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A New Era for the City of Culture
Spurred by city funds, arts organizations have built and expanded all over town
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| 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.
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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.
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