About the West Initiative

Designing a more welcoming Lincoln Center

With 16.3 acres, Lincoln Center’s campus is home to 11 performing arts and arts education nonprofits. Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (LCPA) maintains and manages the operations of the campus as an artistic and civic cornerstone of New York City. For those approaching from the Amsterdam Avenue side, the view of Lincoln Center is far less inviting than from the Columbus Avenue side, with little direct access to the campus.

We want Lincoln Center to be welcoming to everyone—for events and performances and in everyday life. This initiative is a continuation of past renovations that opened up the campus and our outdoor spaces. Following this redesign, Damrosch Park and the western edge of the campus will better serve community members, audiences, and artists.

Vision, Purpose, and Goals

Legacies of San Juan Hill

The campus was originally developed as part of an “urban renewal” project in the 1950s that razed San Juan Hill, part of historic Lincoln Square, which was a culturally diverse, densely populated, and largely working-class community. In the first half of the twentieth century, it was also a lively cultural center, full of theaters, movie houses, dance halls, schools, and other artist spaces that nurtured luminaries in ragtime, stride, jazz, bebop, mambo and other Afro-Caribbean forms, visual arts, musical theater, and more. To honor the communities of that neighborhood, LCPA has invested in several major projects that shine a light on this important history and celebrate its significant cultural impact. These include the Legacies of San Juan Hill digital hub, in collaboration with the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (CENTRO) and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, as well as a series of events and exhibits that engage with this history from a multitude of perspectives.

The digital hub features archival images, articles, videos, playlists, and more from a range of contributing artists, historians, journalists, and community members. It is a resource that will grow over time.

This initiative is a continuation of Lincoln Center’s commitment to uplifting the arts in New York City, actioning bold projects across the campus—including the expansion of free artistic programs, designing and implementing a new Choose-What-You-Pay ticketing model, the reopening of a newly redesigned David Geffen Hall, and working with partners across the city to host blood drives, food banks, graduations, naturalization ceremonies, and more—that marry artistic work and civic service, all with a commitment to expanding access to the arts.

The Planning Process

Since summer 2023, we’ve had approximately 6,200 touchpoints with neighbors, advocates, community groups, elected officials, civic leaders, and other members of the New York City community, who have shared their ideas and feedback through interactive events, in-person and online surveys, community artmaking, interviews, and focus groups. The project team gathered input from community members and stakeholders regarding their current use of Lincoln Center’s spaces, the challenges they face when accessing and navigating the campus, and ideas for improvements. The community's input has been integral in the design of the new Damrosch Park.

Meet the Design Team

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts hired a team composed of three of the world’s premier design firms to action the learnings from the ongoing participatory process. The design reflects the extensive community feedback gathered throughout this process.

Altogether, the team brings together designers with collective decades of experience in urban design, including Hood Design Studio (Landscape Architect), WEISS/MANFREDI Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism (Design Architect) and Moody Nolan (Architect of Record). Other consultants on the project include NADAAA (Planning Firm), Thornton Tomasetti (Structural Engineer), Siteworks (Landscape Architect of Record), Theatre Projects Consultants (Theater Consultant), Jaffe Holden Acoustics (Acousticians/AV), Legacy Engineers (Mechanical Engineer), JBB (Electrical Engineer), Sherwood Design Engineers (Civil Engineer), and Turner Construction Company (Pre-Construction Manager).

Beginning with Damrosch Park, the design team has developed concepts that reimagine the Amsterdam Avenue side of the campus to make it more publicly accessible while transforming it into a state-of-the-art performance park. Damrosch is a park under the jurisdiction of NYC Parks, operated and maintained by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The team has worked towards a design that includes a celebration of the history and public memory of San Juan Hill and historic Lincoln Square, continuing a slate of programmatic and artistic collaborations that celebrate the legacies of the neighborhood, anchored by the Legacies of San Juan Hill digital hub.

About the Designers

Hood Design Studio
Hood Design Studio, Inc. is a social art and design practice based in Oakland, California founded in 1992. The studio’s practice is tripartite: art + fabrication, design + landscape, and research + urbanism. This breadth allows us to understand each place in its scale and context. They respond not with a standard design, but with an approach adaptive to the particulars and specifics of a space. They strengthen endemic patterns and practices—those ecological and cultural, contemporary and historic, and those that remain unseen or unrecognized. Urban spaces and their objects act as public sculpture, creating new apertures through which to see the emergent beauty, strangeness, and idiosyncrasies around us.

WEISS/MANFREDI Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism
WEISS/MANFREDI Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism is a New York City-based multidisciplinary practice known for the dynamic integration of architecture, art, infrastructure, and landscape. Founded by Marion Weiss and Michael A. Manfredi, notable projects include Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park, the Women’s Memorial at Arlington Cemetery, Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center, and the reimagining of Longwood Gardens, Pennsylvania. Current work includes the US Embassy in New Delhi, India, and La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. The firm has been recognized with the 2024 Louis I. Kahn Award, the 2020 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal, the Architectural League’s Emerging Voices award, and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Architecture.

Moody Nolan
Moody Nolan is the country’s largest African American-owned and managed design firm. Founded in 1982 with just two employees in Columbus, OH, Moody Nolan has grown to more than 330 employees in 12 locations around the country, leveraging the power of diverse backgrounds to drive design innovation. With expertise spanning cultural and civic work – alongside a diverse portfolio in other sectors, Moody Nolan is guided by its mission to improve every life the firm touches through responsive design — pairing empathetic listening with innovative thinking — to find harmony between client, community, and environment. Acknowledging the firm’s sustained professional excellence, The American Institute of Architects (AIA) named Moody Nolan as the 58th recipient of the Architecture Firm Award in 2021; the highest honor the AIA bestows on an architecture practice. In 2022, the firm celebrated its 40th anniversary and was also named one of the most innovative architecture firms by Fast Company.

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