#218 Lincoln Center and West Side Story

The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Tom Meyers

Society & Culture, History, Documentary, Places & Travel

4.8 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 9 December 2016

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Warm up the orchestra, lace up your dance slippers, and bring the diva to the stage! For our latest show we’re telling the origin story of Lincoln Center, the fine arts campus which assembles some of the city’s finest music and theatrical institutions to create the classiest 16.3 acres in New York City. Lincoln Center was created out of an urgent necessity, bringing together the New York Philharmonic, the New York City Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera, the Juilliard School of Music and other august fine-arts companies as a way of providing a permanent home for American culture. However this tale of Robert Moses’ urban renewal philosophies and the survival of storied institutions has a tragic twist. The campus sits on the site of a former neighborhood named San Juan Hill, home to thousands of African American and Puerto Rican families in the mid 20th century. No trace of this neighborhood exists today. Or, should we say, ALMOST no trace. San Juan Hill exists, at least briefly, with a part of classic American cinema. The Oscar-winning film West Side Story, based on the celebrated musical, was partially filmed here. The movie reflects many realities of the neighborhood and involves talents who would be, ahem, instrumental in Lincoln Center’s continued successes. FEATURING – Leonard Bernstein, Leontyne Price, James Earl Jones, Imelda Marcos, David Geffen and, naturally, the Nutcracker! www.boweryboyshistory.com Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

Transcript

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0:00.0	Episode 218 of The Bowery Boys. West Side Story. The Making of Lincoln Center.
0:07.2	Hey, it's The Bowery Boys.
0:08.8	Hey.
0:10.0	Support for The Bowery Boys is provided by our listeners. Join us for as little as a dollar
0:15.6	month by visiting patreon.com slash Bowery Boys.
0:22.5	Hi there, welcome to The Bowery Boys. This is Greg Young.
0:25.2	And this is Tom Myers.
0:26.7	Today we're headed to the center of high culture in New York City, a place where the greatest
0:32.3	artists in the world meet in venues that were designed by the greatest architects of the 20th
0:38.8	century. Our destination today is Lincoln Center.
0:42.9	You know Greg, today we're actually going to be telling multiple dramatic stories at the same time.
0:48.4	It's a little bit of musical experimentation on the show. But of course, we're better to experiment
0:54.4	than with Lincoln Center because we're going to be telling the story of these top, you know,
1:00.0	performing arts institutions that came together for the first time in the 1960s.
1:05.2	But in a surprising twist, a sort of story within a story, we're also going to be tackling the
1:12.0	creation of a Broadway musical. And later, it's film version that shook the country as it
1:18.4	tackled the subject of teenage delinquents through dance. This was of course the musical West Side
1:25.6	Story. Believe it or not, these stories are actually related. Our story today is going to focus
1:30.7	on the formation of Lincoln Center. The how, how was it built, and why did these institutions
1:38.0	all come together in this one particular place? But also the film, you know, the film and Lincoln
1:44.3	Center are linked together in ways that are both musical and also quite concrete.
1:51.0	And it all meets on a surprising stage, a forgotten neighborhood, just north of Columbus Circle.
	...

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