Many Voices on Culture at WTC Site

By Andrea Appleton
POSTED APRIL 30, 2007

It has not even been designed, but already the World Trade Center site’s cultural hub has a long and tortuous history. Most recently the city revealed that the site, once meant to host four institutions, and later reduced to two, will now hold just one—the Joyce Theater.

After the recent announcement that the off-Broadway Signature Theater would no longer be included in a performing arts center, City Councilman Alan Gerson, chair of the Council’s Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Committee, held a hearing last month on the future of culture on the Trade Center site. A diverse group of stakeholders, from residents to Port Authority and state officials to developer Larry Silverstein, came to testify. For some, it was an opportunity to voice grievances.

“It’s an enormous personal disappointment to me that we have seen no plans for the Performing Arts Center and no progress to date,” said Community Board 1 member Michael Connolly.

Bob Yesselman, director of Dance/NYC, a service organization for dancers, was equally disheartened. “This is central to the development of dance as well as the Downtown cultural scene,” he said, “but a great number of people in the cultural community wonder if it’s ever going to be built.” 

CB1 members and local officials have complained for years that the planning process for the cultural center has been unnecessarily secretive. No designs were presented at the hearing, though both the Port Authority and the city did describe sketchy plans for the site.

The new plans call for a 1,000-seat theater for the Joyce as well as a variety of small rehearsal and event spaces. Architect Frank Gehry will design the building. The Signature Theater would be housed nearby in the rebuilt Fiterman Hall on West Broadway, part of Borough of Manhattan Community College. (A deal with CUNY has not been finalized.) In previous Center plans, the Joyce had a 900-seat theater and the Signature had two theaters, one with 250 seats and one with 300 seats.

“We hope in the next eight weeks to have a much better sense of the feasibility of the plan,” said Kate Levin, commissioner of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs. She said issues like fundraising and design would have to wait until after that.

Andrew Winters, director of the city’s office on Capital Project Development, said the changes had been largely unavoidable because other projects on the WTC site, including the PATH station and the Freedom Tower, had been moved ahead in the construction schedule, crowding the area.

“Trying to fit all this programming into a limited space caused more and more compromises,” he said. As a result, said Avi Schick, Empire State Development Corporation president, the estimated cost for building the performing arts center rose to nearly $700 million. (The state has allocated $55 million to the center, the only money raised to date.)

“This was the state of affairs that Governor Spitzer inherited,” said Schick, “and it is this state of affairs which mandates that we return to the drawing board.”

Steven Plate, of the Port Authority, said that the temporary shift of the PATH station entrance, to allow for construction of slurry walls, would also delay the start of construction to 2011. The PATH station entrance will be moved temporarily to the theater’s site. In addition, the site is to be used for staging construction of the Freedom Tower.

Despite the setbacks, directors of the Joyce and Signature Theaters said they were optimistic about the new plans. But both sounded a note of caution.

“We need to have physical plans in place, and full commitment from all the agencies involved to make sure this happens,” said James Houghton, founder and artistic director of the Signature Theater. “But,” he added, “I think it’s a new day.”

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