of the four parcels, the "east site," is to start in late 2004. The 20,000-square-foot vacant parking lot is owned by Forest City Ratner. Bruce Ratner, the company's CEO, has made downtown Brooklyn a canvas for his very broad development strokes. The 4.2 million-square-foot MetroTech Center is the biggest block of offices in the city. Very near BAM, Ratner has created 870,000 square feet of mostly retail space with his Atlantic Center and Atlantic Terminal projects. Across the street from them, he wants to build a $500-million, Frank Gehry-designed sports arena that would house the New Jersey Nets and Devils. (Ratner, once a member of the BAM LDC board, left the position for conflict-of-interest reasons.)

A 160,000 square-foot building on Ratner's site will house an African-diaspora art museum and other cultural components. As many as 100 units of subsidized housing are to be developed on the plot as well. Housing will be a prominent feature of the cultural district. Plans call for about 500 residential units, both for rent and for sale.

A pillar of the cultural district will be the Brooklyn Public Library's visual arts library. The design commission for the 110,000-square-foot building was awarded last year to Enrique Norten, of Mexico City-based Ten Arquitectos, over Rafael Vi–oly Architects, of New York, Ateliers Jean Nouvel, of Paris, and Huff & Gooden, of Charleston, S.C.

Raising the $75 million needed to design and build the library will be a major challenge. (The institution wants to raise an additional $45 million for furnishings, collections and operating costs.) About $11 million has been committed from BAM LDC and the city. The final design will be completed in two years at the soonest.

The triangular structure will sit behind a contemporary-looking glass curtain meant to make it seem open to the community around it. Inside, patrons will find theatres, an auditorium, art galleries, a black box theatre, a 24/7 media lounge, practice rooms for artists, writers and musicians, and-oh yes-a collection of library books.

Construction was supposed to start in 2005, but that was before the recession. "Who knows?" says library executive director Ginnie Cooper. (Cooper promised, though that it won't take 41 years to build the library, as was the case with the main Brooklyn Public Library, which started in 1912 as a Beaux Arts building and ended up-41 years later-as a moderne building.)

Sharing a lot with the library will be a 20,000-square-foot, 299-seat theater with offices and rehearsal space for the Theatre for a New Audience, a group devoted to Shakespeare and classical plays.

Art will be the common theme of the new structures slated for the area, but the buildings won't be Xeroxes of each other. The physical district will be unified by its streetscape and public open spaces, says Jeanne Lutfy, president of BAM LDC: "One of the goals here to is develop the district so it feels like it's connected to the surrounding community, as opposed to a campus of buildings where you come to see performances and then leave."

BAM LDC has hired the landscape architectural firm Michael Van Valkenberg Associates to tailor the open spaces. The small BAM Park, across the street from BAM itself, will be renovated and become a venue for arts and art classes. Streets in the district will be dressed up with façades, landscaping and lighting improvements, and work by local artists will be integrated into the improvements. Even the stairs of the new library will be used as seating for outdoor events.

"The special-looking buildings and streetscape and public open spaces will help engender connections to get you in and lead you through the district," says Lutfy. BAM LDC even created a weekend green market this summer at nearby Fort Greene Park, and hopes to move it to a permanent spot within the district.

The timeframe for completion of the district? BAM LDC put the figure at 10 years a couple of years ago, but now Lutfy says "at least 10 years" for three of the sites, and longer for the fourth, which has some existing development. "The fund-raising environment is more difficult," Lutfy concedes. "But the need (for the district) is still there."

The city has allocated $40 million toward the district. BAM LDC uses part of that to give the Brooklyn Public Library and other partners 15% of the capital cost for their projects, a grubstake used to raise more funds and financing. The residential buildings will be developed by private firms, which will come up with money on their own.

Finding funding hasn't been the only challenge. The arts district is going right in the middle of a historically African-American, middle-class community that has been home to artists of its own including filmmaker Spike Lee, author Richard Wright and jazz matriarch Betty Carter. Community members feared the cultural district would neglect their own culture and change the neighborhood into a lily-white Lincoln Center East.

After all, BAM itself is best known for things like European avant-garde dance productions, hardly reflective of the local community. Amid a grassroots outcry and threats from a local legislator to block city funding, BAM LDC has been forced to make sure the community is represented.

For instance, half of the 500,000 square feet of cultural space is dedicated to Brooklyn-based arts groups. And half of the 500 housing units will be subsidized; of that number, half will be targeted to local residents and artists, and BAM LDC will try to increase that percentage through targeted marketing.

The 80 Arts building project was awarded to a New York City-based, minority-owned architecture firm, Open Office. And a local community development organization will manage the building. "We made a concerted effort to reach out and make sure we got community input," says Lutfy. "That, we think, helped to enrich the plan and make it better."

BAM LDC is hoping to install a boutique hotel in the district, with 100 to 150 rooms. BAM already uses 7,000 hotel room nights a year for visiting artists.

The city's funding is predicated on having the arts organizations that own or have long-term leases in the district's buildings to agree not to transfer the property to non-arts parties. "They won't be able to sell to retail chains," says Lutfy. "So in 30 years, it will still be an arts district."

[Kris]

Cultural Center in Brooklyn (http://forums.wirednewyork.com/viewtopic.php?t=1628)

[Gulcrapek]

Another good thing... I was wondering when this would happen, I've seen things about it for the last year but no date. Looking forward to the spruced up streets and 'different' buildings.

[Kris]

March 24, 2004

New Theater for Brooklyn Arts District

By GLENN COLLINS

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/03/24/arts/03242004_BROO_MAP.jpg
The new theater would be adjacent to the Brooklyn Academy.

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/03/24/arts/24broo2.jpg
Harvey Lichtenstein, left, chairman of BAM Local Development Corporation, and Jeffrey Horowitz, artistic director of Theater for a New Audience, on the site of a proposed theater for Mr. Horowitz's company.

