By Esther B. Fein, The New York Times
DANCERS step gracefully along the sidewalks, their slippered toes pointed outward, their hair tightly pulled into chignons and pinned into place. The sounds of street music complement their movements. The Chagall murals of the Metropolitan Opera House loom and the crowds lean forward with anticipation.
This, after all, is Lincoln Center, and this is all happening even before you walk through the doors of any of its many theaters.
”Living in this area is like living on a stage all the time,” said Tamara Roberts, a computer programmer who lives on West 69th Street. ”You see performers on their way to work, or dancers and musicians on their way to Juilliard for classes or people all glitzed up to go watch a show. It’s an electric neighborhood.”
It is difficult to imagine the Lincoln Square neighborhood without Lincoln Center, without the plaza fountain spewing, without banners flapping in the wind advertising the current programs, without ticket holders rushing to make an 8:30 curtain.
But before Leonard Bernstein conducted Beethoven and Mahler in the first performance at Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall) on Sept. 23, 1962, Lincoln Square was a wasteland, cultural and otherwise.
Rundown buildings and neglected tenements covered the blocks from 62d to 66th Streets between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues. The music the area knew then was mothers lulling babies to sleep or radios blaring from stoops in hot weather.
But what was once a testament to urban despair is now a monument to urban growth and development. Lincoln Center, with its 12 concert halls, museum, public library, bandshell and park has inspired the rejuvenation of the entire Lincoln Square neighborhood, which spreads from Columbus Circle to 72nd Street between Central Park West and the Hudson River.
With specialty food shops like Pasta and Cheese and cafes like Fiorello’s and Opera Espresso catering to affluent residents and visitors, it is easy to forget that behind the Lincoln Center complex there are still low-income housing projects. Amsterdam Houses are directly behind the center on Amsterdam Avenue and the eight buildings known as Phipps Houses, built in 1904, are on 63d and 64th Streets between Amsterdam and West End Avenues.
There is a also a large middle-income complex, Lincoln Towers, a 3,900-unit rental apartment development on West End Avenue from 65th to 70th Street. It takes four to six years to get to the top of the waiting list for these apartments, and all attempts so far to convert the buildings into cooperatives have been unsuccessful.
The predominant form of housing in the Lincoln Square area, however, is luxury. ”If you’re thinking of living in the Lincoln Square area,” said Ethel Sheffer, the chairman of the local Community Board 7, ”you better have a lot of money.”
The Lincoln Square Special District, established by the City Planning Commission in the early 1970’s to encourage the development of the neighborhood around Lincoln Center, comprises six blocks in the area from 62d to 67th Street between Broadway and Columbus Avenue.
Developers were granted additional floor space in buildings on these blocks in return for providing pedestrian bonuses, such as arcades and plazas. But the spirit of Lincoln Square – and the prices – extend to the entire Lincoln Square neighborhood.
Rents start at $1,000 for a one-bedroom apartment, and co-op prices at $60,000 a room. Among the newest buildings in the area are a 26-story condominium on 66th Street between Broadway and Central Park West, a 31-story condominium at the corner of Columbus Avenue and 67th Street and a high-rise apartment building at 67th and Amsterdam.
”If you live in the Lincoln Center area, it’s a good address,” said Rose Seda, a manager at Rodman & Associates, a real-estate agency. ”It’s a neighborhood that’s up there already. There are good restaurants and shops and of course, there’s the center itself.”
The biggest proposed construction in the area is Lincoln West, a 4,300-unit, 76- acre complex from 59th to 72d Streets on the old Penn Central rail yards hugging the Hudson River. Although Community Board 7 voted against the huge project, the Board of Estimate approved it last September.
”We felt the project was too large and too dense with serious potential environmental problems,” said Mrs. Sheffer. ”But as long as it’s being built, we are trying to make sure that it has the most positive public impact.”
Lincoln West Associates, the developers of Lincoln West, agreed to provide a park along the Hudson River, that will act as a continuation of Riverside Park, which has its southern border at 72d Street. They have also agreed to contribute $30 million toward the renovation of the 72d Street IRT subway station and $1.5 million toward the renovation of the 66th Street station on the same line, a local stop at Lincoln Center.
The area is also served by the IND subway line, running along Central Park West, and several bus lines.
Residents of the Lincoln Square area can buy trendy clothes at Charivari and classic haberdashery at Banbury Cross, gourmet cheese and breads while browsing through antiques at Maya Schaper and exotic flowers at the Southflower Market. And they can swoon over Gable and Garbo at the Regency movie theater, which runs festivals of old films, or philosophize over first-run foreign films at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema. All this is the blessing.
What dilutes that blessing is that lots of other people in the city want to eat in the chic new restaurants, shop in the elegant new stores and be the first to catch the new Italian movie.
STILL, the crowds that come to experience Lincoln Square and Columbus Avenue (locals sometimes call it ”an East Side avenue misplaced on the West Side”) keep the area lively and dynamic.
Central and Riverside Parks, which buttress the Lincoln Square area to the east and west, are frequented by walkers, bikers and runners. The 63d Street Y.M.C.A. serves as a cultural and artistic center. Squash and racquetball courts at the Manhattan Squash and Racquet Club at the corner of 66th Street and Columbus Avenue supplement the athletic facilities at the ‘Y.’
Crime in the area, which is covered by the 20th Precinct, decreased in the first nine months of 1983, compared with the similar period in 1982, according to Henry Martin, a crime analyst for the Police Department. He attributed the decline – including nearly a 35 percent decrease in armed robberies – partly to the hiring of private security guards by some block associations and to the proliferation of attended buildings.
He also pointed to the stabilizing influence of Lincoln Center, the ABC-TV complex and other nearby institutions, such as Fordham University’s West Side campus and Roosevelt Hospital.
Children can attend Public Schools 191 or 199, where about 60 percent of the students scored at or above grade level on the most recent city reading test. The nearest high schools are Martin Luther King Jr., where about 70 percent of the graduates last June were accepted at institutions of higher education, and Louis D. Brandeis, where the figure was 76 percent.
There are also several private schools, among them the Ethical Culture School and the Professional Children’s School. The Fiorello H. La Guardia High School of Music and the Arts, which will encompass the current High Schools of Music and Art and Performing Arts, is slated to open on Amsterdam Avenue, behind Avery Fisher Hall, in September.
But despite the revolving-door traffic, there is a community of Lincoln Square. ”When the weather is nice I see the same elderly people sitting under the trees in Damrosch Park, eating their lunch,” said Doreen Lown, who works at Lincoln Center. ”You see mothers strolling their kids around the complex and couples sitting on the edge of the fountain and you realize that Lincoln Center is very much a part of this community.”
TV Expanding Its Studios
ABC-TV, with the highest daytime ratings for the last six years, countless viewers awaiting the next episodes of ”General Hospital” (now the No. One daytime drama) and ”All My Children” (No. Two) and a new soap, ”Loving,” on the air since last June, has been expanding its studios in the Lincoln Square area.
In 1982, it added 320 West 66th Street to its holdings, which also include its broadcast operations and engineering center on Columbus Avenue. Construction is now under way at the new site on two 10,000-square-foot studios expected to be completed late this spring. One will house production of ”Loving,” but plans for the other are not completed.
ABC has also bought property at 125 West End Avenue, which is being renovated into offices and a semitechnical facility. That building is already partly operational and will be fully phased in over the next several years, according to Jeffrey Tolvin, an ABC spokesman.
