"Supporting Diversity through Arts and Culture" A Lecture by Margaret Newman, Executive Director, Municipal Art Society of New York

(New York City, June 26th, 2014)

Biography

Margaret Newman is the Executive Director of the Municipal Art Society of New York. She assumed this position on February 3rd, 2014. Having been the Chief of Staff at the New York City Department of Transportation for 7 years, she has had extensive experience in coordinating major agency projects, design overview and project direction for DOT’s Urban Design and Art Division.

Prior to these appointments, Margaret Newman was a partner at Marren and Newman Architects from January 1991 to August 2007. She was a fellow at the American Institute of Architects and holds a B.A. in Visual Arts from Bennington College and a Masters in Architecture from Princeton University.

“Supporting Diversity through Arts and Culture”

A Lecture by Margaret Newman, Executive Director, Municipal Art Society of New York

I’m an executive director of the Municipal Art Society which is 120 year old urban design NGO and non-profit located here in New York City. So what I’m going to talk about today is how the work of my organisation helps to enable arts and culture specifically by abdicating for the public spaces where arts and culture can happen.  And I just want to say in my previous job, as a chef of staff for the City of New York in a Departement of Transportation, we were the great recipients of some cultural diplomacy from Denmark, we had a great privilage of working with Jan Gehl who is a great architect and planner, who came over from Denmark and helped us planning here in New York City, and most recently we’ve been working with Henk Ovink who – I believe  - he works for the Danish government and he will help us with some suistainability projects. So we certainly benevited from some cultural diplomacy here.

MAS was established in 1893 by a band of painters, sculptors, artists, architects and urban planners, who starts to provide public space and buildings with decoration, ornamentation and monuments. The intent was to bring arts and culture directly to the public in informal venues as opose to arts and cultures talked away in more formal venues such as private homes, museums and libraries.

The first model of the organiation was: to make to make us love our city we must make the city lovely. I’m going to be talking primarily about the arts and culture within New York City, arts in its most diverse way whoch includes all the design arts and visual arts, performing arts, and the diversity in a sense not so much as a description – as we use it – of the different cultures, but diversity in a sense of the range of different projects and work that you might find.

This dicotomy between formal and informal venues for arts and cultures still resonates today, cities all have their formal venues, such as museums, theatres and opra halls which you see here. More importantly to the work that I’m involved in, cities have their informal venues for arts and culture such as parks, subways and sidewalk.

Today these informal venues are feeling the pressure of increasing urbanisation, more and more people are choosing to live in cities, many of these cities are already built up and are over subscribed and struggle to meet the needs of their new citizens. By 2050, 7 out of every 10 people will live in an urban area, and we need to ensure, that these informam venues are serving the public well, as cities become more dense and more populated.

So groups like MAS, my organisation, it is important for us to maintain these public spaces. Throughout this 120 years history MAS has worked to ensure that these informal public venues are afforded their rightfull place within the larger urban environment. We believe that these venues can service forms for people to gather and expose themselves in social, cultural and artistic ways and that these activities can contribute to improve the quality of everyday life in the city. And I would like to describe some of that history and some of the ungoing work that we're doing at MAS.

As I mentioned before, the organisation was founded in 1893 to enhance the city scape with public monuments and murals. Soon MAS's founder realised that efforts were being subsumed as more building and developement took place. And many of the buildings they grew out of this period were built without condisderation or concern for surrounding, neighbourhoods and buildings, much less for public monuments and murals. So we've acted to protect these spaces, which contributed to the overall culture and quality of NYC's builts spacial city. So the result was the citie's first comprehensive building and zoneing codes, which were enacted in 1916 which afforded the city adequate access to open space air and light which helped to ensure citizens to be able to convergate, interact and express themselves in public round.

So another important historic moment in NYC in terms of public space happened in the mid 20th century. During this time many historic, civic assets in NYC were being sacrificed, without considering the consequences. Builing structures that stood, these inspiring monuments to city life, to urban civilisation, and which the public could enjoy first hand were lost. The Penn station was demolished in the 60's but the former Penn station was built in 1910 and then - as I said - in 1963, it was a wonderful structure and provided a glorious space to house trains and people.

So currently, this is how Penn station looks like (showing the picture), I'm sorry if some of you have been there, but it's a necessery part of our urban infrastructure. So the destruction of the former Penn station was an important turning point in a movement to preserve similarily meaningful structures. This is a picture of mayor Wagner, from NY signing a bill in 1965, after that some of the permissions were granted to protect landmarks. So our organisation led the way to pass legal reforms that would provide the tools necessery to prevent an`other Penn station debacle. And more generally to preserve the character of civic assets and urban spaces in NY. Btw, those of yu who will be around New York City next year, it's the 50th anniversary of the landmarks law, which is very exciting to those of us here and we'll be celebrating this with the special event, which many cities in Europe I know and all around the world have similar concerns about what you preserve in terms of your cultural and build assets and what you allow to be demolished. So I think it's an important concern for everyone.