A $22 million, 299-seat theater designed by the architects Frank Gehry and Hugh Hardy is expected to be the newest ornament of a growing cultural district in Brooklyn.

The multipurpose experimental space, to be built on a city-owned parking lot adjacent to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, would serve as the first permanent home for the Theater for a New Audience, a 25-year-old Off Broadway company known for its productions of Shakespeare and classical drama as well as its educational programs in New York City schools.

The city's Economic Development Corporation has committed $6.2 million to the building's construction. The 40-member board of the Theater for a New Audience, which includes Zoe Caldwell, Robert Caro, Dana Ivey and Julie Taymor, has mounted a campaign to raise the balance of the money for the building, which the theater will own and operate.

Harvey Lichtenstein, chairman of the BAM Local Development Corporation, said he expected that the new building would give the cultural district even greater momentum. "It is a significant milestone on the way to our goal of establishing an arts district that will serve the neighborhood, Brooklyn and the whole city," he said.

The nonprofit development corporation is in its fourth year of overseeing a 10-year, $630 million master plan to create an arts district in the environs of downtown Brooklyn, Park Slope, Fort Greene, Boerum Hill and Clinton Hill.

The theater is to be built next to the planned Brooklyn Public Library for the Visual and Performing Arts designed by Enrique Norten of TEN Arquitectos in Mexico City. Both buildings are scheduled to be completed in 2008.

The new theater would join a nucleus of other arts buildings clustered around the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The cultural district would offer mixed-income housing, studios and performance and rehearsal spaces as part of a master plan created by architects including Rem Koolhaas, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio.

Other facilities already in place are the academy, the Mark Morris Dance Studio, the BAM Harvey Theater and a recycled office building, owned by the Alliance of Resident Theaters/New York, that provides rehearsal and administrative space for 21 small theater companies.

The BAM development corporation's $6 million renovation of the James E. Davis Arts Building, at 80 Hanson Place, is scheduled for completion this summer. It is to house 15 to 20 cultural organizations.

The triangular parking lot site for the library and the proposed theater is just across Ashland Place from the academy's main building and the nearly adjacent Williamsburgh Savings Bank building, the area's most prominent landmark. The other sides of the theater would border Flatbush and Lafayette Avenues. The current 125-car parking space is to be replaced by a 400-vehicle underground garage.

"Having its own home will be transformative for our theater," said Jeffrey Horowitz, artistic director and founder of the Theater for a New Audience. "It would give us a permanent place in a community and give us more money to spend on our productions, instead of renting space."

The 25,000-square-foot new theater building is to include a main stage, a 50-seat rehearsal and performance space, and room for administrative offices. There would also be a cafe facing a tree-bordered public area — also available for exhibitions and performances — in front of the new library. Mr. Horowitz said the design was based on historic Elizabethan courtyard theaters and was inspired by the Cottesloe Theater of the Royal National Theater in London.

Like the Cottesloe, the new building would permit many different audience configurations, including the classic proscenium stage as well as a thrust stage and a theater in the round. It is to have a high ceiling and a trapped floor, allowing actors access to the stage from underneath it, "which is essential for Shakespearean characters, many of whom, like Caliban, enter from below," Mr. Horowitz said.

The theater company was founded by Mr. Horowitz in 1979 to encourage the performance and study of classic drama. It has introduced more than 100,000 public school students to Shakespeare.

Although its productions have not always been accorded critical raves, the company has been nominated many times for Tony, Drama Desk and Drama League awards, and has won several Lucille Lortel and Obie awards.

The proposed new theater would "be a friendly neighbor and will provide educational programs for the community," said Susan Goldfinger, senior vice president of the real-estate development department of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, which has committed $6.2 million from the Mayor's capital budget for the theater's construction. The city-owned land is to be conveyed to the theater through a long-term ground lease.

Some community groups have angrily opposed the proposed arrival of a $485 million New Jersey Nets arena, the centerpiece of a $2.5 billion residential and commercial complex that the developer Bruce C. Ratner envisions for the area straddling the Atlantic Avenue rail yards not far from the academy. Mr. Gehry is also the prospective architect of the Nets project.

Some local residents fear that an influx of arts groups would further drive up rents in the neighborhood, pushing out working-class minority residents.

Mr. Lichtenstein, the Brooklyn Academy's leader from 1967 to 1999, said the area had been gentrifying long before the advent of the cultural district. "We're encouraging the construction of middle-income housing there," he said, adding that no existing structures would be displaced to make way for the new theater, except for those in parking lot.

"I think the neighborhood would welcome it, because it's not about lining some developer's pocket," Patti Hagan said of the new theater. She is spokeswoman for the Prospect Heights Action Coalition, which has opposed Mr. Ratner's plan. Mr. Ratner is also the development partner of The New York Times Company in a new building for the newspaper's headquarters.

Mr. Horowitz, who lives in Boerum Hill, said the theater could be rented to cultural organizations and local groups 12 to 16 weeks a year, when company productions were not running. "Our educational programs will reach out to the neighborhood," he said.

The theater company, which has a $3 million annual operating budget, has been looking for a permanent home since 1997.

"The theater is tiny, and the budget is tiny," Mr. Gehry said, "but we hope this can lead to an interesting space." He has designed theaters in Los Angeles and Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., and is creating another in Miami.

As currently envisioned the theater is to have an open, glassy lobby space that would be "its own marquee, statement and front door," said Mr. Hardy, an architect on many previous theater projects, including the renovations of the New Victory, the New Amsterdam, the Joyce and Radio City Music Hall.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

April 25, 2004

The (Not Easy) Building of (Not Exactly) Lincoln Center for (Not) Manhattan

By JAMES TRAUB

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/04/23/magazine/questions.184.1.583.jpg
Harvey Lichtenstein, seated, flanked by the Brooklyn Academy of Music's family.

