A Kid from Brooklyn Becomes a President (Again)
I was warned. They told me not to take that job.
“It’s a freewheeling circus, Reynold. And there’s no ringmaster.”
“Why would you want to cope with so many self-reverential personalities run amok?”
“Only Darwin and Hobbes would fully understand what’s really going on over there.”
To compete to be the president of Lincoln Center was regarded by my friends and mentors as bordering on a self-destructive act.
The most recent incumbent, Gordon Davis, had lasted all of nine months. The board chair, Beverly Sills, was mired in controversy, exhausted after seven and a half years in that role, and eager to leave. Lincoln Center’s much-touted redevelopment project was tied in a Gordian knot.
The widely admired developer Marshall Rose, who so successfully spearheaded the restoration of Bryant Park, had just resigned from his post as chair of Lincoln Center Redevelopment and was quoted on the way out as saying, “[I] was stabbed in the back.”1
If that sounds Shakespearean, the allusion fits. Rivalries abounded. Personalities clashed. Egos reigned. Reputations were badly damaged. And the whole circus was reported on assiduously by a delighted press, analyzed to a fare-thee-well by the newspapers and weekly magazines:
First, its President of 17 years, Nathan Leventhal, stepped down just as the [redevelopment] effort was getting underway. Then, the Metropolitan Opera held the project hostage in a very public battle over management issues. Then, the economy took a dive, terrorists attacked New York, and now Lincoln Center’s new President, Gordon J. Davis, has decided to resign after less than a year. Can the institution still hope to raise $1.5 billion to rebuild its complex over the next ten years? Some top cultural officials have said no, that the project was likely to be postponed or abandoned, perhaps simply because the Met and the other constituent arts groups still cannot agree on how to proceed.
—Robin Pogrebin, New York Times, September 29, 2001
. . . a study in the treacherous—some would say dysfunctional—politics of the city’s largest and most fractious arts organization. Hamstrung by rivalries among the Center’s warring constituent members; undercut by Ms. Sills, who seemed unwilling to cede power to her new President; and derided by staff members . . . a disillusioned Mr. Davis finally called it quits on September 27.
—Elisabeth Franck and Andrew Rice, New York Observer, October 8, 2001
Lincoln Center is a community in deep distress, riven by conflict over a grandiose $1 billion redevelopment plan . . . instead of uniting the Center’s constituent arts organizations behind a common goal, the project has pitted them against one another in open warfare more reminiscent of the shoot-out at the OK Corral than of a night at the opera. “To say that it is a mess is putting it mildly,” says Johanna Fiedler, the author and a former staff member at the Metropolitan Opera. “There is nobody running the show right now.”
—Leslie Bennetts, New York Magazine, February 4, 2002
What is wrong with Lincoln Center? The problem goes deeper than the virtuoso bickering over redevelopment which, to judge from reports, fills the corridors of what is called “the world’s largest cultural complex.” The chief personalities of the place—Beverly Sills, Joe Volpe, Paul Kellogg, and the rest—make entertaining copy, and it would almost be a pity if the soap opera were to end.
—Alex Ross, New Yorker, April 1, 2002
The situation at Lincoln Center was in a state of disarray. Disagreements proliferated, and civility had all but disappeared. Relationships and processes that had bound constituent artistic organizations together were unraveling, very publicly. At stake was the very future of Lincoln Center as the leading performing arts institution in the world.
There were real challenges and threats to be managed. The nine performing arts organizations, two educational institutions, and one branch of the New York Public Library all confronted some combination of these realities: declining and aging audiences; a post-9/11 flagging economy; competition for consumer discretionary income; and significant reductions in government support—federal, state, and municipal—for annual operating requirements.
Yet the most pernicious dangers emanated from inside Lincoln Center, in the form of self-inflicted wounds. In the absence of forward-looking leadership, resident artistic forces behaved more like rivals and adversaries than partners and allies. Staff and trustees were highly unrealistic about the energy and determination needed to remedy decades of deferred maintenance, to fix a deteriorating infrastructure, and to enliven tired and uninviting public spaces. Instead of reimagining how cultural encounter and civic engagement might meet in the twenty-first century, Lincoln Center had become a nasty mixture of shortsightedness and pettiness.
Parochialism prevailed. Lincoln Center was a quarrelsome, unpleasant place. Its leaders seemed tired, bereft of ideas, and lacking in energy. The best years of the oldest American performing arts center, the largest and most prominent in the world, were increasingly described in the past tense by observers, commentators, and insiders.
Fortunately I was forearmed, because I chose to disregard the warnings.
After six years of traipsing through much of the Third World and many failed states as the president of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), one of the world’s leading refugee assistance organizations, somehow the stresses and strains of Lincoln Center, with its sixteen acres and twelve world-class arts institutions, struck me as manageable.
After having dealt with Laurent Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Slobodan Milošević of Serbia, and their followers, Joe Volpe, the volcanic general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, seemed to me if not a pleasure, well, hardly daunting.
And having ordered food drops from the air over Kosovo; rushed assistance to malnourished children in Burundi, Tanzania, and East Timor; and let the world know that the Eastern Congo and South Sudan are the planet’s two most dangerous places, because I had witnessed human agony and depravity there with my own eyes, Lincoln Center and its key figures, with their bombast and betrayals, somehow fell into a proper context. Whatever the quarreling was about, surely life or death was not at stake.
Another motivation for me to compete for the job was that although I am a very well-traveled and a reasonably well-read guy, I am an unabashedly proud New Yorker. The events of 9/11 shook me and my seemingly impregnable, defiant city to our psychic foundations. Rather than “retreat” to the challenge of teaching and writing in a just-offered, tenured post at the Harvard Business School, I was haunted by a question: How could I help, even in a small way, recently elected Mayor Bloomberg to nurture my hometown back to recovery?
For much of my adult life I had watched JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark airports embarrassingly deteriorate. Second-tier American cities and third world countries had more modern transportation infrastructures. I had rooted in vain for New York City to once again compete for large trade shows and professional conventions by modernizing the utterly outmoded Javits Center. I also had seen little forward movement on converting the Farley Post Office at 34th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues into a new Moynihan Station, which has been on the drawing board as the much-desired eventual replacement for the deteriorating Penn Station. Few people believed that the Second Avenue tunnel would be completed, and certainly neither on time nor anywhere near budget. I watched sadly as major ideas for the development of Governor’s Island moved from one stage of drift and indecision to another.
