Geffen Hall’s inaugural opening night with its resident orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, then featured a new “immersive multimedia work” called San Juan Hill: A New York Story. Created by Etienne Charles, this piece brought together, according to its billing, “music, visuals, and original first-person accounts of the history of the San Juan Hill neighborhood and the indigenous and immigrant communities that populated the land in and around where Lincoln Center resides.”
To make the story more explicit, Lincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic arranged for a graffiti crew known as the ex vandals to paint a mural for the center’s Amsterdam Avenue façade. Conceived by a musician and tagger known as “Wicked Gary” Fritz, the work presented the black historical figures of San Juan Hill on the left, a depiction of the modern Lincoln Center plaza on the right, and a wrecking ball crashing through the middle. “This was a thriving Black community that they took out to bring in Lincoln Center,” Fritz explained to Ebony magazine at the unveiling.
A year later, Lincoln Center launched an online “hub” on its institutional website, called “Legacies of San Juan Hill” and dedicated to “interrogating our role in this history.” Here we can read of the “old, long disgraced story, the one in which benevolent city fathers swept in to rescue the city from slums and blight.” San Juan Hill “may have been run down, a source of hardship and deprivation, but the cure was worse than the curse,” continues one article. “Clearance and rebuilding scattered neighbors, broke apart fragile social networks, uprooted working class communities, destroyed jobs, targeted people of color for removal, and deepened racial segregation.”
Lincoln Center’s latter-day struggle sessions have played into a new media environment in which race-based narratives are an editorial imperative. “Before Lincoln Center, San Juan Hill Was a Vibrant Black Community,” went one headline in The New York Times. “A vibrant neighborhood known as San Juan Hill, which was home to many low-income Black and Latino residents, was razed to make way for the center’s construction,” went another article. Whatever the historical reality or the artistic merits of the San Juan Hill initiative, Lincoln Center banked its post-pandemic recovery on a narrative of its own abhorrence, developing programming and even a new campus plan around its “original sin” of race-based displacement. The one problem with such self-abnegation is that Lincoln Center’s historical record turns out to be far less loathsome than what its leadership represented, and even exculpatory of the crimes to which they now confess.