Several years ago, Harvey Lichtenstein, the former president and presiding genius of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, visited the board of an important New York arts institution with the hope of persuading the group to consider moving to the ''cultural district'' he was, and is, developing in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood around BAM. Lichtenstein said, ''You know, Paris has the Left Bank, and London has the South Bank, and here you've got Brooklyn.'' The outer borough was the Left Bank-in-waiting. Then some wiseacre on the board cracked, ''Yeah, well, in Paris when you go to the Left Bank, they're still Parisians.'' Everyone guffawed; Lichtenstein fumed.

Harvey Lichtenstein has heard enough Brooklyn jokes for a lifetime. In the early years of his tenure at BAM, in the late 60's and early 70's, a martial-arts school occupied a studio above a performance space, and in the midst of, say, ''Candide,'' the audience might be jolted out of its trance by a sudden ''Aieee-yah!'' But Lichtenstein persisted in his lonely crusade, and after 15 or 20 years, all but the most hopelessly Manhattan-centric of playgoers and balletomanes had come to recognize that New York's Left Bank was coming to life in the avant-garde hatchery of BAM. By the time he retired in 1999, Lichtenstein had become a monstre sacre -- a father figure of the new art and one of the great cultural impresarios of Joseph Papp's generation. John Rockwell of The New York Times described him flatly as ''the most innovative and influential performing arts administrator New York has known.''

Nowadays, Lichtenstein operates out of a tiny office that smells strongly of the fried-fish place downstairs. From this dim (and temporary) bandbox, Lichtenstein and Jeanne Lutfy, his chief aide and sometime envoy to the real world, direct the fortunes of the BAM Local Development Corporation, a $630 million project that aspires to create a new neighborhood of theaters, museums, libraries, dance studios, art galleries and housing, all designed by some of the world's greatest architects -- a not-Lincoln Center for this not-Manhattan. Enrique Norten, the Mexican architect, will be building a new branch of the Brooklyn Public Library in an empty lot across the street from BAM, and last month, after long negotiation, the classically-oriented Theater for a New Audience agreed to build a 299-seat theater, to be designed by Frank Gehry and Hugh Hardy, in the space next to the library. Lichtenstein, who at 75 is possibly New York's oldest young person, is creating a new neighborhood for the children of those starched-out Manhattan arts snobs -- and a lot of those kids, as Lichtenstein observes, already live in Brooklyn.

Harvey Lichtenstein has been described, in the past, as something of a barbarian, but age has scoured his face, leaving him with a great, square head reminiscent of Rodin's bust of Clemenceau. He has the pink cheeks of age, the shooting gray eyebrows of discernment and the battered beak of an old fighter. He is merry, as befits the old and wise. But not always: sometimes, as when he is recalling battles of yesteryear, or today, he pulls his lips back and grits his teeth, and you can see the inner mule. He still sounds mad that the critic Arlene Croce called the dancer Pina Bausch ''Euro-trash,'' which seems to have happened more than a decade ago.

Thirty years ago, when BAM was still a fledgling operation, Lichtenstein spent much of his energy trying to persuade artists that Brooklyn was something more than a redoubt of Ralph Kramden-style American philistinism. Peter Brook, the English director and an early convert, told me: ''When I first went there, all my theater friends said: 'We never go to Brooklyn. Something that happens in Brooklyn doesn't happen.''' Brooklyn was Nowheresville -- a sort of Manhattan banlieue. By virtue of attracting people like Brook to BAM, Lichtenstein did a great deal to turn Brooklyn into Somewhere. But it was also true, as Lichtenstein concedes, that ''BAM was sort of an exception in the cultural area.'' The commercial strip of Flatbush and Fulton Avenues, which bordered BAM, was pure unreconstructed Brooklyn -- fast-food joints, storefront churches, secondhand-furniture shops, shuttered spaces. BAM could never serve as the hub of a community -- as, in its own way, Lincoln Center does -- unless the community changed. And this, Lichtenstein decided, would be his next job.

Lichtenstein envisioned something that didn't really exist anywhere: a bohemian, or bourgeois bohemian, paradise where artists lived and worked and mixed with neighborhood folk. It wouldn't be Lincoln Center, with art up on a plinth, and it wouldn't be SoHo, where art has been reduced to shopping bait. It would be a culture community. As Jeanne Lutfy, the L.D.C.'s president and a former city economic development official, says: ''We didn't want this to become over time like SoHo, where the arts organizations would eventually be priced out of the area. If it's a cultural district, we want it to be that way for years to come.'' Rather than build space and rent it to arts groups, the organization would find the right tenants and help them build their own institutions, which they would own.

Lichtenstein turned to the progressive architectural firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro to draw up a master plan. The goal of the plan, Charles Renfro, the lead architect, says, was ''to overcome BAM's physical isolation,'' to use design to weave the rarefied, and largely white, world of BAM into the commercial and residential world of Fort Greene. The building scale would be low, the ''tawdry outer-boroughness'' of the commercial strip would be respected, if not altogether preserved, and the ''public space'' of the cultural institutions would flow into the ''private space'' of the housing, which would be provided at subsidized rates to artists and would ensure the 24-hour character of the neighborhood. Renfro describes the plan as ''utopian''; Lichtenstein, a utopian himself, was delighted with it.

The project would never fly without public financing, but after years at BAM, Lichtenstein was a genius at scrounging for municipal dollars. And the timing was right. New York was competing fiercely with New Jersey to accommodate companies that found Manhattan unaffordable, a battle that intensified after 9/11, when businesses sought to disperse employees. Brooklyn had already become a key player in this battle by virtue of the downtown office development known as MetroTech. And the cultural-district plan offered something MetroTech needed and Jersey City didn't have: a neighborhood. In 2001, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, though scarcely a friend of advanced culture, agreed to give the BAM L.D.C. a $50 million matching grant over four to five years.