All of these and other projects critical to New York’s economic future were stymied by political battles among mayors, governors, Assembly speakers, and Senate majority leaders. The projects were victims of what Senator Chuck Schumer politely called the culture of inertia.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg promised a different future. And I hoped that my professional habit of getting things done might be put to good use.
Ever since my stint as executive director of the 92nd Street Y from 1977 to 1984, I had been beguiled by the performing arts. I was, and remained, a Lincoln Center loyalist, enamored of its ten first-class resident arts organizations and two teaching academies. The opportunity to help them overcome their many self-imposed obstacles to progress and to lead in Lincoln Center’s preparation for the next generation of artists and audiences was simply too tempting. And so was being in charge of the largest and most consequential presenter of arts in the world.
ORIGINALLY I THOUGHT the chances of my being selected by the search committee were even at best. True, my seven years with the 92nd Street Y had brought about a much-noticed revitalization of all the performing arts at that venerable organization. But the powers that be at Lincoln Center might have viewed the Y as modest in size, an upstart, a marginal player.
Their possible attitude reminded me of a story I used to tell as the Y’s executive director whenever I needed an excuse for being late to an appointment downtown. Traffic traveling south on Lexington Avenue was often at a standstill. Hailing a taxi meant risking a delayed arrival. The subway was also notorious for equipment breakdown. I ran the risk of being held up in a train that would just not move. So, when seeking forgiveness, I would mention Isaac Stern, who performed at the Y for years.
Fairly early in his career, he was pacing up and down in his famous agent’s office in a distressed state. Isaac was represented by the legendary impresario Sol Hurok. They were very close, and Mr. Hurok treated Isaac like a son:
“Isaac, you look very upset. What is wrong?”
“Papa, each year you schedule me on the west coast at the start of the season. By the time I cross the country and reach New York in the late spring, my playing has improved, and I am ready for the tough-minded, demanding New York newspaper critics. But for some reason, this year, my very first solo recital is here in Manhattan.”
“Isaac, I have forgotten. Where did I book you?”
“I am playing at the 92nd Street’s Y Kaufmann Concert Hall.”
“Oh, Isaac, quit worrying. That is an out of town engagement.”
Would the search committee in 2002 dismiss my Y experience as not only “out of town,” but also too far in the past to be relevant, as I had left that executive director post eighteen years earlier?
In my favor, I had been the architect of the AT&T Foundation, the largest corporate-asset-based philanthropic entity in America. The arts was one of its leading priorities. Together with Exxon and Philip Morris, the AT&T Foundation was the most generous corporate benefactor to the performing arts in the country. Most Lincoln Center artistic organizations regularly received handsome charitable gifts from the foundation during my tenure as president or chairman from 1984 to 1996.
But few institutional philanthropists contributed enough to loom large in the economic life of the ballet, the theater, the orchestra, and the opera, to name but four of the beneficiaries of AT&T support. My leadership there was nice, perhaps a plus, but hardly dispositive.
If that was the case for my time at the AT&T Foundation, it was even more so for my role as chair of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, a formidable family fund with a substantial performing arts program to its credit.
Even my business responsibilities at AT&T—helping to lead its media, public relations, advertising, and public affairs programs and assisting in charting a course for the company to conduct business overseas—might have been viewed as of marginal relevance to playing the role of the Lincoln Center’s president.
Teaching, consulting, and writing seemed to gain me no credit in search committee deliberations. I was not asked a single question about these roles, except whether I expected to give them up entirely if I was offered the job.
My time as president of the largest refugee relief and resettlement agency (1997–2002) was regarded as somewhat exotic work, its applicability to Lincoln Center hard to fathom.
I had two opportunities to overcome any doubts, misperceptions, and reservations, at full search committee meetings. And although I had not previously met two of the most influential members—Frank A. Bennack Jr., president of the Hearst Corporation and vice chair of Lincoln Center, and Bruce Crawford, the chair of the Metropolitan Opera—and knew Beverly Sills, Lincoln Center’s chair, only slightly, the interviews seemed to go smoothly.
When one of my primary rivals, a quintessential insider, Joseph Polisi, at that time the president of The Juilliard School for some thirteen years, publicly withdrew from contention, my prospects improved. Little did I know with how many job applicants I was actually competing, including former cabinet members in the Clinton administration and corporate leaders of some repute from around the country.
I described the forces at play to my wife Elizabeth, whose response was unforgettable.
“Reynold, you are a competitive guy. I am sure you will secure this offer, and the place will be lucky to have you.
“But are you sure you want this headache of a job, in view of all that you are learning about the poisonous environment at Lincoln Center?”
She was absolutely right to pose that question.
Why was I drawn to this post, notwithstanding all the warnings and the prevailing negativism?
Generally, I favor the underdog. When two sports teams play against one another, and I am a fan of neither, I routinely root for the club that comes from the town with the highest unemployment rate. The 92nd Street Y—dispirited, running an operating deficit, underutilized, talent deprived, and needing an infusion of energy and leadership—had been just the place for me.
In 1982 AT&T, at that time the largest company in the world, was just about to divest itself under court order of local telephone companies and compete in every American market for both services and equipment, as well as to conduct business abroad. Under such circumstances, it was turning to outsiders for help. I was flattered to be asked to be one of them. And what I knew about the business initially consisted of picking up a phone and waiting for a dial tone.
I, a New Yorker, was working in a firm dominated by midwesterners; a Democrat in a rock-solid Republican corporation; a fellow who preferred Beethoven to Willie Nelson, and tennis to golf. Four strikes against me, I was told. It was the perfect challenge.
The IRC had trouble meeting payroll and severe problems making financial ends meet. The nobility of its cause and the compelling need for its services threatened to be overwhelmed by a scarcity of revenue, the absence of cost controls and risk enterprise management tools, and a breakdown of management accountability. Institutional crisis was fast approaching. Maybe I could lead in the repair of a broken, but very worthy and much-admired, organization.
So the mission ahead at Lincoln Center appealed to me. I was drawn to the challenge of resolving conflict in its conspicuously failing physical transformation. It was mired in controversy. I was confident that I could solve the stalemate and help lead the organization out of a cul-de-sac.
