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Plans for Lincoln Square, 1955–1956 The American dance scene of the 1950s faced a critical moment with the beginning of public and private support for the art form. The proposal of the Lincoln Center complex—America’s first major cultural center—and the choices made during this decade would influence the direction of dance for years to come. Throughout, Martha played a significant role in positioning dance at Juilliard and in the arts. Of all of the considerable challenges that Martha faced, placing modern, or now more often called contemporary concert dance, within Lincoln Center was the greatest. If Martha shared the general postwar disenchantment, she kept those thoughts in check and hoped for the best. In the fivefold increase of ballet companies and the just-released Ford study of the country’s performing arts organizations and institutions, she saw progress. Experience had taught Martha how to build support in a difficult situation. She knew the value of having a “foot in the door” with or without financial support , and avoided any situation that might arouse controversy until she had a tactical plan in place. Then she would win battles repeatedly for the next twenty years. It was Kirstein, as managing director and a board member of City Center, whose power was based with those who had money. He now fought ceaselessly to claim the exclusive rights to a theater for the New York City Ballet in the new complex. (He would later add his determination to acquire the planned Juilliard dance facility for NYCB’s School of American Ballet, believing from private conversations with the duplicitous Peter Mennin that the space would soon be theirs for the asking.) In the words of his biographer, “Kirstein laid down his life for classical ballet—hustling, animating, inspiring, bullying, dreaming in the service of his great cause,” surviving “real and constant anxiety , three nervous breakdowns, bankruptcies, etc.” in the “co-creation” with Balanchine of the City Ballet and its affiliated School of American Ballet.1 Martin L. Sokol, writing about the New York City Opera, recognized that as early as 1953 “ugly politics and power plays” had entered Lincoln Center’s creation .2 The first organization to be invited into the center was the New York City Ballet to the exclusion of the other performing units who did not “reckon” with Kirstein, he believed. Although Charles M. Spofford is regarded as the “original moving force for Lincoln Center,”3 a memorandum from Lincoln Kirstein to City Center’s Morris and Baum two years earlier had already envi- sioned “a new building . . . the ideal site would be central; a block, or indeed two blocks. . . . Also included would be the School of American Ballet, which would pay annual rent; possibly to the Juilliard School on a similar basis.”4 Despite evidence that Kirstein was a prime mover behind the Lincoln Square initiative , Sokol praised him for never losing his artistic integrity or sense of honor, though “volatile, impulsive,” and “occasionally less than diplomatic”— all characteristics well known to Martha Hill.5 The initial exploratory meeting for what would become Lincoln Center was called at the invitation of John D. Rockefeller (JDR) III, widely known as head of the nation’s first family of wealth and power. On 25 October 1955, six men concerned about the future of the performing arts in New York City came together . Joining JDR at a private luncheon at the Century Association, the exclusive men’s club on West Forty-third Street, were representatives from the Metropolitan Opera Association, Charles M. Spofford, chairman of its executive committee, and Anthony A. Bliss, its president. Also attending were two representatives of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Society: Floyd Blair, its chairman, and Arthur A. Houghton, Jr., its president; architect Wallace K. Harrison was also present. JDR III’s meeting was called on the heels of the city’s urban renewal program under the chairmanship of Robert Moses and Mayor Robert Wagner. Seven days later, JDR III’s son David, called Robert Moses into his office to ask the favor of a “rub out” of a narrow street to allow Chase to squeeze an enormous building into Lower Manhattan.6 By early 1955, they had determined that an eighteen-block area north of Columbus Circle between Sixty-second and Seventieth Streets on the West Side of Manhattan should be redeveloped (although the project was not officially announced by Moses until 29 October 1956). Moses had asked his old friend, architect Harrison, what...

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