Suddenly, the BAM L.D.C. was leading a charmed life. And then, suddenly, it wasn't. The terrorist attacks diverted philanthropic dollars away from cultural organizations, which suddenly had to think much harder about the $20 million or $30 million capital campaign they would need to build a new home. And then there was that old Manhattan-centric thing. Lichtenstein was braced for that obstacle, of course; what he hadn't expected was local ingratitude. In the fall of 2001, Lichtenstein, Lutfy and others began discussing their plans in a series of public meetings in Fort Greene, an elegant brownstone neighborhood that for the previous generation had been largely black and middle class but had recently begun to attract a younger and more diverse population. Fort Greene had, in fact, become the perfect setting for a cultural district -- multiethnic, historically rooted, culturally active and full of weird incongruities, the coffee bar abutting the West Indian jerk joint. And in fact the homeowners and professionals I spoke to were delighted with Lichtenstein's plans.

But others viewed BAM as an outpost of an alien culture and the planned community as the last straw of gentrification. What would become of the Afrocentric shops along Flatbush, the black street life and even the local cultural institutions? Gentrification would mean displacement -- it always does. The black would give way to the not-black, the local to the global. When I talked to Abeni Crooms, a local community organizer, she asked me why Lichtenstein would bring in the Mark Morris Dance Group when Fort Greene already had 651 Arts, a local organization -- and a rather shaky one financially -- that presents dance performances. I said that maybe Lichtenstein thought an international figure like Mark Morris was more important than 651 Arts. Crooms was genuinely startled. ''I can't even imagine thinking like that,'' she murmured.

Lichtenstein was caught up in a drama familiar to every developer in New York -- the passion play of community outrage. This was not the kind of issue usually hashed out in the avant-garde productions at BAM. In October 2002, the Concerned Citizens Coalition, a body led by local politicians, clergy members and arts organizations, held a public meeting at the Brooklyn Music School, a local arts institution that hadn't been included in the L.D.C.'s plan. Lichtenstein was invited to attend but not to speak. Four hundred people jammed the room, many of them brought in by local politicians and ministers from the vast projects that line the northern edge of the area; it is safe to say that very few of them had attended Peter Brook's ''Mahabharata.'' A survey was read out supposedly showing that the majority of residents opposed the plans. Critical comments were projected on a large screen: one read, ''Whenever BAM has done anything, it has always been with the unstated goal of bringing as many affluent white people as possible into the area.'' Lichtenstein, who had spent a lifetime standing up for the difficult against the conventional and the multicultural against the monocultural, was shocked to find himself denounced as an arch honky. ''It was a pretty hostile meeting,'' he says. ''We found out that gentrification is a big issue here. They said it was all our fault, which is silly. But there's the fact that we contribute to it, and so on. So how do we deal with that?''

In the aftermath of the October meeting, relations with the citizens' coalition grew so acrimonious that both sides agreed to work with a mediator from the Ford Foundation. By last summer, when I first started talking to Lichtenstein, the L.D.C. had agreed to help 651 Arts and the Brooklyn Music School and to provide much of the planned new housing for local and low-income people; tempers had grown cooler, but Lichtenstein was still balking at a demand from the minister who heads the citizens' coalition that the L.D.C. and his organization form a ''partnership.'' Lichtenstein had not become the most important impresario in New York by forging partnerships: he had done it by insisting on his own judgment even in the face of common sense. The whole subject brought out his spleen. ''It's our concept,'' Lichtenstein said. ''It's our idea. We got the money. We can't share control; that's crazy. Then we don't have a project.''

Harvey Lichtenstein is a man of unusual tastes: he is so entirely at home in the gestural and the nonrepresentational that he tends to find the figurative banal. When we first spoke, each of us had just seen a staging of Leos Janacek's opera ''Fate'' at Bard College, a rather fuzzily constructed work set in a spa at the turn of the century. I told Lichtenstein that I hadn't known what to make of Frank Gehry's set, which consisted entirely of two suspended monoliths. ''I thought the sets were amazing!'' he cried in his rasp-file voice. ''You don't need a spa, you don't need a ballroom, you don't need all that.'' And the opera -- he loved it. And the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, which Gehry designed, was a masterpiece. ''I can't tell you how exhilarated I was,'' Lichtenstein said. He is exhilarated a lot: as the composer Steve Reich says, ''Harvey loves new work, and the more far-out it is, the more he loves it.''

Lichtenstein explains his aesthetic orientation by saying, ''I was brought up with Franz Kline and Rothko and de Kooning and Motherwell and all those people.'' Lichtenstein's father was a music-loving, though unschooled, Polish immigrant, and Lichtenstein was, in fact, weaned on Beethoven and Brahms, but a cousin married Jack Tworkov, a well-regarded Abstract Expressionist painter whose family introduced young Harvey to the new art. Lichtenstein began to hang around the galleries while he was still in high school. And when a girlfriend took him to see the Martha Graham Dance Company, Lichtenstein experienced one of his revelations: soon he was taking dance classes and began moving in a world where dance intersected with the other arts. After college, in the early 1950's, the young man spent a summer at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a famous seedbed of postwar modernism. There Lichtenstein got to know Kline, who was himself married to a dancer, as well as Robert Rauschenberg, the poet Charles Olson and Merce Cunningham, who had just started up his dance company. It was a very heady moment.

In the 50's, Lichtenstein danced professionally with several Martha Graham-inspired companies, filling out a modest income with odd jobs. In the early 60's, he took a job in the development department at Brandeis University, then went to work managing the subscription programs at the New York City Ballet and the New York City Opera. In 1967, the board of the Brooklyn Academy of Music asked him to take over as director. At the time, Lichtenstein recalled, the academy -- which he later renamed, in classic Pop style, BAM -- offered five performances a year by the Boston Symphony orchestra, recitals, lectures on current events and folk dancing. ''It was mostly older, older, older audiences,'' says Lichtenstein, who was then 37. A mercy killing seemed in order.