But I hoped to do much more than break an impasse.
I wanted to associate with the glamour and the glitter, to be ultimately responsible for the production and presentation of classical performing arts and of the new, the fresh, and the innovative. I yearned to encourage gifted staff to bring to their indoor and outdoor stages the most daring, audacious, and ambitious work. I was drawn to the soaring wonder of the performing arts at their finest.
Really, though, what I longed for was to expand, and by a wide margin, the Lincoln Center practice of subsidized tickets and free performances that lowered the barriers to entry for working-class families. This is the Lincoln Center that welcomes all and invites New Yorkers and visitors from every economic class to come early and stay late. I yearned for it to remain or to become a destination in and of itself, an oasis of relaxation and greenery in a crowded and dense town, a mainstay contributor to the quality of life in New York City, and a very important source of civic pride.
At this book’s opening I quote E. B. White, who described three kinds of New Yorkers: those who were born here; those who commute; and those from out of town or another country, who arrive in New York City as their final destination. Lincoln Center must serve all three, but it needed to extend itself, with special attention, to welcome those first-generation New Yorkers, “the settlers,” who give the city passion.
As a kid growing up in a poor and working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn during the 1950s and 1960s, I attended PS 100, situated between Brighton Beach and the edge of Coney Island, and Abraham Lincoln High School, located on Ocean Parkway. Both offered an excellent education for students willing and able to take advantage of a superb faculty and a tradition that highly prized excellence in teaching and learning. And both placed no small emphasis on the performing arts as a pathway to education; a method of transmitting national and universal values; a source of social cohesion; and a way for kids to develop self-confidence, poise, empathy, and a capacity to imagine.
The band, the symphony, the chorus, the chamber music group, and the annual musical theater competition; the class trips to Broadway and Off Broadway, and to museums: all these in-school and extracurricular activities were led by an inspiring faculty deeply committed to exposing their students to the joys of music, dance, theater, film, and visual art.
What existed in abundance for most school kids in those decades had largely disappeared from New York City’s public school system by the end of the twentieth century. As I prepared to meet with Lincoln Center’s search committee, I wondered whether its members would encourage a new president to take the lead in restoring the arts to school curriculum and exposing kids in unprecedented numbers to the treasures at Lincoln Center.
Lincoln Center should be devoted to the first-generation New York family, that Metro card–holding, brown-bag-carrying youngster, those children receiving one or more forms of public assistance. No kid should grow up in the cultural capital of the world without being exposed to the best in the performing and visual arts. Lincoln Center needed to show the way not just by enunciating that precept, but by practicing it. I was confident that our doing so would be neither unnoticed nor unemulated.
MUCH OF MY OWN enthusiasm for the performing arts and concern for their financial well-being originated in my childhood and late adolescence. Abraham Lincoln High School and the intellectually ambitious students drawn to it nurtured my exhilaration in learning. Lincoln was a very large public high school. There were about as many students in my senior class as there were in the total undergraduate enrollment at Hobart College, where I was destined to go. I remember looking around the college campus and asking, “Where is everybody?”
Hobart professed justifiable pride in an outstanding faculty that cared about teaching in small classes and in the pursuit of a liberal arts education as an intellectual adventure. I couldn’t wait to partake of it.
My only major concern was money. Hobart offered a generous scholarship, but it was less than half of what I needed for tuition, room, and board. Some of the remainder I could borrow from the state and federal governments at a very low interest rate, but debt was a condition I hoped to avoid as much as possible.
From the beginning of my time in Geneva, New York, in 1962 until graduation in 1966, I took every job I could. I arrived two weeks early in my freshman year to work at the bookstore. There was no pay, but I received free books. I worked the food line in the cafeteria for $1 a meal and all I could eat. Later, when it became clear that I was a very good student, I served as a tutor to both members of fraternities and athletes, who needed all the assistance they could afford in swimming upstream intellectually to pass some fairly demanding required courses.
My dad offered to help, but we never discussed how much money would be involved or how often he could send it. Then, in my first week at school, a lovely letter from him arrived with a check for $7. He sent heartfelt wishes for success at Hobart and promised to forward the same sum every week. He wished it could be more.
Well, forty weeks of school times $7 per week equaled $280, about 5 percent of the some $4,000 I needed for tuition, room, and board. I knew that Dad was doing all he felt he could to support me.
Soon after receiving Dad’s letter, I joined my newfound friends at a local pub and pizza hangout named after its owner, “Dutch.” I signed over the check to Dutch to pay for a pizza and a Pepsi. As a kid from Brooklyn, I knew something about decent pizza, and what Dutch offered wasn’t bad at all. Given how few culinary choices there were in Geneva, Dutch’s affordable fare and friendly atmosphere made me feel very much at home.
A week later, on a break from studying, I made my way back to Dutch’s. As I entered, he greeted me and led me over to a corner, asking how I was faring at school. We exchanged pleasantries, and then he put his arm around my shoulder and said, “Son, I am sorry to tell you, but your dad’s check bounced.”
I was mortified. Dutch said it was no problem, last week’s food and drink would be his treat and not to worry, but he felt I ought to know.
When I returned to my dorm room, I wrote Dad a letter. I exaggerated the number of jobs I was able to manage and told him that while I appreciated very much receiving his weekly checks, really, they were not necessary.
He never sent another. The bounced check was never mentioned. He must have felt relieved by my freeing him of the obligation to send me something weekly. Finances at home were obviously much tighter than I had ever imagined.
I learned many lessons at college, and not all of them were in the classroom. Financially, I was on my own. And I have been ever since.
Really, I did not mind. In fact, it occurred to me that until my freshman year in college, I had never given much thought to our family’s financial circumstances. True, sometimes my birthday gift as a child would come months late, whenever the household’s cash trickle allowed. For me, sleeping in the living room next to my younger sister, Joyce, was quite natural.
My pleasures as a child were simple, and Dad had a knack for making them fun. For example, on Saturdays, on the rare occasions when we were alone, while my mom was at the beauty parlor, we would go up to the rooftop of our apartment building, where one of the tenants maintained a pigeon coop. On those occasions, Dad would remove his trumpet from its case and play tune after tune. I was totally absorbed, a joyful, admiring audience of one.
