Newark, N.J.

"The first doubt was that people from the suburbs wouldn't come," says Lawrence Goldman, the amiable president and CEO of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, improbably built in Newark, a city whose name is synonymous with urban ills. "And the second doubt was that only people from the suburbs would come."
That's how he began two conversations, one this past winter, midway through NJPAC's inaugural season, and the second just a few weeks ago, after the season triumphantly ended. We might draw two conclusions. First, that people who are interviewed a lot keep saying the same things. And, more importantly, that social questions, some of them critical, keep being asked by everyone who wonders why Newark needs a shining new performing arts facility.

Newark -- a city of 260,000 people, 58% of whom are African-American -- had the worst urban riots of the 1960s, and in many ways it never recovered. Drive around it, and you'll see block after block of bleak or abandoned homes, plus acres of vacant space where houses burned down and nothing has ever been rebuilt.
But a tour also shows you new townhouses and other signs of hope. There's a thriving downtown, headquarters for, among much else, the Prudential Insurance Company of America. There's an extensive, beautifully landscaped park, easily the jewel of any other town, and the "Ironbound" district, once heavily industrial, now home to the nation's leading Portuguese community, with busy shops and restaurants.
Not to mention the Performing Arts Center, first dreamed of in 1986, located in Newark after fierce debate, built largely with government funds but now sustained by earned income and private donations. It's located minutes from downtown, all bricks and glass and copper, an architectural delight (designed by Barton Myers) with skyways unpredictably dividing its internal space, helping to create unexpected angles everywhere and giving you something fresh to look at, anywhere you turn. When it opened this past fall, it offered a 2,750-seat concert hall and opera house and a smaller, friendly 514-seat space, along with restaurants, banquet and rehearsal rooms, and everything else you'd expect from an institution whose budget makes it the seventh largest arts center in the country. Oddly, the doors to the main theater are too narrow, causing pile-ups in the lobby just before a show. But even so, NJPAC has, after Carnegie Hall, the best space in the New York area for large classical concerts. Certainly it shames the New York State Theater and Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, both for looks and sound.
And yes, suburban people do come, as I've seen for myself at concerts by the deeply musical New Jersey Symphony, which saw ticket sales (and especially subscriptions) leap this year, after it gratefully made NJPAC its home. For its own events, the arts center reports all kinds of success -- 82% full, almost all budget projections met, and, most important of all, 26% of all ticket sales going to minorities, a number five times greater than normal for any other facility this large.

And it's in minority attendance that the real story lies. Mr. Goldman asked whether only people from the suburbs would come, and the answer (given by the minority ticket sales, by large donations from African-American community groups, and by the 29% of tickets bought by Newark residents) is clearly no, with the interesting footnote that NJPAC draws suburban minorities, a group not usually included when anyone speaks of a suburban audience.
But then NJPAC's policy right from the start was to encourage community participation. And when you talk to Mr. Goldman and especially to Richard T. Bryant, vice president for marketing, or Stephanie Hughley, vice president for programming, you might almost think you'd encountered some new breed of evangelist. "We celebrate diversity," says Mr. Bryant. "I'm in heaven," says Ms. Hughley. "Imagine an arts center that really wants to be for everyone! I spent most of my time out of the office, meeting with individuals, groups and local arts organizations."
Her programming reflects these concerns. I went to a celebration of Newark's jazz history, organized by the city's best-known artist, the playwright and poet Amiri Baraka, and also to a performance by the National Song and Dance Company of Mozambique, part of what's planned as an annual World Festival, this year honoring Newark's Portuguese residents (Mozambique, of course, was once a Portuguese colony). At both events I found a middle-class African-American audience that the leading arts organizations in New York don't know how to attract.

Does Newark feel the impact? In some ways, obviously yes. "It's going to trigger development," says Mayor Sharpe James, who can point to plans for more construction near the center. He's also thrilled by what NJPAC can do for Newark's minorities.
"NJPAC deserves great attention," agrees Clement Alexander Price, professor of history at the Rutgers University Newark campus, and a specialist in the history of Newark. "It desegregated its season, compared to other arts centers, and contributes both to the demilitarization of the city, and to a significant improvement in race and social relations." Stephen Adubato, director of the North Ward Center and an unofficial spokesman for Newark's small but influential Italian community, puts it even more strongly. "We have a chain-link fence around our building, and on top of the fence we have barbed wire. That wasn't enough, so on top of that, we put razor wire. Now we're in the process, which I wouldn't have dreamed of five years ago, of taking down the fence, because it doesn't fit the image NJPAC is giving us of Newark."
Which makes it fascinating to hear dissenting views. One, says Mayor James, came years ago from Jack Kemp, then Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, who (as Mr. James quotes him), said "You're crazy! You should be looking for money for AIDS and poverty." In more substantial form, the same thought comes from Father William Linder, the founder and director of New Community, a social service agency that provides an impressive mix of housing, credit and medical care to many Newark residents. "NJPAC is a wonderful facility," he says, "but it's not economic development, even though it keeps being described as such."
And Ras Baraka, schoolteacher and community activist (who's Amiri Baraka's son), thinks NJPAC doesn't touch his part of Newark or even talk to it, limiting itself to programs that, he says, "are so face value, in terms of what could be done."
In NJPAC's defense, Mr. Goldman cites community outreach -- "Half of Newark's schoolchildren were here this year" -- along with employment opportunities, which, as Clement Price attests, were notable for community-oriented affirmative action, even while NJPAC was being built. But Mr. Goldman also might support his critics, without meaning to do so, when he's asked which audience the center most needs to develop. He names downtown office workers, most of whom don't live in Newark.
Still, would the money that built NJPAC ever been spent for community development? If it wouldn't have -- the likely answer -- then the discussion is larger than the arts. Do we help our inner cities from the top down, by image-making and normal profit-oriented investment, or do we need the kind of concerted social action we haven't seen since Franklin Roosevelt? NJPAC can hardly swing the vote the latter way. But isn't it refreshing to see a major arts center enter the debate at all?

From the New York Times, the same day my own piece appeared in the Journal: "Newark has taken significant steps toward economic revival in the last nine months, largely because of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, a grand glass-shelled structure that opened downtown last October. The arts center has not only drawn suburbanites, who once feared Newark, to the city, it has also formed the anchor for a miniature boom in real estate speculation in recent months and paved the way for other potentially lucrative tenants to relocate in Newark.

"But by and large, the revival has failed to reach the wooden frame house and brick apartment buildings of central Newark… "

Wall Street Journal, July 28, 1998