Place  /  Film Review

Lincoln Center Destroyed Lives for the Sake of the Arts

The terrific new doc “San Juan Hill” chronicles the 1960s land grab that gave the Metropolitan Opera a home, while scattering longtime residents.

Stanley Nelson’s terrific film San Juan HillManhattan’s Lost Neighborhood, assembled from a multitude of archives with the help of a dozen talking heads and a lot of newsreel footage, is Lincoln Center’s version of the land acknowledgment — in this case, admitting that the huge arts institution and its streamlined neighbors, Fordham University and Lincoln Towers, sit on 14 city blocks, nearly 48 acres of land, wrested more than 60 years ago from the eponymous thriving neighborhood that had welcomed new arrivals of all races and classes since the turn of the 20th century. The Metropolitan Opera House; Balanchine’s purpose-built New York State Theater (renamed for David H. Koch, after the industrialist gave Lincoln Center 50 million bucks); the David Geffen symphony hall; the Juilliard School; and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, plus two movie houses, trendy restaurants, and a multi-stage drama complex, cluster together around a marble plaza with a spurting fountain. Down Broadway, in an upscale mall, sits the newest addition, the headquarters for Jazz at Lincoln Center. At the back of the original site there’s an open-air performance space, with room for circuses, free concerts, crafts fairs, and other amenities designed to attract tourists and appeal to the area’s new residents. 

Early in the film, author James Baldwin (1924–1987), the incredibly productive Harlem native who became a leading writer, thinker, and orator in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, declares, “urban renewal means Negro removal.” Ariana DeBose, the Oscar-winning actress/singer who played Anita in Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake of West Side Story, narrates the heartbreaking tale, which runs just under an hour. The Spielberg film uses historical footage of the destruction of the original neighborhood; the original 1961 West Side Story was shot on-site as demolition was underway, leaving its filmmakers free to reorganize the debris to their own purposes. DeBose is ably accompanied by a phalanx of historians, sociologists, artists, and former residents of the neighborhood that was destroyed in order to build, in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.