A New Era for the City of Culture

By William Hanley

The Museum of Modern Art
Taniguchi Architects with Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates
Opened: November 2004
Total cost: $425 million
($65 million from New York City)
Annual visitors: 2.75 million
In a move to expand its audience and capacity to show more — and bigger — artworks, MoMA increased its exhibition space by nearly 50 percent to 125,000 square feet (oriented around a 110-foot-tall atrium) and enhanced its education and research facilities. It also added circulation, restaurants, and shops. Last year’s attendance was up from just under 1 million in 2002 (the year the museum closed to build). Its vast presence on the Midtown Manhattan block that it has occupied since 1932 will only grow when a proposed Jean Nouvel'designed mixed-use tower is built.
Photo by Jeff Mermelstein
The Museum of Modern Art
Taniguchi Architects with Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates
Opened: November 2004
Total cost: $425 million
($65 million from New York City)
Annual visitors: 2.75 million
In a move to expand its audience and capacity to show more — and bigger — artworks, MoMA increased its exhibition space by nearly 50 percent to 125,000 square feet (oriented around a 110-foot-tall atrium) and enhanced its education and research facilities. It also added circulation, restaurants, and shops. Last year’s attendance was up from just under 1 million in 2002 (the year the museum closed to build). Its vast presence on the Midtown Manhattan block that it has occupied since 1932 will only grow when a proposed Jean Nouvel'designed mixed-use tower is built.
Photo by Jeff Mermelstein

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Greek and Roman Galleries
Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates
Opened: April 2007
Total cost: $225 million ($10.8 million from New York City)
Annual visitors (entire museum): 5.68 million
The biggest tourist attraction in New York City, the venerable Met can no longer expand its footprint into Central Park; instead the museum has created new space by building within its vast complex. One of its most successful rehabs, the 30,000-square-foot Greek and Roman galleries, with a splendid, skylit sculpture court at its center, greatly increased space for the museum’s renowned collection of Classical art, placing work that had long been confined to storage on display. The opening of the new galleries marked the culmination of a 15-year project to overhaul the museum’s southeast corner, clarifying visitor circulation among several of its collections.
Photo by Jeff Mermelstein

New Museum of Contemporary Art
SANAA Kazuyo Sejima+ and Ryue Nishizawa with Gensler
Opened: October 2007
Total cost: $55 million ($5.9 million from New York City)
Annual visitors: 300,000
Even as years of gentrification brought caf's and boutiques to the tenement-lined streets of the Lower East Side, the Bowery remained a gritty, exhaust-choked stretch of restaurant-supply stores and single-room-occupancy hotels until SANAA’s museum, which looks like a set of irregularly stacked boxes, arrived. With open gallery spaces as well as a caf', bookstore, and auditorium, the 58,700-square-foot building provides the 34-year-old contemporary art museum with its first tailor-made home. Its opening kicked off a migration of art galleries to the surrounding blocks, along with a wave of hip restaurants, bars, and retail. Though much of the area’s scrappy character remains, the New Museum has demonstrated how a high-profile cultural project can jump-start an entire neighborhood.
Photo by Jeff Mermelstein

TKTS Discount Booth
Father Duffy Square
Perkins Eastman and PKSB
Opened: October 2008
Total cost: $19 million
($$11.5 million from New York City)
Annual tickets sold: 1.3 million
(Times Square location)
A cultural landmark since the early 1970s for its day-of-show discounted theater tickets, the Theatre Development Fund’s TKTS booth witnessed the long transformation of once-seamy Times Square and the theater district into a frenetic, family-friendly entertainment center. Three years ago, the “booth” underwent its own metamorphosis from a humble temporary trailer into a wedge-shaped, glass-walled pavilion as one part of the larger redevelopment of Father Duffy Square. The booth’s tiered roof (based on a competition-winning concept by Australian firm Choi Ropiha Fighera) creates an elevated public space, where visitors climb above the swell of pedestrians to sit among the video screens and neon and gawk at the noisy show that is Times Square’s street life.
Photo by Jeff Mermelstein

Museum of the Moving Image
Leeser Architecture
Opened: January 2011
Total cost: $67 million
($54.7 million from New York City)
Projected annual visitors: 156,000
By 1920, when Paramount Pictures built a new studio in Astoria, Queens, most of the American film industry had migrated to Hollywood. In 1988, when the Museum of the Moving Image opened in one of its buildings, the project was part of a decade-old effort to bring filmmaking back. Now, television shows from Sesame Street to Law & Order shoot at the facility, and the museum — dedicated to film, TV, and video — recently unveiled an addition that includes a 267-seat theater and 68-seat screening room. Beyond its programming, the museum is an emblem of New York’s reemergence as a center of film production.
Photo by Jeff Mermelstein

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Diller Scofidio + +Renfro with FXFOWLE Architects
Scheduled completion: Spring 2012
Projected total cost: $1.2 billion
(Up to $$240 million from New York City)
Annual visitors: 5 million
Built in a then-rough area of the city, Lincoln Center was a travertine fortress raised on a plinth when it opened in the 1960s. Patrons accessed performance halls via parking garages tucked safely below its plazas. Now that the Upper West Side is a desirable area, the 16-acre campus is undergoing a six-year-long face-lift to undo its inward-looking planning. Renovating performance spaces, adding a new restaurant, and revamping plazas, it aims to open the campus to the neighborhood, welcoming patrons and the public alike.
Photo by Jeff Mermelstein

New York City

Spurred by city funds, arts organizations have built and expanded all over town

Photo by Jeff Mermelstein

Click the image above to view a slide show of New York's new arts spaces.

In the last decade, the New York building boom spread to museums and performing arts organizations, with the construction or renovation of facilities all over the city. Thanks to years of a strong economy, there were generous private donors. But there was also a new patron for capital funds: the city itself. In 1998, then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani announced the city would pay 10 percent of the projected construction costs for the expansion of the Museum of Modern Art, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi. That $65 million was the first major bricks-and-mortar contribution from New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) to a non-city-owned project. Since 2002, the DCA has helped fund some 600 cultural construction projects, dispensing a total of $1.8 billion. “Funding culture has a huge economic impact in terms of both tourism and quality of life,” says DCA commissioner Kate Levin.

Here are the numbers: 21.4 million tourists visited New York’s arts institutions last year and left a $21 billion contribution to the city’s economy behind. New cultural buildings have helped transform neighborhoods, too — just look at how the New Museum, which opened a building by the Tokyo firm, SANAA, in 2007, has glamorized a once-gritty stretch of the Bowery. And despite the economic downturn, the DCA still has $600 to $700 million to spend on capital projects before the Bloomberg administration exits the stage in 2013.

What follows here is a glimpse of the impact of all that new architecture for the arts — as well as a look at the visitors and New Yorkers who flock to it to see the city’s exhibitions, screenings, and performances, or, often, just to hang out.