We’d then return to our fourth-floor apartment, where Dad would prepare lunch for just the two of us. His menu was consistent: scrambled eggs and my choice of either rye toast or an English muffin, with sliced tomato on the side, and Tropicana orange juice to drink.
We had no formal dining room, so usually as a family we ate together in a nook at the tail end of our tiny kitchen. But with Mom not home, we didn’t need that much space, so Dad would open the oven door, which served as our table, and we both sat at footstools, happily conversing.
By the time I was nine years old, and my dad was thirty, in the afternoon, weather permitting, I was allowed to join my friends in the immediate vicinity of our apartment building. One of us—Johnny Rodriguez, Elliot Wienerman, Mark Feldman, or Allen Rome—would bring a pink rubber ball—the only kind worth using, a Spalding—and depending on how many friends gathered, we played street games to our heart’s content: hit the penny, off the wall, curves, punch ball, stick ball, stoop ball, slap ball, kings, handball, paddle ball, running bases.
If the weather was inclement, then I was in for a real treat. Dad would roll up the throw rug in the living room and lay out brown butcher block paper. He would find a set of magic markers in a desk drawer and put a 78-rpm record on the Victrola to play Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, or Vivaldi. He would ask me to imagine what the composer might have been thinking or what kind of mood he was trying to convey and then draw whatever came to mind.
It was an exercise in creativity, and we would discuss my earliest attempts to think about what the sounds I was hearing meant to me and how they moved me. Translating them into another form of art was always exciting. Dad made sure that the drawing was Scotch taped to the front door to greet Mom when she returned home.
If there was time left over, then came the really fun part. My dad was a skilled tap dancer. He greatly admired both Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, but because he was five feet eight, like Mr. Kelly, he would impersonate him, putting on khakis, athletic socks, penny loafers with taps on them, and a pretty tight-fitting white T-shirt. Then he would dance a Kelly routine just like those made famous by the movie Singin’ in the Rain.
At bar mitzvahs and weddings my father could be relied upon to tap a dance for the assembled guests.
One of my most memorable late birthday gifts was a certificate to attend classes at a tap dance school. To this day, it doesn’t take much to coax me into a time step or a soft shoe. My upbringing provided an enticing exposure to music, dance, and visual art. It prepared me to appreciate the rich cultural inheritance we all can enjoy.
These childhood pleasures and the bliss that comes from economic ignorance faded as I grew older, replaced by a sense of financial insecurity. I pledged that my spouse, children, sister, niece, and granddaughter would not want for life’s necessities or even occasional extravagances. What lured me away from the 92nd Street Y to AT&T was not just feeling that my work was complete at the world’s largest community center. The opportunity to test my mettle in a for-profit firm entering competitive foreign and domestic markets was enticing. Could I prove my worth to senior executives for whom a profit and loss statement and the return on equity were all that mattered?
Taking that job would put me in an entirely new financial condition. A handsome salary, annual bonuses, and stock option awards would allow me to build a nest egg. Then, after a decent interval (which turned out to be a dozen years), I might return to public service, without worrying about whether I could afford to do so.
Although my twelve years with AT&T proved to be lucrative, at least by my own standards and expectations, they did not mitigate the impact of my encounter in early adulthood with the reality of debt and its consequences. I am sure that this experience is partly responsible for my ironclad commitment to deliver balanced or surplus budget results in all of the posts I have held, for all the years I have held them.
Living beyond one’s means is unhealthy for families and institutions. Working hard to generate surplus capital is an admirable discipline, organizationally and personally. Special needs and rainy days are inevitable. Accumulated savings will help to manage them. That small pizza and Pepsi at Dutch’s and that bounced check embarrassed an eighteen-year-old freshman. It was one source of distress that never again made an appearance in my life.
MY YEARS AT Lincoln Center were tumultuous and eventful. They began in March 2002 and ended on January 31, 2014.
During this period the New York Philharmonic publicly reversed itself, first triumphantly announcing a merger with Carnegie Hall, and then, five months later, abashedly declaring the merger a nullity, much to the embarrassment of all involved parties.
This fiasco was no surprise to those who had watched the New York Philharmonic closely. We sadly observed an orchestra adrift, lacking in managerial and trustee leadership. Its superb musicians, often performing with astonishing virtuosity, deserved better.
During his seven-year tenure, its music director, Lorin Maazel, was arguably among the world’s most technically able conductors, and surely the most handsomely paid. He was also, before and after concerts, for all intents and purposes missing in action, a veritable mystery man. During his tenure, never once, unlike virtually all of his predecessors, did he deign to conduct The Juilliard Orchestra or any other private school ensemble. He never expressed interest in improving the state of music education in New York City’s elementary and secondary schools. Indeed, he rarely appeared on local radio or television. The board of directors and staff seemed entirely comfortable with a music director largely unrelated to the city that surrounded him. The New York Philharmonic was in a sense a disembodied ensemble, led by a globe-trotting septuagenarian, more at ease on his Virginia farm or, apparently, in almost any European capital, than in Manhattan.
Concurrently, Gustavo Dudamel, Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT), and David Robertson, to name but three conductors, came to personify the excitement and energy generated by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, and the St. Louis Symphony, respectively. These are well-led institutions; they know what they are about. They have artistic profiles and stand for something musically. Audiences and critics flock to their performances. Other cities in America and around the world invite them to perform, early and often. Each artistic leader embodies and personifies the town that engages him professionally. MTT and Gustavo are known to concertgoers and taxi drivers alike. That was not the case for their counterpart in New York City.
It is said that if you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there. The New York Philharmonic’s detour to Carnegie Hall was paved with a reckless neglect of the interests of a precious artistic institution and the public it was bound to serve. For Lincoln Center’s resident orchestra, maintaining robust audiences was a constant challenge. The New York Philharmonic was stuck, year after year, with an alarming operating deficit. It was neither seasonal nor cyclical, but structural. Governance and management mediocrity became the norm. How could this condition be tolerated by respected trustees possessed of the capacity to express their views and, if necessary, part company with an organization that seemed to be just coasting along?
At the same time, the New York City Opera fought hard to leave what it described as a deficient New York State Theater in favor of becoming one of the resident artistic organizations at the 9/11 site, but without success. Twelve years later and counting, it remains a mystery as to which artistic organizations will occupy a piece of that hallowed ground.
