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Culture Counts


In early November, the New York Foundation for the Arts released "Culture Counts: Strategies for a More Vibrant Cultural Life for New York City," the first comprehensive study of culture in New York City in 30 years. The 78-page report -- widely distributed to city leaders and available online -- may not be a page-turner, but it should be digested by anyone who cares about the future of the arts in this city. It is both a snapshot of the current state-of-the-arts and a rallying cry for action. The report is the culmination of the "Cultural Blueprint" initiative, an attempt to assess how the cultural community can come together and speak in a unified voice. It involved a year of interviews, focus groups, town hall meetings in each borough, mappings, and surveys, and the collaboration of over a thousand New Yorkers -- cultural, civic, and business leaders; individual artists and arts organizations; and interested citizens. "The report is based on a conviction that the cultural community needs cohesive cultural policies, forceful advocacy, and imaginative and pragmatic planning to reach its full potential," says Ted Berger, the executive director of the New York Foundation for the Arts. "Now there is a particular urgency as cultural institutions, large and small, must contribute more than ever to the city's health, not only by drawing and inspiring visitors who come to experience the cultural riches of our city, but also by persevering as anchors in the educational, spiritual and emotional lives of New Yorkers."

In places like New Orleans, Baltimore, and Seattle, city leaders have successfully parlayed cultural policy into an engine of economic growth -- to revitalize decaying city centers, and to attract tourists and new businesses. In New York, however, the very vitality and diversity of the cultural sector has long enabled New Yorkers to enjoy the arts without considering how they come into existence. "We've always said, rather lightly, that we're the cultural capital of the world," Berger tells me. "But you cannot take this field for granted. It is a fragile community." Suri Duitch of the Center for an Urban Future agrees. "Here," she writes, "where the sector employs an estimated 130,000 people, the arts may be seen as a natural blessing, something we are endowed with, that warrants no further thought or effort."

The report's authors do not shrink from enumerating the less-quantifiable benefits of participation in the arts -- education and community building, for example -- but they also offer enough hard data to give planners, sociologists, and other number-crunchers a field day. The bottom line: The arts bring around $12 billion each year into the city's economy through job creation and taxes -- a 240 percent return on the city's investment. Such findings are backed up by independent economic research, which shows that two-thirds of wealth is generated by "human capital" -- skills, ingenuity, creativity, enterprise, the bread and butter of the arts. Equally impressive are the report's data about arts participation: Of the some 800 New Yorkers surveyed by the Fordham Institute for Innovation, almost two-thirds went to movies; half to musical performances, libraries, art shows, or museums; and more than a third to theater. A whopping 75 percent reported engaging in their own creative activities -- whether through writing, sewing, or singing in their church choir. A citywide map confirms that cultural activity is spread throughout the boroughs, with at least five cultural organizations in every district. For artists and arts organizations, such information is a tool -- to carry with them into board meetings, to present to their council members, to "hang their hats on," in the words of the Blueprint Project Director, Kinshasha Holman Conwill.

The release of "Culture Counts" was timed to coincide with the recent elections of a new mayor, comptroller, public defender, and a spate of borough presidents and council members -- the largest turnover in city government in history. The report was on its way to the printer on the morning of the terrorist attacks. "All the findings gain added poignancy post September 11," Conwill tells me. "If anything, they have the potential to catalyze the kind of creative thinking that has helped New York to sustain itself in difficult times."

The problems facing the arts community mirror the problems facing all New Yorkers: a lack of affordable living and working space; inequitable access to the city's resources; shrinking budgets and uncertain futures. In past decades, arts organizations have scraped by on an uneven and unpredictable system of public and private support; overall, funding has plunged by 62 percent since 1982, driven down by the lingering effects of the early 1990s recession, the fallout from the culture wars, and government neglect. Today, nearly three-quarters of all arts groups receive no city support. New York's Department of Cultural Affairs, the country's largest arts funding agency, has failed to keep pace with the diverse needs of the city's arts sector, and is itself increasingly undernourished by city allowances.