Instead, Lichtenstein got the board to agree to the kind of decision that looks ingenious only in retrospect: he would showcase the art he loved, not the art his audience wanted to see. He brought Merce Cunningham and Robert Wilson and Steve Reich, figures then known only to the illuminati, to Brooklyn. They played in front of half-empty, or three-quarters-empty, houses. When I asked Lichtenstein why he didn't switch to more popular fare, he said: ''I knew these were important artists. I knew Merce Cunningham was a great artist. I knew it. And I wouldn't stop.'' The leading figures of that generation are grateful to this day for the opportunity Lichtenstein gave them when their reputations were still forming. ''The thing that was important for Bob and myself,'' Philip Glass told me, referring to Robert Wilson, ''was that we were young artists who were ready to work in big spaces, but there were no big spaces.'' Lichtenstein offered not a SoHo loft, but a 2,100-seat house with a splendid proscenium and all the trappings of a forgotten age of theatrical glory. (BAM was built in 1908.)

BAM specialized in what the performance artist Laurie Anderson calls ''the sleeping-bag show,'' where you could bunk in the balcony while a boundary-less, time-bending spectacle unfolded according to its own pace. Her own debut performance there, ''United States 1-4,'' in 1983, took place over two evenings and eight hours. Genre itself was open to question. In many of BAM's productions, language was reduced to a sort of incantatory role in the service of tableau or theatrical spectacle. Peter Brook's famous six-hour version of ''The Mahabharata,'' performed in 1987, down the street from BAM, in the old Majestic Theater, which Brook and Lichtenstein had meticulously renovated to a state of half-finished, grimy grandeur, appeared to be enacted in Esperanto. (Actually, it was in English, translated from the French.) But the viewer was unlikely to forget the great wooden wheels that the charioteers rolled across the stage to represent their vehicles, or the schematic, highly choreographed battle scenes.

Indeed, Brook compares Lichtenstein with Diaghilev, another dancer who created a multimedia, synesthetic experience by working with painters, musicians and poets. But what also strikes Brook, as it does so many others who have worked at BAM, is Lichtenstein's combination of artistic conviction and entrepreneurial brio. Lichtenstein saw Brook's famous Broadway production of ''A Midsummer's Night Dream'' on Broadway in 1969, experienced one of his aesthetic epiphanies and proposed that Brook move it to a completely unknown theater in a place called Brooklyn. Brook would attract, he said, ''a different public,'' an idea that delighted the populist director. They put cushions in the orchestra pit and charged a few dollars. More than a decade later, Lichtenstein climbed in the window of the abandoned Majestic Theater and called Brook in a frenzy of excitement to say that he had discovered the perfect setting for ''The Mahabharata'' -- as, it turned out, he had. Brook describes Lichtenstein as ''this rare combination of an artist, a ballet dancer who has a feeling for all the arts and this extraordinary administrator, with his managerial flair, and beyond all this the capacity to persuade people.''

Actually, Lichtenstein has a few limitations as an administrator. His single-minded convictions often provoke him to act first and worry about the consequences later. In several cases, the consequences have come very close to bankruptcy: there was his ill-fated repertory company in the early 80's; his breakneck, damn-the-torpedoes renovation of the Majestic Theater; and his apparently suicidal 1992 decision to stage Ariane Mnouchkine's four-part production, ''Les Atrides,'' a retelling of the Oresteian tragedy. Karen Brooks Hopkins, his executive vice president (and now his successor at BAM), describes her former role as Lichtenstein's ''enabler.'' ''He's a high-risk player,'' she says, ''and he likes to roll the dice.''

But in the end, Lichtenstein's instincts, which is to say both his very personal taste and his gift for showmanship, always carried the day. His most inspired gamble came in 1983, when he inaugurated the Next Wave Festival to showcase the work of a new generation of performers, including Laurie Anderson, Mark Morris, Lucinda Childs, Trisha Brown, Pina Bausch, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane and the Flying Karamazov Brothers. Most of these figures were no better known in mainstream circles at the time than the earlier generation was 10 or 15 years before. The Next Wave made BAM the outer-borough annex of Downtown, while at the same time turning avant-garde art into a deliciously daring pursuit for the Uptown crowd, like motorcycle riding. ''That gave us sort of a gritty persona -- not only that we were showing all this tough work, but that we were doing it in Brooklyn,'' Hopkins says. ''And we used that. We said, 'Your friends are going to find their way to Lincoln Center. But you have to get them to Brooklyn.' It was a macho thing.''

In his new job, even more than in his old one, Lichtenstein has had to draw on his pragmatic willingness to find the best solution. He had wanted the cultural institutions in the BAM L.D.C. to be as forward-looking as the ones he brought to BAM. Even before the L.D.C. was formed, he helped the Mark Morris Dance Group acquire an abandoned building diagonally across from BAM, where the celebrated dancer built a $7 million studio and office -- a ravishing space for dancers accustomed to dingy theaters. Then Lichtenstein arranged to bring the Twyla Tharp Dance Company to a nearby church, but the deal ultimately fell through. He said he had hoped to attract the Wooster Group, an avant-garde theatrical troupe, and the New Museum, which showcases contemporary work, to the new district, but those, too, fell by the wayside. Neither the Brooklyn Public Library nor the Theater for a New Audience nor WNYC, the public radio station, with which he is now in deep negotiation, satisfies the grand vision. But Lichtenstein is philosophical. ''It's more of a community thing than BAM was,'' he says. ''BAM was a big house, and playing off against Manhattan, and it really needed something that would be able to attract the cultural clientele in the city. Now we're looking for a broader landscape for the community, for Brooklyn.''

Perhaps with encouragement from Lutfy, the enabler of this enterprise, Lichtenstein has learned, if haltingly, to speak the language of ''the community.'' He is still baffled that people would rather see 651 Arts shows than Pina Bausch, but he seems to have absorbed the fact that most people do not, in fact, hanker for advanced cultural experiences; they care about their neighborhood, and fear losing its coordinates. He has let go of some elements of the utopian vision. Gone is the artists' housing: the housing will now be divided more or less equally between subsidized units for the neighborhood and market-rate ones, to ensure an adequate profit for the developers, among them, Bruce Ratner (who also sits on the board of BAM). Lichtenstein and Lutfy have worked with unions to ensure that on L.D.C. work sites young people from the community will be hired as apprentices; a significant fraction of contracts will go to companies owned by minorities, women and local people. The BAM L.D.C. also plans to hire educators to serve as a bridge between the new arts groups and local schools. And the protesters have drifted away to other concerns.