As the New York City Opera searched for another home, there was an air of desperation about its odyssey. In a sense, the search was nothing more than an exercise in futility and escapism. There was simply never an adequate audience or fund-raising base to build a new opera house from the ground up on the island of Manhattan.
But once Paul Kellogg, the artistic director, declared the New York State Theater artistically unfit for the New York City Opera, the die was cast. Although the company had for more than forty years somehow been able to work reasonably well notwithstanding the venue’s purported acoustic deficiencies, for unfathomable reasons Paul believed it could no longer do so. The audience, in effect, was told that staying away was entirely understandable.
Its members heeded that advice—in droves—with deleterious consequences for the company’s finances, its morale, and its very future.
The entire board of directors and staff of the Opera were badly distracted by edifice wanderlust and allowed themselves not to notice as attendance eroded, seasons were contracted and curtailed, and the endowment became a piggy bank to finance consistent and alarmingly high operating deficits.
These were the years when Beverly Sills left the chair of Lincoln Center, sworn to retire, only to emerge ninety days later as the president of the Metropolitan Opera.
When the mayor, Mike Bloomberg, read me the riot act over an anonymous disclosure to the New York Times of a $15 million gift he had pledged to Lincoln Center two years before to launch redevelopment.
When Joe Volpe, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera for sixteen years, did all within his power to stop the physical redevelopment of Lincoln Center. He often behaved boorishly, just as his reputation would lead one to expect. Volpe, joined by a small but powerful group of naysayers, failed to halt what would ultimately be a $1.2 billion-plus physical transformation of Lincoln Center, but not for want of trying. For many and varied reasons, Volpe’s retirement was welcomed, and everyone looked forward eagerly to his successor.
Peter Gelb was greeted in 2006 by an inbox overflowing with challenges. His marketing innovations were lauded. The live transmission of opera to several thousand movie theaters in the United States and around the world was widely praised. His management of the challenge of music director James Levine’s frequent illnesses and convalescence was much admired.
But his artistic direction of the Met was deemed highly uneven. It received very mixed reviews. In any event, whatever appeared on the Met’s stage never wanted for attention.
For me, many of Gelb’s artistic choices were brave and the results often memorable. However, there was far less to debate about the Met’s economic fortunes under Gelb’s leadership. They continued a decline that was well under way during Volpe’s last years in office. During Gelb’s tenure, the Met’s annual budget, already in very shaky condition, climbed from roughly $215 to $330 million. Deficits also grew, or were closed by invading the corpus of a badly eroding endowment.
What was wrong with the Met’s business plan? How could its operating statement and balance sheet have eroded so badly since 2006, even as record fund-raising occurred? Was anyone pressing Peter Gelb for a major course correction?
It was frustrating to run the risk of being held accountable for the travails of resident organizations like the New York Philharmonic, the New York City Opera, or the Metropolitan Opera, over which Lincoln Center had little control. In the case of the New York Philharmonic and the New York City Opera, Lincoln Center extended every effort to point the way to artistic and financial solvency, orally and in writing. We could propose, but only those proud, independent entities could choose whether to act on our recommendations. Many were airily dismissed, and others were simply ignored.
There were many bright spots during this period as well, artistic and otherwise.
Lincoln Center’s geography was redefined by its newest constituent, the Wynton Marsalis–led Jazz at Lincoln Center. In 2004 it opened to critical acclaim three stunning, Rafael Vinoly–designed spaces on the fifth and sixth floors of the Time Warner Building at Columbus Circle.
Lincoln Center Theater’s major challenge seemed to be finding adequate storage space to house its many Tony Awards. Contact, Coast of Utopia, The Light in the Piazza, South Pacific, Other Desert Cities, War Horse, and Golden Boy were just a few of its much-heralded productions during the tenure of Andre Bishop and Bernard Gersten.
The Chamber Music Society, under the fresh artistic leadership of Wu Han and David Finckel, acquired new energy and vitality. Its activities expanded to include many more performances in Alice Tully Hall, more touring, and residencies around the United States and the world. The Lincoln Center Film Society also became more ambitious in the number and kind of its offerings and in related educational programming. And Lincoln Center’s own eclectic presentations of more than four hundred annual events were perhaps never as bold, creative, and award-winning as in the period from 2002 through 2014.
Leaders of the burgeoning, affluent hedge fund industry were persuaded to adopt Lincoln Center as their artistic cause, and the much-applauded, now consensus-blessed, ambitious physical transformation of Lincoln Center proceeded apace.
The entire city block, 65th Street from Broadway to Amsterdam Avenue, and all the artistic facilities that align it, were utterly transformed into a warm, receptive, and engaging boulevard of the arts. Never again could Lincoln Center be called forbidding, anonymous, or unwelcoming.
With the transformation of Alice Tully Hall, the expansion of The Juilliard School, the renovation of the New York State Theater (since renamed the David H. Koch Theater), the creation of a state-of-the-art third performance space for Lincoln Center Theater, two new screening rooms and an education center for the Film Society, and new dance studios for the School of American Ballet came a beautifully designed, graceful welcome to Lincoln Center’s main campus, one filled with light and life. There are new green spaces, new restaurants, and a totally Wi-Fi’d campus. Twenty-first-century technology is displayed indoors and out. And there is a remodeled, utterly overhauled, privately owned public space called the David Rubenstein Atrium (named after its principal donor), a new Lincoln Center Commons, open free of charge to the public 365 days a year.
New board leadership took hold at Lincoln Center, the New York City Ballet, Lincoln Center Theater, the Chamber Music Society, the Film Society, and most recently, the New York Philharmonic.
This book reports on these events and their results, including both those who helped achieve progress and those who fell short. My administrative colleagues and the trustees to whom we report escape neither unscathed nor unpraised, as the case may be.
The donors are described with admiration and candor—from the generous who give willingly because they believe in their benefaction and derive pleasure from contributing to a cause beyond self, to the bargainers who treat philanthropy as another opportunity to extract advantage.
IN REFLECTING ON the forces and personalities at work in the world’s largest performing arts center, much more is involved than an account of heroes and villains, winners and losers, who’s up and who’s down. Above all I hope to illuminate certain truths, not just about Lincoln Center, but also about the leadership and management of key institutions in our society.