"We are in a difficult budget time," Ted Berger acknowledges, "yet what we know is that arts and culture are part of the solution to the city's vitality, both economic and spiritual." The report articulates some solutions, including reorganizing the Department of Cultural Affairs to better serve the city's diverse and far-flung arts communities, many of whom perceive racial, ethnic, or borough-based discrimination in grant-giving policies.

Even during the economic boom times, arts organizations flailed. "Ticket sales for Broadway shows are up 30 percent since 1990. Major museums are seeing record attendance. Many cultural institutions have taken advantage of good economic times to launch major capital campaigns for renovations and expansions into new buildings," Duitch wrote in her pre-September 11 report. "But most of New York City's arts organizations have only seen the dark side of a strong economy: a devastating rise in real estate costs." The same small theaters, galleries, and museums that once transformed struggling neighborhoods like SoHo into hot zones are being pushed out by rents that have risen 50 to 300 percent in the last five years. In San Francisco, where technology companies drove up real estate prices during the 1990s, city planners came up with ideas to preserve nonprofit space -- including development on city land, a web site devoted to space-finding needs, and free assistance to nonprofits looking for homes. Now that even the outer boroughs have become expensive, New York risks driving away many of its artists, particularly the experimental individuals and groups that bring fresh ideas and energy to the arts community as a whole.

Wisely, the report does not offer unilateral prescriptions for what it terms the cultural "ecosystem" -- the diverse and far-flung artists and organizations that span every discipline, language, ethnicity, age, and neighborhood. Instead, it offers the broadest possible definitions of cultural policy. "The choice of a family to educate their child in the language, traditions, and history of a particular ethnic group is cultural policy," the arts consultant, Caron Atlas, writes. "A grantmaker's criterion for quality and excellence is cultural policy. A community development corporation's decision to focus on cultural tourism or historic preservation is cultural policy. The convergence of television, Internet, and other digital media is cultural policy." That New York's cultural policy is largely invisible or unarticulated has damaging consequences. The Fordham study revealed, for example, that the city's elderly and low-income youth are under-served by the arts community, and that affordability and access to information top everyone's lists as barriers to arts participation.

A roundtable discussion among dancers, musicians, and other artists, reported by Roberto Bedoya, points to the paradox of the artist's life in New York: Artists are attracted to the city, and yet the city is inhospitable to its artists. Some in the discussion insisted that the cultural community cannot separate itself from other communities: better housing for all, not just artists; better education overall, including better arts education. Conwill finds hope in the close integration of artists into the fabric of the city. After the 9/11 attacks, arts organizations stood ready to help the city -- through contributions of time and money, the creation of school programs, or simply by opening their doors to its citizens. Now, she says, artists are ready to get back to their work -- to mount the plays and exhibitions that get to the core of what New York is about. Culture, she says, is "part of the daily work of the city as much as our subway system."

Martha Hostetter writes for American Theatre magazine.

Twin Towers Attack


Shortly before 9 a.m., while a customer was waiting for his bialy to be toasted, the owner of Grace Deli at 198 Broadway rushed in. "There was an explosion at the World Trade Center." The customer asked if he was joking, but the owner shook his head grimly. About half a dozen of the people in the deli rushed out to see the twin towers, right across the street.

All we could see was a darkened band near the top, something like the band around a cigar, that was spreading. It was the first moment in a day that witnesses, those who survived, may never forget, a day when two planes crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and the buildings completely collapsed. It was, officials say, the worst act of terrorism in United States history. For the rest of the day, people who saw what happened were walking around, telling the story of what they had seen, of what they had lived through, to anyone who would listen.

Rob Ercoreca had a closer view. He was walking through a courtyard at 4 World Financial Center when the first plane hit. "Glass and concrete were flying down. I went under a bench. People started jumping, and they would literally explode when they hit the ground. I ran towards them. I don't know why. Maybe you never know if someone might be alive."