The new neighborhood is just beginning to take shape. The L.D.C. has not even found institutions yet for two of the four plots it controls. The first project, a former office building converted to office space for arts groups, including up-and-coming local organizations as well as what Lichtenstein considers ''well-known'' groups like Bomb magazine and the Bang on a Can festival, is scheduled to open this summer. And yet the cultural district will inevitably transform the neighborhood from a quiet and self-contained locality to a fragment of global culture. The architecture alone may well effect this transformation, for Lichtenstein said he is hoping to attract the most notable architects in the world to his little pocket of Brooklyn. The Enrique Norten design for the Library for the Visual and Performing Arts looks like a great crystal ship pointing its prow into Brooklyn; Herbert Muschamp, The Times's architecture critic, has called it ''New York's first full-fledged masterwork for the information age.'' And the teaming of the wildly inventive Frank Gehry with the more fastidious and tradition-minded Hugh Hardy in the building of the Theater for a New Audience's home has just the element of planned incongruity and eclecticism that lies behind the entire district. A new home is also ready for WNYC, should the station agree to move to Brooklyn.

It is an oddity of New York's history that cosmopolitan culture has always been confined to Manhattan. New York has never had a Left Bank or a South Bank, perhaps for no better reason than that the East River is wider than the Thames in London or the Seine as it passes through Paris, and so Brooklyn and Queens developed as separate cities, and even separate states of mind. That is now coming to an end, especially in Brooklyn, where the latest news is that Bruce Ratner is planning to build a basketball arena and office-and-housing complex just down Flatbush from Lichtenstein's neighborhood -- and that the architect will be Frank Gehry, rapidly becoming the borough's designer-laureate. And even if the project never comes to pass, Brooklyn, which in Harvey Lichtenstein's boyhood was the world's capital of the ''white ethnic,'' has already become a competing center of cool, both among young people and artists. There are said to be more painters in the outer borough than in the inner; the Brooklyn Museum is now featuring a show with works by 200 Brooklyn artists.

One afternoon I asked Lichtenstein to compare his old and his new life. ''That was a great time,'' he said, with a little sigh. ''This time is not bad. I don't quite have the power I built up gradually at BAM to do things. At the same time, I've got this vision, I'm working with people like Gehry, I'm working with the community, I'm making mistakes. I think that my job is to keep the real heart and soul and core of the plan alive.''

James Traub, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author of ''The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square.''

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

http://www.archpaper.com/images/09%20INTERIMprop.jpg

The Stealth Designers (http://www.archpaper.com/news/diller_scofidio.html) (Diller + Scofidio)

[Derek2k3]

Check out renderings of the new Theater for a New Audience by Gehry at Advanced Media Design's web site. It's under new projects.

http://amdrendering.com/

Some other new stuff is on there too to check out.

[Kris]

http://amdrendering.com/new/projects/h3/tfana/Ext-b.jpg
http://amdrendering.com/new/projects/h3/tfana/Ext2-b.jpg

The building envelope and budget constraints definitely show. But how generous and welcoming regardless!

http://amdrendering.com/new/projects/h3/tfana/Int-b.jpg

Is that an Elizabethan layout?

[Kolbster]

This is going to be soooooo hot

[billyblancoNYC]

I like the design a lot. Not sure how much they paid for the Gehry name for this one, b/c I don't think it's all that special, but very nice nevertheless. But, this matched with the library and with other buildings in the district will really give a sense of "wow, I'm in somewhere pretty special," which is a higher calling than having one super stimulating building.

Well said, though, very welcoming.

[Stern]

Another classical Ghery building for NYC, love it!

Interesting how Gehry has become a type of postmodernist with his three most recent NYC buildings: BAM theatre, InteractCorp, Nets Stadium, there is an art-deco energy running through all them.

It seems as if the billowing effect that Gehry first employed when he designed the Disney Concert Hall has ironically ended upon its recent completion.

It seems as if Gehry is returning to his earlier modernist convinctios, only his most recent NYC buildings show that his earlier deconstructive aspects are replaced by more fluid forms that he had practiced so heavily and to a context.

[Clarknt67]

I like the design a lot. Not sure how much they paid for the Gehry name for this one, b/c I don't think it's all that special, but very nice nevertheless. But, this matched with the library and with other buildings in the district will really give a sense of "wow, I'm in somewhere pretty special," which is a higher calling than having one super stimulating building.

It's kind of incredible to think what kind of impression people will get of Brooklyn in 30 years if they roll over the Manhattan Bridge, past the skyscrapers on Flatbush, this, BAM, the dance theater, the performance library, the arena and it' surrounding towers, etc...

It will be nothing like it is today (assuming all these projects come to fruition, a bit "if" I know).

[billyblancoNYC]

I like the design a lot. Not sure how much they paid for the Gehry name for this one, b/c I don't think it's all that special, but very nice nevertheless. But, this matched with the library and with other buildings in the district will really give a sense of "wow, I'm in somewhere pretty special," which is a higher calling than having one super stimulating building.

It's kind of incredible to think what kind of impression people will get of Brooklyn in 30 years if they roll over the Manhattan Bridge, past the skyscrapers on Flatbush, this, BAM, the dance theater, the performance library, the arena and it' surrounding towers, etc...

It will be nothing like it is today (assuming all these projects come to fruition, a bit "if" I know).

Agreed. To add to that, how about noticing Brooklyn Bridge Park to the right and the new Williamsburg/Greenpoint/Long Island City skyline to the left. Oh yeah, there's the Atlantic Yards buildings, too. What a difference, indeed.

