For Lincoln Center’s
West Side, A New Story

You probably know Lincoln Center from this view — its distinctive Revson Fountain is a touchstone for many New Yorkers and the star of many memorable film and TV scenes.

But you might not be familiar with the other side where there is a wall facing the Amsterdam Houses, a public housing complex, and the Phipps Houses, one of the last remnants of San Juan Hill.

San Juan Hill was a working-class neighborhood.

And a thriving arts hub. The pianist and composer James P. Johnson was inspired by transplants from Charleston, S.C., when he was playing at the Jungles, a happening spot inside a dance school. “The Charleston” was born.

“You had to get a special license to have a dance hall. But it was virtually impossible for African Americans to get a license to run a dance hall so they had a dance school and in it was the Jungles,” said Julia Foulkes, a professor of history at the New School.

The jazz pianist Thelonious Monk grew up there and perfected the keys.

And “Shuffle Along,” the first play written, staged, and performed entirely by Black Americans, had its debut at the 63rd Street Music Hall there.

In the 1950s, the San Juan Hill arts hub disappeared.

It was dug out.

Paved over.

And replaced by the sprawling Lincoln Center.

“It’s like the history got buried,” said Leonette Joseph, 70, a lifelong resident of the community and retired special education teacher and creative arts therapist.

Last year, Lincoln Center announced that it would redesign the center’s western edge, which faces the vestiges of San Juan Hill.

This spring, Lincoln Center unveiled the team picked for the revamp: Hood Design Studio as the landscape designer; Weiss/Manfredi as the design architect; and Moody Nolan, as the architect of record. The center of the redesign plan is Damrosch Park, a 2.4-acre park and outdoor performance space on the southwest corner of the Lincoln Center which opened in 1969. The design team will focus on practical aspects like shading and seating, as well as integrating the feedback from the over 3,400 New Yorkers who have already provided their input on how to enhance the institution’s appeal to locals and visitors alike while honoring the artistic contributions of San Juan Hill.

“The history of jazz would be very different if it had not been for San Juan Hill. How to make places of performance that resonate with this musical tradition is something that we are really interested in,” said Michael Manfredi, co-founder of Weiss/Manfredi studio.

“But the other thing that was erased was a sense of neighborhood. We want to make places that are intimate, not grand,” he said. “Intimate so that sense of neighborhood can start to spill from the west to the east.”

The design team needs to start by reimagining Lincoln Center as a full square. Currently, three sides of Lincoln Center welcome the public with the fountain, a landscaped plaza, picturesque views of performance spaces and seating for respite. On the fourth, the concrete wall that went up in the 1960s separates what was left from what came to be. From that direction, Lincoln Center’s campus is largely inaccessible to foot traffic, including to residents of the Amsterdam Houses, the public housing complex across the street. The Phipps Houses, still standing, are now more conventional apartment buildings.

“There are three open sides. Then one that says don’t come in,” Ms. Joseph said.

The wall will likely come down, said Leah C. Johnson, executive vice president of communications at Lincoln Center and whose grandmother was born in San Juan Hill. “We want to focus on how we can open up access along Amsterdam Avenue.”

The general public is familiar with the image of the razed San Juan Hill, though they may not realize that’s what they are looking at.

The 1961 film “West Side Story” begins with a flyover of its blocks of rubble — 17,000 residents and 800 businesses were displaced. The Sharks and Jets break out in the elaborate, Jerome Robbins-choreographed dance number on the construction site.

Before the rise of Harlem, San Juan Hill was one of the largest Black neighborhoods in Manhattan.

In the late 19th century, Black Americans started moving into the community from Little Africa, present-day Greenwich Village, because of a rising Black unemployment rate, displacement as Italian Americans moved in and the widening of Sixth Avenue. Puerto Rican and Afro-Caribbean immigrants followed, all initially drawn to low rents and jobs at the ports off the Hudson River. The landscape of the neighborhood was largely warehouses and industrial lots stitched between rows of tenements and brownstones. The tenements tended to be racially homogenous. Tenement basement clubs sprouted and offered cheap alcohol and with a range of musical styles to entertain the influx of residents to the community.

Lincoln Arcade, located on the site of the Juilliard School and within steps of Lincoln Center, was a commercial and residential building near Lincoln Square built in 1903. Two of the residents included artists George Bellows and Robert Henri, members of the Ashcan School, an artistic movement that encouraged artists to depict the happenings of everyday residents in the city in their work, particularly immigrants and the poor.

Residentially, Henry Phipps Jr., a successful entrepreneur and real estate investor, donated $1 million to build model tenements to replace overcrowded apartment buildings. Phipps set out to prove that investing in low-income housing could benefit tenants and developers. The 63rd Street housing in the neighborhood, which began construction in 1906, was his second affordable housing project in the city, following his first on East 31st street.

Monk moved to the Phipps Houses on 63rd Street when he was 4 and stayed in the neighborhood for most of his life. “Thelonious was one of the stars of the neighborhood long before I was born and long before he was famous,” said T.S. Monk, 74, a former jazz drummer and the son of Thelonious Monk. “He ran community centers, music programs, and played a lot of basketball in the community.”

Mr. Monk, who currently resides in West Orange, N.J., remembers his father’s fondness for the community, its people, and its vibrancy. He also remembers the destruction of the community. “When I was going to P.S. 191, we had book covers that they gave us and the book covers I remember being green and black. And [the book covers] were diagrams of this thing that was coming called Lincoln Center,” Mr. Monk recalled. “And that’s when they started changing the neighborhood and started gentrifying the neighborhood and people started moving out and they started the demolition of the community.”

Mr. Monk summed it up with a common refrain: “They called it urban renewal and we called it urban removal.”

Through the redesign, there is a sort of reckoning.

“Anywhere you walk, you have a sense that you’re walking some place where many people have lived and where many histories have happened and again where many of these histories are erased, but are always recoverable,” said Elizabeth Alexander, the president of the Mellon Foundation and a board member of Lincoln Center. “I’m excited that this project is doing a kind of restitution that is actually tied to and enhancing the mission of the organization.”

The initial mission, like that of other performing arts venues established after World War II, was to showcase American dominance in the arts. “It is a combination of putting the city on a new pedestal in terms of world attention and that the performing arts become a really key way to display that,” said Professor Foulkes of the New School.

But that mission should not have come at the expense of blocking out the next generation of local talent right at its doorsteps with the wall and an invisible line, leadership now says.

Over the past few years, the center has instituted a choose-what-you-pay program, diversified its performances, and hopes to further its outreach to local public schools. To celebrate the reopening of David Geffen Hall in 2022, the center commissioned a piece by the composer Etienne Charles entitled “San Juan Hill: A New York Story,” a multimedia work that included music and first-person accounts of individuals who once lived in San Juan Hill.

Also in 2022, the artist Nina Chanel Abney created a piece of figures, words, shapes and symbols on the north side of the campus that pays tribute to San Juan Hill and the musician Etienne Charles commissioned a mural along the wall on Amsterdam Avenue highlighting the history of San Juan Hill. In 2023 a comprehensive digital hub that encompasses interviews, archival photography and audio, interactive maps, and scholarly essays about the San Juan Hill community was launched.

“For Lincoln Center, like any great institution, the challenge is to reimagine, and to think about how you can expand and extend your service. For all the many successes of Lincoln Center over the decades, we certainly have a lot of work to do to broaden out the appeal of the work we do and to make more people feel welcome at Lincoln Center,” said Henry Timms, the chief executive of Lincoln Center. “We are very aware of the fact that we need to consistently think about how we engage with our history and honor it, and how we inherit it in interesting ways.”