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Rethinking Culture on WTC Site When the city announced last month that the Signature Theater would not be housed in a Performing Arts Center on the World Trade Center site, it left only the Joyce Theater of the four cultural institutions that had once been chosen for the site. Tom Healy, president of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) likened the process to a series of amputations. “It is essentially cutting off a person’s legs and one arm and expecting them to applaud,” Healy said in a March 28 interview with the Trib. A week before the city’s announcement, Healy came before the CB1 WTC Redevelopment Committee to caution that the Center was tenuous because of cost and space considerations. He advised the community to actively look elsewhere for performance and art space in the “nooks and crannies” of the millions of square feet planned on the site. “I think there are significant opportunities for low cost solutions throughout the commercial and retail space and the public space,” Healy said. Healy declined to make any specific suggestions, but he gave the Winter Garden as an example of a space that would have been better suited for performances if that use had been anticipated before its construction. And just as the space in the office towers will be subsidized with tax dollars by leasing to government agencies, he said, “There’s no reason cultural life shouldn’t be thought of in the same way.” Healy urged the board to join with the Port Authority, the MTA and Silverstein Properties, as well as the city and state, “in a big public discussion” to identify those spaces soon. “A window exists now with a new gubernatorial administration and before the architecture is set in stone over the next year. That opportunity will disappear quickly.”
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