Institutionally, America is supposed to run on a strong three-sector engine, monitored by a vigorous Fourth Estate. Each sector, prodded by a free press, is said to contribute significantly to the public welfare, in a division of labor virtually unique to our country. But the gap between the promise and performance of all of these sectors is growing, alarmingly so. And the faith of Americans in the proper execution of their respective responsibilities has badly eroded, perilously so.
The first sector is government at all levels: federal, state, and local. Each is divided into executive, legislative, and judicial branches, which share power with one another. And each is supposed to act ultimately in accordance with the will of the people, the consent of the governed as expressed through free and fair elections. The polity is the ultimate consummation of the will of the people. American democracy has no other master.
So I have been taught. By Madison, Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers, the authors of arguably America’s only tract of political philosophy, the Federalist Papers.2
The second sector is free enterprise. It is composed of for-profit institutions presumed to act in the best interests of their shareholders by delighting customers, partnering with suppliers, and conducting themselves not only lawfully but in a socially responsible way. Such being the case, little regulation from government is said to be required. What is in the interest of General Motors and Goldman Sachs is in the interest of the United States. Ordinarily, capitalism triumphs where government treads lightly.
So I have learned. From Friedrich Hayek, Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, and Alan Greenspan.3
The third sector is the realm of nonprofit institutions. Accountable neither to voters nor to shareholders, eleemosynary organizations form when markets and governments fail to provide needed services at high enough levels of quality and at low enough cost. Exempt from taxes and eligible to receive tax-deductible gifts, these publicly subsidized nonprofits are intended to promote the general welfare.
The pluralism of this third sector allows for the coexistence of hundreds of thousands of organizations serving the commonweal, a critical component of the genius of America. Educating our kids, healing our sick, offering the visual and performing arts to a demanding and discerning public, ministering to our religious needs, providing social services of all kinds, generating ideas in think tanks and patents at research universities, and safeguarding our civil rights and liberties, these and other indispensable services are performed better in America than elsewhere because of our extensive voluntarism and philanthropy.
So I have gathered. Courtesy of Alexis de Tocqueville, Waldemar Nielsen, Lester Salamon, and Robert Putnam, among others.4
Politicians are accountable to citizens. The $4.5 trillion budgets they collectively wield each year, and the millions of workers the federal, state, and local governments employ, are intended to serve public needs. No more. No less. Answerable to the American people who choose to vote, politicians must face the public in regularly held elections, in which their performance will be judged.
Members of the boards of directors of for-profit institutions are supposed to govern them intelligently and prudently. Our $17.5 trillion economy depends on it. That means careful selection of a qualified chief executive officer and the constant monitoring of the chief executive officer’s (CEO’s) performance, as well as that of the senior management team. It entails rigorous review of company strategy and close examination of an organization’s strategic risk profile. It suggests that the director of a for-profit firm is responsible not to the CEO but to the shareholders and the customers, first and foremost.
All around this nation, nonprofit organizations, private institutions devoted to the public good, also struggle with the challenges of governance, the fast-changing marketplace, government relations, and leadership. The lessons I learned at Lincoln Center might be valuable not only to those who labor in the country’s fast-growing, nonprofit third sector, but also to those employed by the government or in the private sector.
On January 19, 2012, a Gallup study revealed that Americans’ satisfaction with the size and power of the federal government was at a record low of 29 percent. Their satisfaction with the size and influence of major corporations remained near an all-time low of 30 percent. Gallup concluded its report: “The results suggest that it’s a case of ‘pick your poison’ in the political arena when it comes to big business and big government—Americans are quite dissatisfied with the size, power and influence of both.”5
This lack of confidence is widespread, and it characterizes the prevailing attitude of Americans. Citizens are losing trust in the US Senate, the House of Representatives, the presidency, labor unions, the media, religious organizations, and government as a whole. A Pew Research Center poll taken in 2012 confirmed the Gallup study.6
When people lose faith in key institutions, they are less able to solve common problems. As a candidate to run on the Republican ticket for president in 2012, Jon Huntsman characterized our key national challenge as a “trust deficit.” It is serious and it is corrosive, he claimed.
The Edelman Trust Barometer, administered for fourteen consecutive years, also found that faith in government and business is in a very severe downward trend. According to this study, published on January 19, 2012, government suffered the deepest trust decline in the history of the poll, and business was not far behind in the public’s loss of confidence.7
By comparison, faith in nongovernment organizations has held up reasonably well. But that level of credibility and confidence can be squandered easily. Maintaining public approval is a constant challenge and requires high-quality governance and management. The public’s trust must be earned every day. If proof were needed, for decades the US Supreme Court and houses of worship were exceptions to the sweeping tide of negativism depicted in well-regarded opinion surveys. This is no longer the case.
When government is not trusted, voter participation rates fall. Democracy languishes. Resistance to corrective action rises.
When business is distrusted, the demand for regulation escalates, and the expressed needs of corporations for lower taxation and trade liberalization fall on deaf ears.8
And when nonprofits falter, when confidence in them erodes, charitable contributions plummet, and faith in the voluntary sector diminishes.
The active consent of the governed, shareholder and customer satisfaction, and nonprofits that discharge their fiduciary responsibilities with care: these are the fundamental building blocks of a vibrant governmental sector; a healthy free enterprise economy; and an energetic, creative, and highly emulated nonprofit sector.
The disciplined reporting and commentary of journalists plays a critical role in holding all three sectors accountable. After all, they consist of institutions that are supported by the public. They are dependent on citizen, client, consumer, investor, and donor approval. The media are the independent source of information on which all of these constituencies depend to reach sound judgments.
Selected board chairs, trustees, and executives are criticized in these pages because those who enjoy a precious public trust should be called to account for acts of brazen omission or commission that occur on their watch. No one was held accountable by President George W. Bush for the intelligence failures that led to 9/11, or for the disaster that befell our country in Iraq, or for the utterly unnecessary damage to lives and property caused by the catastrophic failures to prepare for Hurricane Katrina and to deal with its consequences. Similarly, many at Lincoln Center who ran excessive operating deficits, deferred building maintenance inexcusably, allowed endowments to remain stagnant or deteriorate, or permitted artistic drift did so with impunity.