At about the same time, Nigel Scott, a bond broker, was working on the 55th floor. He felt the building shake. He looked out the window, and saw flames on the sister tower. "The flames were rolling across the building... I saw people jumping from the building, right in front of me."

Security came over the loud speakers and told everyone to stay put. He called his girlfriend, to tell her he was okay.

Then the second plane hit; this time, his tower. "The sound was huge. I heard a jet, and then an explosion. Everyone was thrown to the floor. My head is still ringing. I will never forget that sound."

Frank Broughton, who works for the Bank of New York at 101 Barclay, saw the second plane hit from his office. "The plane came in, and then looked like it was trying to veer off. It was too late. I saw people jumping out the window to get out of the way." He said after the first attack, security told everyone to stay in the building and move to the north end. After the second attack though, Broughton got out; "I was thinking, I have family, I need to talk to my family."

At 10 a.m, the first building collapsed. It was slow motion movie-life; an explosion of flames, the building crumbling, the great rumble reaching the crowd, and then a cloud of ash, first in a bubble low to the ground.

Momentarily, the crowd was paralyzed, not seeming to accept what had happened.

Then the cloud spread. There was a heavy rush of debris, as thick as an avalanche, as frightening as nuclear fall-out, looking like Mount St. Helen's had erupted in downtown Manhattan. It was nearly impossible to breathe. The cops yelled; "Run, run. That's asbestos in there. Don't walk, run!" People ducked in buildings, behind cars, in locked doorways.

Covered in about an inch of the finely-ground white-grey ash, an African-American woman who now looked white was limping alongside a man in the middle of Fulton Street. "It's ok, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here, it's ok, I'm here," the man said to her, as she cried.

People were stumbling east away from the towers, trying to escape. Some hid in doorways, trying to shield their faces.

After the cloud had settled a little, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani walked through the street, looking straight ahead. "Everyone should remain calm and head north above Canal" He told the people surrounding him that he had contact with the president. "Stay calm."

"Move north, move north," an emergency services personnel was yelling out. "Don't go east"

If the ground concrete and glass formed a blanket several inches thick on the street, the burned bits of memos, day planners, bills floated in the air all the way across the river several miles away to neighborhoods like Carroll Gardens, where the dust and soot settled on cars. Politicians who had planned to spend the day handing out campaign literature on the street instead passed out dust masks.

Shortly after 11am, local bars were full of people watching television, giving their own eye witness accounts and talking about friends and relatives who work in Lower Manhattan.

Others, looking to help in any way possible, went to the local hospitals and helped organize anyone who passed by on the street to go to a nearby blood donation center.

"I don't work with anyone or any organization. I'm just a volunteer. I figured I'd stand here and help," said William Burton, a Carroll Gardens resident. Burton gathered groups of three or four people, then flagged down a car to serve as a make-shift shuttle.

By 12:45pm, over 200 people lined up outside the blood donation center on Lawrence Street near Borough Hall.

"I just wanted to do something," said Lisa Abernathy, a college student at the City University of New York. "I could only watch the TV so long. When I heard they needed blood, I figured it was something I could do, even if it was small."

At one point, workers at the blood bank were so overwhelmed they handed out donation forms for people to fill out and asked them to return after 6:00pm.

With limited subway service and area bridges closed, the Brooklyn Bridge filled with a parade of what looked like refugees--Wall Street traders in blue jackets, business people in suits covered in grey dust, and mothers and children with dust masks--being evacuated from lower Manhattan.

One woman met her grandmother at the base of the bridge, where they embraced and wept.

Near Borough Hall, police tried to direct people to buses that would take them to Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy, and Far Rockaway. One woman wondered how she could get to Staten Island.

"All the bridges are closed," an officer told her. "No one is going over the Verrazano Bridge and no one is going back into Manhattan." Across the city, all fire fighters and police, including off duty and those on vacation, were called in. Even young police recruits were brought in to help direct traffic and flag down car service for elderly and handicapped people.