[Kris]

www.bamculturaldistrict.org (http://www.bamculturaldistrict.org)

[professionalx]

Having a fair experience of both architects' theatrical work (and having been a client rep for a Geary theatre building) I have to say that this looks like 90% Hugh Hardy and 10% Geary. That's not totally a bad thing - Hardy has turned out some world class theatres that are as much a pleasure to work & perform in as to attend as audience. He's best represented in NYC by his early gut rebuild of the Joyce Theater (18 St & 8 Av) as well as his respectful renovations of the New Amsterdam & Victory Theatres on 42nd St. I believe he's done a lot of consulting & planning for both BAM & TNC in the past as well, so he probably had an inside track on this. Of course, he just doesn't have Geary's flair for the exciting exterior or his star power. So it's probably a good combination - Hardy for the interior, where Geary is weak and vice versa, assuming that they get along. I recall Geary saying nice things about the Joyce when we brought it up as an example of what we wanted at Bard.

[tmg]

The New York Post
BAM BOOM TOWN
By STEPHANIE GASKELL

January 30, 2007 -- Here's a first look at what city planners hope will be a new Left Bank - Brooklyn-style.

After years of delays, officials are finally ready to move forward with a massive plan to transform Fort Greene into a mecca for artists and performers.

The plan, which was obtained by The Post, shows the previously envisioned theater and arts library - but now also includes a dance studio, public park, museum/gallery, underground parking garage and residential housing.

The BAM Cultural District, which carries an estimated $650 million price tag, will be built around the existing Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The city will submit a request for bids on the projects next month.

"Brooklyn is really developing as an important place for artists," said Harvey Lichtenstein, the former BAM executive director overseeing the project.

The district, between Fulton and Lafayette streets near Fort Greene Park, will include:

* The Theater for a New Audience, to be built early next year. The 299-seat theater is modeled after London's Royal National Theater.

* A dance studio in a 20-story residential tower with 150 apartments, half of which will be affordable housing.

* The Visual and Performing Arts Library, currently on hold until a new executive director is named for the Brooklyn Public Library.

* A public plaza, which will be built with an underground parking garage by landscape architect Ken Smith, who designed the outdoor space at the new 7 World Trade Center building.

[ablarc]

... what city planners hope will be a new Left Bank - Brooklyn-style.
Is that the Parisization of Brooklyn?

The 299-seat theater is modeled after London's Royal National Theater.
And its Londonization !!

an underground parking garage by landscape architect Ken Smith, who designed the outdoor space at the new 7 World Trade Center building.
Aha! Manhattanization! As though Atlantic Yards wasn't enough!

Why can't they let Brooklyn be itself??! :p

[noik53]

^ I know I may get a huge back fire from this question but "What really is Brooklyn's Style?".....
We complain about it being another version of another city but what is Brooklyn's real identity?

[Derek2k3]

I posted this somewhere before but here's the plan for the North Site again. Across the street is Forte' which is around 20 floors now. Across from Forte' will be Kondylis' 400' high-rise. These towers should begin to unify the Dtwn. Bk skyline with WSB & Atlantic Yards.

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/01/0108_WORK/image/15.jpg

More images here:
http://www.work.ac/

[ablarc]

^ I know I may get a huge back fire from this question but "What really is Brooklyn's Style?".....
We complain about it being another version of another city but what is Brooklyn's real identity?
I was being ironic.

Brooklyn does have identifying traits, but they needn't keep it from expanding its repertory. Diversification is good.

It's true Brooklyn probably has more rowhouses than any place on earth, but that's no reason to oppose skyscrapers.

The Borough's skyline is paltry for such a populous place.

Many parts of Brooklyn are awful and other parts are tedious. There's no reason to celebrate either; that's the kind of "character" no place needs.

[ablarc]

^ I know I may get a huge back fire from this question but "What really is Brooklyn's Style?".....
We complain about it being another version of another city but what is Brooklyn's real identity?
It is what it is. And any amount of diversity you add to it will serve to enrich it --in Brooklyn or Manhattan, or wherever style already occurs. You wouldn't want to build a sjyscraper in Venice (preserved in amber), BUT:

The Cloisters, Roosevelt Island, Chatham Towers, the Blue Condo, Perry West, the Hearst Tower: not one is typical Manhattan. And is Manhattan's character diminished by their nonconformist presence?

If you don't have any style to begin with --like some Sunbelt places-- the row to style is a long one to hoe.

Brooklyn ain't the hothouse orchid opponents of Atlantic Yards pretend. If it were, I'd say it has no more future than Venice.

[ryan]

Why so much animosity for Brooklyn?

[ablarc]

^ Man doesn't know how to read.

[BrooklynRider]

That mock-up/model is extremely poor and because the models are all transparent, bulk cannot be assessed. I don't think bulk will be a problem in this area with these types of buildings, but why show existing buildings as transparent boxes? BAM is there and won't change. Mark Morris is there and won't change. The Harvey theater is there and won't change. Why all the transparent boxes.

In case it isn't clear, I'm annoyed by all the transparant boxes.

[Stroika]

Stalled Brooklyn Arts District Regains Momentum



By TERRY PRISTIN (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/terry_pristin/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
Published: December 5, 2007


For years, Harvey Lichtenstein (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/harvey_lichtenstein/index.html?inline=nyt-per), the impresario who turned the Brooklyn Academy of Music (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/b/brooklyn_academy_of_music/index.html?inline=nyt-org) into an internationally known site for innovative productions, has dreamed of transforming the parking lots near BAM into a cultural district reminiscent of the Left Bank in Paris.

The $385 million project, which will create a cultural district around the Brooklyn Academy of Music, will have mixed-income apartments, retailing and cultural spaces.