Not a single senior executive has been indicted for white-collar crimes associated with the disappearance of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Countrywide, MF Global, or Arthur Andersen as independent entities. Nor have senior management or outside directors of the likes of Bank of America, Enron, WorldCom, Citibank, Merrill Lynch, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac been held accountable for stunning acts of omission and commission that betrayed the trust of shareholders and arguably violated the spirit, if not the letter, of dozens of laws and regulations.
Analogously, the CEOs and board chairs of some of the non-profits that comprise Lincoln Center were not held responsible for the weakened artistic and financial state of the organizations they were charged to protect. For this reason alone real-life situations are recounted in the pages ahead, no doubt to the embarrassment of some, but only with the intention of helping others cope with similar challenges.
This third sector of ours, nonprofit institutions, is hardly immune from the abuse and neglect of trustees and professionals. Lincoln Center’s constituents were governed by some trustee leaders who did not hold their CEOs accountable for performance and who violated the trust invested in them to manage risk. Tales of organizations losing their way do not go untold here.
However, many with whom I worked took their responsibilities very seriously. These men and women were devoted to the common welfare, their egos in check, their energies unleashed, their resources generously offered. They accomplished nothing short of an institutional transformation. Prominent among them were the trustees of Lincoln Center, the parent body and the campus landlord, together with most of their constituent counterparts.
They comprised in total some 525 of New York City’s most accomplished figures, drawn from all sectors of society. These trustees found in Lincoln Center and its resident organizations a cause worthy of their time and treasure. They, and the benefactors they helped attract, renewed Lincoln Center physically and programmatically for a new generation of artists and audiences. In the quest, they enjoyed the company of gifted and hardworking employees, driven to succeed.
This is their story, too.
MY DAILY LIFE at the Lincoln Center was filled with tension and beset by provocation.
The situation called to mind one of my favorite quotes from Machiavelli, who warned his Prince about the dangers of introducing change into an organization or a polity. His admonition, I discovered, was well worth heeding:
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.
For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order. The lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries . . . and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.
Transforming Lincoln Center was not without blind alleys, strong-willed opponents, unexpected detours, speed bumps, and more than a few sleepless nights.
I was helped by more than my community center, Fortune 50, and refugee professional experience to put it all into proper perspective. I was also assisted by a sense of humor.
For example, when the members of the Lincoln Center search committee asked what I, as a candidate, would do to reduce embarrassing rivalries that ran rampant across campus, I replied that my prior position at the IRC and my friendship with Jean Marie Guéhenno, the undersecretary for UN peacekeeping, would enable me to borrow some of his troops to occupy Josie Robertson Plaza and separate the warring factions.
Or when Mayor Bloomberg asked me, “What’s the difference between your job, Reynold, and Kofi Annan’s, the Secretary-General of the United Nations?,” I replied, “I don’t know, Mr. Mayor.”
“Well, then, what’s the difference between the UN Security Council and Lincoln Center?”
I looked quizzical, and he continued: “The Secretary-General and the Security Council need only cope with five vetoes. You and Lincoln Center have twelve.”
The mayor was referring to a decision reached before my arrival that all material actions about the physical redevelopment of Lincoln Center had to be unanimously approved by every resident artistic organization.
The unintended consequence of such a rule is that it strongly predisposed the sixteen-acre campus and its artistic facilities to neglect and inattention. To be charitable, it promoted the perpetuation of the status quo. To be accurate, it caused the decay of many of the Center’s buildings, its public spaces, and its physical infrastructure.
Allowing each constituent to wield a veto on virtually any and all matters, while self-destructive if pushed to its logical conclusion, was also consistent with the legal and governance framework of the Center. Each of the twelve constituents comprising Lincoln Center was its own independent 501(c)3 organization, fully equipped with a board of directors, an operating budget, a balance sheet, and a mission statement.
Lincoln Center, the organization I ran, sometimes referred to as “Linc. Inc.,” performed important common functions. It operated one of the largest underground garages in New York City. It maintained all of the public spaces surrounding the artistic facilities: cleaning and repairing them; protecting them from inclement weather; policing them with a private security force; and offering contemplative, social, and performing arts activities throughout the Lincoln Center complex, along with extensive food and beverage service.
Lincoln Center was authorized to rent the public spaces to outside parties under a renewable five-year license from the Parks Department. It created the Lincoln Center Corporate Fund, raising from $4 to $6 million annually as general operating support for constituent use. It successfully sought funds for Live from Lincoln Center, a forty-year tradition of airing constituent performances across the syndicated stations of the public broadcasting network throughout the nation. And to round out the artistic diet offered to the public and use the constituent venues and ensembles when they were otherwise empty or idle, Lincoln Center offered what has become the most extensive arts presentation program in the world.
In addition to these regular activities, the services performed by Lincoln Center during the course of its mammoth physical redevelopment placed a premium on cooperation between and among constituents and reliance on a set of unprecedented Lincoln Center offers of service and revenue.
Beyond the formalities, the chair of Lincoln Center regularly held meetings with her counterparts at the twelve resident artistic organizations, as I did with mine. Likewise, my staff regularly convened meetings of professional communities across constituent boundaries in finance, public relations, marketing, fund-raising, and the like.
Such meetings conveyed information, shared best practices, and allowed colleagues to help one another. They built trust. Ultimately, my ability to get consequential things done depended on the exercise of leadership, devising solutions to problems, creating ways to seize major challenges, and convincing others of their wisdom. It was also immensely assisted by mobilizing the goodwill of influential trustees who wished to leave Lincoln Center stronger than they found it, who yearned to see it flourish. My calendar was filled with trustee meetings. One-on-one conversations not only with members of Lincoln Center’s board, but also with constituent trustees, were frequent.
Gathering important figures, board members, and hired hands behind a common plan was essential. The diffusion of power at Lincoln Center, its factionalism, and its bias toward inaction, not to mention its flamboyant personalities, had to be overcome. Those powerful forces revealed in no small measure why friends and colleagues of mine told me not to take that job.
THIS BOOK EXPLAINS how transformational change, even in the face of such seemingly intractable obstacles, was realized. Architecturally. Artistically. Civically. Economically.