September 11th, 2001 had started with candidates for mayor voting early in front of the cameras. It was a light turnout. "The difference between American and a lot of other places is that we can vote, we have a democracy," one of the candidates told reporters."It's a shame that such a small percentage of Americans take the opportunity."

Seven hours later, at 3 p.m., the fact that this was Election Day was all but forgotten, and Mayor Giuliani was giving a press conference at "undisclosed location." After explaining what they knew, and assuring New Yorkers that the city was safe, he asked everybody to pray for strength. "American democracy is much stronger than vicious cowardly terrorism, and we're going to overcome this."

By Mark Berkey-Gerard, Jonathan Mandell, and David Schwartz

Posted 4:30 p.m., September 11

###

Heart of Brooklyn


 

The lion's share of New York City's art and cultural media attention, and resulting visitor traffic, seems to go to the cultural institutions located in Midtown Manhattan and the Museum Mile. That is great for the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim and the Whitney. But how do you compete for a share of that audience when your cultural institution resides outside that mid-Manhattan preserve?

A group of six Brooklyn institutions has found a solution by banding together to promote themselves as a cultural destination -- in the Heart of Brooklyn.

Established informally in 1998 by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Brooklyn Children's Museum, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn Public Library, Prospect Park Alliance and Prospect Park Zoo, the Heart of Brooklyn Cultural Consortium is a model of intra-institutional collective action. The directors and trustees of the member organizations share a vision of heightening cultural awareness and substantially increasing programming opportunities for their membership and the public.

"It just makes a great deal of sense to bring it all together. We all have existing programming relationships, but it seemed better to work together formally rather than just on an ad-hoc basis" says Arnold Lehman, board member of Heart of Brooklyn and director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. "More than that, our goals are to tell people how easy it is to get to the Heart of Brooklyn and how much there is to do when you're here. From art and science to a stroll in the park, there's something for everyone and all ages."

Educational programming is a highlight of Heart of Brooklyn Activities. It is a vehicle for increasing access to the vast educational and cultural resources and collections of the member institutions, and it is a way to promote each of the Heart of Brooklyn projects through the member institutions.

Branding the Heart of Brooklyn as a "better and stronger destination point for the people of Brooklyn and the city is certainly a major goal of ours" says Tupper Thomas, president of the Consortium (as well as president of Prospect Park Alliance and administrator of Prospect Park). "But mostly we're working on a number of wonderful projects that we've worked on for a number of years, like the Trolley and the Children's Adventure Program."

The members of Heart Of Brooklyn jointly participate in a variety of activities:

Brooklyn Cultural Adventures Program is a recreational camp for children 10 to 12 years old representing a broad cross-section of Brooklyn's population. It was created in 1998 to engage children in fun, educational activities in summer and winter that introduce them to each institution's collections.

The Brooklyn Expedition is a web site that increases educational services to the community by offering teachers, children and families the resources of three major Brooklyn institutions, the Brooklyn Children's Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Public Library.

Additionally, five of the consortium's members collaborate to run the Heart of Brooklyn Trolley, with hourly stops throughout Prospect Park and its neighboring cultural institutions. The trolley is free of charge and connects with the Brooklyn Children's Museum Trolley.

"Heart of Brooklyn is working because it's a good idea, and also because the directors are enthusiastic about working together" says Ellen Salpeter. "During the extensive planning process, we studied institutional partnerships in other parts of the country and found that ours was unique in its diversity of membership." They have served as a model for proposed partnerships in Queens, Staten Island and Newark.

"We're a very collegial group, which isn't always the norm" says Tupper. "This group of institutions has something very unique to offer, unlike anything in the world."

The official announcement of the creation of the Heart of Brooklyn Cultural Consortium will be made in February.

Simon Watson is the executive director of Downtown Arts Projects, a New York-based non profit dedicated to emerging artists of all disciplines.



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