But more than just a call to support your local soprano, The Opera House is an incisive discussion of postwar urbanism, of which the Met was the centerpiece for the Lincoln Center complex. The overall project was overseen by Wallace K. Harrison (who also designed the new house) and includes buildings from a who’s who of modernist royalty: Philip Johnson (David H. Koch Theater), Max Abramowitz (David Geffen Hall), Pietro Belluschi (Juilliard School/Alice Tully Hall), Eero Saarinen (Vivian Beaumont Theater), and Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (New York Public Library for the Performing Arts). To say it was a difficult life for Harrison is a wild understatement. Froemke does a fine job conveying his struggle to not only corral a group of huge egos but also realizing his fantastical dreams for the Met: he went through 44 models, and his early designs are equal parts Fritz Lang and Le Corbusier. His final building is a compromise wrought by budget contractions—“There was a part of him that always felt he had sold a little bit of his soul,” critic Paul Goldberger says in the film—but its towering arches and avant-garde chandeliers are still appealing and the acoustics inside exceptional.

Thanks in no small part to Harrison’s Met, Lincoln Center is now a stop on the New York tourist trail. But before it was the city’s Acropolis, the 45-acre site was a bustling neighborhood of European immigrants and their kids. (It was the setting for the musical West Side Story.) When Robert Moses condemned the area in his lust for slum clearance, he provided the Met with a long-sought location for a new house and gave the city an arts hub. He also displaced countless individuals, families, and businesses.

This is a part of the Lincoln Center story that too often feels missing, but Froemke embraces it fully. She recreates the neighborhood using fantastic archival footage and interviews with former residents, which revive the neighborhood and provide testimony to the human damage Moses—and the project—caused. She also weaves in a kind of ironic commentary by including a promo film declaring Lincoln Center was the “creation of the American people...built by their own free will” and video of Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic as it performs Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.

That said, The Opera House is hardly a take down. Instead, it’s a lively celebration of opera and a commemoration of the mighty forces that mobilized to find the Met a new home. It does feels cautionary, though, posing difficult questions about our urban landscape without offering easy answers. Nearly six decades later, as communities around the country face similar issues of land use and housing that haunted the Met and Lincoln Center, there could be no better time for the conversation.