So today there are many benefits of the work that we did, preserve the landmarks law. This is the Grand Central Station (showing) was said to be underminded by a poorely designed tower, which you can see on the left, and the lefal reforms that I just mentioned prevented this from happening. They were further supported by an advocacy campaign which was led by MAS along with Jackie Kennedy Onassis who worked with us to ensure the reforms would stand up in court. And today Grand Central Terminal is not nearly a train station but a social and cultural, architectural asset to New York City. And not only does the structure contributes to arts and culture thrugh its architecture and design, but also serves as unexpected venue for arts and cultre. In fact Grand Central has become programable space and it hosts special events in art exibits throughout the year. So this is the place I hope you have visited, since you’ve been in New York.

More recently, my organisation has intervened to ensure that a proposed rezoning of our central business district, to provide additional office space, does not undermine sites of historic and architectural merit. This is a picture of East Midtown and I think you can actually see UN there the background where we are today and we identified 17 buildings within the footprint of the proposed rezoning for landmark status after site visits research and collaboration with various experts in the fields of architecture history and urban design.

One ofthe 17 buildings that was identified to be proposed as landmarks, was the center for fiction, which operates a building dating back to 1820 served as the New York Mercantile Library, which is over near Grand Central Terminal. Today the Center For Fiction offers a diverse programme of free and low-cost public events featuring over a hundred authors, translators and critics each year.

We've also been at the forefront of expanding preservation of significant architectural and cultural assets and I think the most widely known of this is the expansion in Time Square. This is a a rendering of Times Square, with the closed spaces on Broadway which are currently under construction. Times Square is not exactly an architectural gem, but it's a place that is an iconic symbol of New York City. The signs, the lights, the culture all resonate with people in a very real way. In the 80’s we took action to preserve Times Square area by ensuring that all development must contribute to what makes it special: the lights. Times Square represents a great example of how public and shared spaces contribute to urban life, to urban diversity, by serving as places where people gather and express themselves.

We also believe that cultural preservation of place matters and sometimes culturally significant assets are much more local. We partnered with the organization called City Lore which is an oral, history non-profit, which preserves historically and culturally significant places. Through a census of place we surveyed New Yorkers and ask them to nominate places that evoke associations with history, memory and tradition. What we heard back, was that New Yorkers care about places like a graffiti mural, a legendary record store or historic tavern, a bar where writers gathered. And again these efforts serve the purpose of promoting and providing the public with alternative avenues to arts and culture through informal publicly accessible venues. These are the kinds of places that preserve meaning in our neighborhoods.

All this work, as I mentioned before, began with a band of artists, sculptors and painters, who wanted to enrich the lives of New Yorkers by making their city beautiful. New York City today is full of monuments and murals and some of these have deteriorated over time. We have a program called ‘Adopt the Monument’ and ‘Adopt a Mural’  and we raise money from private and corporate donors to bring back to life the city's most neglected installations of public art. For example this is a photograph of  the Heinrich Heine fountain on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. This monument was first commissioned by a committee of German-Americans in 1893, I think this is probably after the Statue Liberty, one of the earliest examples of cultural diplomacy. It honors Heinrich Heine, the famous German poet, writer and social dissonant and it was originally intended to be installed in Grand Army Plaza just south of Central Park here in Manhattan. By the time it was finished, however, anti-german sentiment and political hand-wringing forced it to be relocated to the Bronx in 1899.

MAS led the way for the restoration of the fountain in time for its 100 anniversary. At the rededication ceremony the keynote speech was delivered by the deputy mayor of Dusseldorf and if you get up to the Grand Concourse in the Bronx it is incredibly beautiful statue and lovely park so I highly recommend it, it's right near Yankee Stadium so it's easy to find.

This is a photograph of the Rocket Thrower by a sculptor Donald De Lou, was constructed for the New York World's Fair in 1964-65. The statue’s a 43-foot high bronze figure, second tallest sculpture in New York City next to the Statue of Liberty. The theme of the monument was man conquering space, which was consistent with the overall future-oriented theme of the fair. As you can see the figure here seen hurling a rocket upward with the right hand and reaching for the constellation of stars on the left. Fifty years later the statue still stands, thanks to conservation efforts that we provided and in fact it's prominently featured during the US Open tennis tournament, which is situated in the same park.

One more project that I just wanted to show you, is a WPA mural which was the Works Progress Administration program which was launched by the federal government during the depression in the ‘30s. There was a Russian painter named Ilya Bolotowski, who did the mural. It was located on Roosevelt Island just East of the UN in the East River and the original setting of the mural was the waiting room of the hospital for chronic diseases. The curved walls of the room which you can see here... apparently left patients feeling rather anxious and so to relieve their anxiety, the mural was commissioned. So the mural was hidden from public view under 7 coates of paint for many years and recently it’s being restored and it will be reinstalled in Cornell University campus as it will be built over the next few years on Roosevelt Island

So in conclusion, I hope the overview of the work has provided you some insight into how our organization enables arts and culture in the public realm. It contributes, we think, to the richness and diversity of our civic and cultural life here in New York City. So I hope you'll get around to take a look at these things and hopefully this is helpful in terms of understanding more about our city. Thank you.