As exciting as this vision seemed to many residents of the rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods near BAM, it also stirred fears among longtime Brooklynites of a Manhattan (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/classifieds/realestate/locations/newyork/newyorkcity/manhattan/?inline=nyt-geo)-oriented enclave, where local artists would be snubbed. A recent decision by city officials may help to quiet some of those anxieties — and may finally give the long-stalled arts district some momentum.
Last month, Carlton A. Brown, a Harlem (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/classifieds/realestate/locations/newyork/newyorkcity/manhattan/?inline=nyt-geo)-based developer with deep roots in Brooklyn (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/classifieds/realestate/locations/newyork/newyorkcity/brooklyn/?inline=nyt-geo), was chosen to lead the team that will build the cultural district’s centerpiece. The $385 million project, on city-owned land at Ashland Place and Fulton Street, opposite BAM’s Harvey Theater, will have a residential tower with 187 units of mixed-income housing, 4,000 square feet of retailing and a 40,000-square-foot choreographic center to be anchored by the Danspace Project (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/d/danspace_project/index.html?inline=nyt-org), a 35-year-old organization that presents dance performances.
Mr. Brown’s company, Full Spectrum, will develop the project with two architectural firms: Studio MDA of New York and Behnisch Architects of Stuttgart, Germany (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/germany/index.html?inline=nyt-geo).
Letitia James, the City Council member who represents the Fort Greene neighborhood that includes BAM, said she lobbied hard for Mr. Brown, who is African-American. “We are experiencing a renaissance in downtown Brooklyn,” Ms. James said. “But there has been a notable absence of developers of color.”
Full Spectrum’s proposals also gained an edge among the field of six applications because half the units will be for low- and moderate-income tenants and because the unusual design will allow abundant air and natural light to flow through the residential tower, said Seth Donlin, a spokesman for the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
Though construction of the Danspace project is not expected to begin until 2009, officials of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, a nonprofit group created last year to accelerate the process, say the designation of a developer is one of several signs that the cultural district is finally moving forward.
Work is scheduled to begin early next year on the 299-seat Theater for a New Audience at Lafayette and Ashland Avenues, which was designed by Hugh Hardy (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/hugh_hardy/index.html?inline=nyt-per) and Frank Gehry (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/frank_gehry/index.html?inline=nyt-per). And the design process for a nearby 30,000-square-foot plaza is under way.
“Every project that has been committed to publicly is now on a finite design- and-construction timeline,” said Joe Chan, the president of the partnership. “You’ve also got a city administration that is operating with an increased sense of urgency.” The city has pledged $100 million through 2011 to the BAM cultural district, Mr. Chan said.
Mr. Brown’s company has extensive experience building subsidized housing, using complex low-income housing tax-credit programs and other incentives, but Danspace will be his first project in Brooklyn. Other Full Spectrum developments include two mixed-income condominiums at 116th Street and Fifth Avenue in Harlem — 1400 on Fifth and the Kalahari Harlem — and the Solaire in Battery Park City, which was hailed as one of the nation’s first environmentally sustainable residential buildings.
Raised in Jackson, Miss., where his company also has an office, Mr. Brown has lived in the borough for three decades. He has also played a role in Brooklyn’s cultural life as the chairman of Arts 651, a local nonprofit organization that focuses on art by descendants of African slaves. He was active in the coalition of community groups that raised concerns about Mr. Lichtenstein’s vision of the cultural district.
“The community saw themselves as a creative place with a lot of artists,” Mr. Brown said. “We just didn’t have the resources that we needed. Harvey thought you needed to bring in people from Manhattan — that there were not enough people to support visionary, cutting-edge arts.”
Mr. Lichtenstein, however, said it was mainly a lack of money that had slowed the arts district. “The turning point has been the administration’s putting much more emphasis on development of downtown Brooklyn,” he said.
The selection of Mr. Brown is not going to mollify all of the community’s fears about gentrification, said Brad Lander, director of the Pratt Center for Community Development, a Brooklyn-based organization. “But it does make a real difference when folks see development that strengthens cultures and values of diverse communities,” he said.
Mr. Brown said his partners had designed a model for urban living by integrating residential space aimed at different income levels with open space. “It takes an elongated Brooklyn street and stands on its end,” he said in an interview at his spartan office in Central Harlem. Of the apartments, 20 percent will be for low-income residents and 30 percent for residents who earn 80 percent to 130 percent of the area’s median income. The dance space, which will be turned over to the city, will be adjacent to the tower.
The tower will be five cantilevered blocks of apartments ranging in height from 6 to 14 floors. No resident will be more than six floors away from a shared terrace, said Markus Dochantschi and David Salazar, who met while working in London for the architect Zaha Hadid (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/zaha_hadid/index.html?inline=nyt-per) and later started their own firm, Studio MDA. The architects said that by breaking up the project into several midrise structures, they hoped to create a more neighborly and pride-instilling atmosphere than tenants might find in a large high-rise.
To finance the project, Mr. Brown said he intended to use “every form of subsidy you can find.” Goldman Sachs (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/goldman_sachs_group_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org), Full Spectrum’s financial partner in the Kalahari, also expects to invest in the Danspace project, said Alicia Glen, managing director of Goldman’s urban investment group.
Even before the finishing touches have been put on the design, however, the project has encountered a public-relations headache.
At the corner of the site is a former liquor store that was leased in 2005 to three young residents of Fort Greene and nearby Clinton Hill who planned to open a nightclub and recording studio called Amber Art and Music Space.
In August, just weeks before their planned opening — and after they say they had invested $1.2 million — the city told them that the building would be condemned if the landlord did not agree to sell it, said Todd N. Triplett, one of the partners. “This took us completely by surprise,” he said, adding that the partners had received 7,000 e-mail messages of support. Amber has not opened.
Their broker, Eva M. Daniels, who owns a real estate company that bears her name, said the plans came as news to her as well. “If we’d been aware of it, we never would have shown the building,” Ms. Daniels said. The landlord, Juan Lopez, could not be reached.
Mr. Chan, however, said the city had made it clear for years that the site was earmarked for cultural uses and mixed-income housing. “This has been a very transparent process,” he said.






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