The Lincoln Center Turns 50 and Prepares a Party

On May 14, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower thrust a shovel into the ground on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to signal the start of construction on Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

With the maestro Leonard Bernstein as the master of ceremonies, the New York Philharmonic and Juilliard Chorus performed the national anthem. The Metropolitan Opera baritone Leonard Warren sang the prologue to Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci.” The mezzo-soprano Risë Stevens sang the “Habanera” from Bizet’s “Carmen.”

Last Wednesday Lincoln Center announced a yearlong series of events to celebrate its half-century of existence. The 50th anniversary will be celebrated amid a construction site: Lincoln Center is in the middle of an ambitious $1.2 billion redevelopment plan that is not to be completed until 2011. But parts of the project will be finished, including a refurbished Alice Tully Hall, a renovated Juilliard School and most of the fountain plaza.

“In a way, it’s like a rebirth,” said Nathan Leventhal, who was president of Lincoln Center from 1984 to 2000. Martin Segal, a chairman emeritus of Lincoln Center, said that the campus’s being a work in progress does not detract from the aura of celebration. “You can’t build a project that requires construction without having the construction,” he said.

By fall 2009, Lincoln Center hopes to open its new visitors’ space at the former Harmony Atrium, where for the first time audiences will be able to buy tickets to all of the center’s events, with discounts of up to 50 percent on the day of performances. In the center’s version of the popular TKTS booth, a block of seats from each theater will be available for every evening’s performance, unless the house is 90 percent sold. Internet and telephone ticket kiosks will also offer access to full-price tickets for all events presented on the campus. Also at the visitors’ center, on Broadway between West 62nd and 63rd Streets, Lincoln Center will present free weekly performances.

The festivities will begin on May 11, 2009, when artistic, civic and government leaders will gather to commemorate the original groundbreaking with a program featuring new and established artists, and will extend into 2010.

On May 15 and 16, 2010, Lincoln Center will provide continuous free and ticketed programming to highlight the various new spaces on campus. On June 8 the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, together with the Silk Road Ensemble, will present a free performance in the Guggenheim Bandshell in Damrosch Park at the center. The bandshell, built in 1969, has undergone a $4.5 million renovation. The concert will be broadcast as part of the series “Live From Lincoln Center” on PBS.

For the summer, Lincoln Center has commissioned an opera by John Adams; the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard will perform two concerts as part of the Mostly Mozart Festival; and Mark Morris will offer two of his commissions, featuring Mr. Ma and the pianist Emanuel Ax.

Over the course of the year, each resident organization will present its own programming in honor of the anniversary, from a festival of newly commissioned dances for New York City Ballet’s spring 2010 season to movie marathons over the Fourth of July and Labor Day weekends at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Gerard Mortier will present his inaugural 2009-10 season as New York City Opera’s general manager and artistic director with a production of Philip Glass’s “Einstein on the Beach” in the newly renovated New York State Theater.

The year’s activities will also include an exhibition about Lincoln Center’s history at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at the center. The show, organized by Thomas Mellins, will be linked with exhibitions and displays across New York City.

In May 2009 the Paley Center for Media will show a selection of Lincoln Center television shows that were never commercially released, including the 1962 opening-night telecast from Philharmonic Hall (later renamed Avery Fisher Hall); the 1966 Bell Telephone Hour special “The New Met: Countdown to Curtain”; and the 1969 gala concert “Juilliard Comes to Lincoln Center.”

The center will redesign its Web site and create a digital time capsule to which people from all over the world are invited to contribute their Lincoln Center memories and memorabilia. In addition, in spring 2009, StoryCorps, an organization that collects oral histories, will park its Airstream trailer on the Josie Robertson Plaza of the center and invite artists, students, employees and the public to share their memories of the performing arts there. These stories will be stored in an archive at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress.

“We hope the celebratory plans reflect what we’ve become,” Reynold Levy, Lincoln Center’s president said, “and what we hope to be.”