Such change is all about finding common ground, summoning the energy to propel Lincoln Center and its constituents forward, modernizing and enlivening the governing structure while almost nobody noticed, and leading by example. Exercising the power to persuade can regularly prevail over antiquated rules and regulations and over members of the “division of second guessing,” Lincoln Center’s largest department.9
For me, Lincoln Center’s future was too important to ignore in favor of other pursuits, and too critical to the nation’s cultural life to take lightly. So I immersed myself in the undertaking. But because of my full occupational history, I was able to maintain a critical distance, to be totally in, but never fully of, the place.
Totally in, but not entirely of, had been a recurring theme in my professional life.
From 1975 to 1977 I was the staff director of the Task Force on the New York City Fiscal Crisis, proposing revenue enhancements and budget cuts that would do far less damage to poor and working-class New Yorkers than those advanced by Mayor Beame and Governor Hugh Carey. But I had never worked for the City or State of New York. Who was I to offer sound public policy options?
I was the executive director of the 92nd Street Y, where being a Jewish civil servant and being a certified social worker were at that time regarded as necessary. I was neither.
I moved to AT&T with no experience in business whatsoever, save for a few solo practitioner consulting stints, speaking fees, and writing for publication. “You hired someone who ran a community center to help meet the challenges of divestiture and AT&T’s entry into a competitive world?” my boss was often asked.
Of course, at the International Rescue Committee I was widely viewed as an interloper, a “corporate suit,” devoid of the lifelong refugee experience seen as a prerequisite for its president.
And my situation was roughly the same at Lincoln Center. Sure, I had some legitimate connections to the arts, but none compared with the likes of Joseph Polisi, Joseph Volpe, Bernard Gersten, and Peter Martins, each of whom had spent more than two decades with The Juilliard School, the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center Theater, and the New York City Ballet, respectively.
It has been observed that if you are swimming inside a bottle of fluid, you are likely to become familiar with its properties, but you are totally unable to detect, let alone describe, the shape of the bottle. Knowing the contours of the flask that holds the liquid, the institution that animates art, comes naturally to me.
Being totally in, but not entirely of, one’s setting affords a measure of detachment and perspective often lacking in a professional too immersed in the details, too habituated to organizational routine, or simply too bored to break the mold, to engage in self-criticism, and to embrace change.
UNSURPRISINGLY, MY ADJUSTMENT to Lincoln Center was not entirely smooth, and my presence raised questions, gave rise to curiosity, and met with some resistance. These realities may have been exacerbated by my choice of automobile.
My father, a man of sweet temperament, solidly rooted values, and strong convictions, died in our home in Riverdale, a portion of which my wife, Liz, and I converted into a hospice after he endured a series of what were very tough bouts with cancer.
Dad didn’t ask for much as mortal weakness set in and death approached. He was courageous and stoic. But of all things, he fervently requested that I drive his 1993 Mercury Marquis for as long as it would last. It was a giant of a car: four-door, maroon in color, light gray leather interior, fully air-conditioned, with terrific speakers and power everything (windows, seats). For him, its purchase was a point of pride and accomplishment, a step up in luxury and price, and I know he imagined driving it forever.
That car had 20,000 miles on it the year of his death. When it was finally retired, at eighteen years of age, it approached 165,000 miles. And whenever I drove that Mercury, we communed, my father and I. His presence was palpable. That compensated a lot for the ribbing I received when driving his monstrously oversized, ten-mile-a-gallon relic through New York City streets.
People have asked me what was best about being the president of Lincoln Center. I replied, as you would expect of any self-respecting New Yorker, “parking.” The job came with its own space. Who could ask for anything more?
My hours of work at Lincoln Center were long. I often left Riverdale, about four miles north of the George Washington Bridge, bordering on the Hudson River, at 6:00 a.m. or earlier. At that hour, it took me only twenty-five minutes, door to door, to arrive at my office. I’d breeze down the Henry Hudson Parkway and connect to Riverside Drive, taking it to 96th Street, where I would hang a left, then a right onto West End Avenue. Even at that early hour, I’d see a substantial number of pedestrians, fifteen or twenty at least, standing in front of their co-ops, condominiums, and rental apartments, trying, often in vain, to hail a cab. West End Avenue was not a place taxis frequented, for reasons I never understood, because demand for them always seemed to exceed supply.
With the passing weeks, I began to notice that people on the street seemed to be waving at vehicles behind me. I looked in the rearview mirror but saw nothing. I checked my lights to see if I had left the brights on, and my seat belt to see if the door had closed with the belt caught in it, or whether the door itself was slammed shut.
One morning, in a light rain, while stopped for a red light at 87th and West End Avenue, I saw a man in his fifties waving right at me. He ran across the street and knocked on my window. I opened it warily. What, he wished to know, would I charge him for a “quick hop” to 48th Street and First Avenue?
It finally occurred to me that I was being hailed as a driver of a gypsy cab, one of New York City’s many illegal vehicles, always large American sedans. Their drivers cruise the streets for fares at all hours, when Yellow Cabs are scarce and when many customers find radio cabs difficult to reserve or unaffordable.
Parents adversely affected by the Great Depression often encouraged their daughters to learn to type. Having acquired that skill, should unemployment ever loom, they would have a job to fall back on. My dad would have loved knowing that he had supplied me with an employment safety net. Should Lincoln Center not work out, I could do worse than cruise West End Avenue for readily available customers each weekday morning. To 48th Street and First, I’d charge $50.00. After all, that’s way across town. It was raining, which by rights should carry a premium. And gypsy cab drivers are rarely tipped. It’s best to build a gratuity into your base charge.
One Sunday morning, soon after I was appointed and before I was given a red plaque with my parking space, number 39, imprinted on it to put on my dashboard, I approached the entrance to the Lincoln Center parking lot where senior executives pull in.
A security guard I hadn’t yet met stopped the car and asked for identification. I told him I was the new president of Lincoln Center. He looked very confused. Stepping back and taking in a full view of my (Dad’s) car, he mentioned that Gordon Davis, my predecessor, drove a new convertible Audi. And Nat Leventhal, who held the job for seventeen years, always drove a new Lexus. The guard’s look of consternation begged for an explanation, but I was speechless.
Suddenly his confusion turned to a smile. Ushering me into the garage with a sweeping hand gesture, he said, “I know. Your other car. The one you drive every day. It must be getting a tune-up and some repairs.”
In this way, I learned early on that even a beat-up old Mercury Marquis could find its proper place at Lincoln Center.
And if it could, perhaps I could as well.
