Eisenhower Breaks Ground for Lincoln Center

On May 14, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower traveled to the corner of Broadway and West 64th Street to break ground on Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. He turned the first shovel of dirt alongside Mayor Robert Wagner, Lieutenant Governor Malcolm Wilson, and John D. Rockefeller 3rd, the project's chief fundraiser and public face. The site sat on what had been San Juan Hill, a dense Black, Afro-Caribbean, and Puerto Rican neighborhood that Robert Moses's slum clearance program had emptied out, displacing more than 7,000 residents and 800 businesses. Eisenhower cast the new campus as a cure for what he called urban blight and as a piece of Cold War cultural diplomacy, an argument for American life that no government press release could make on its own. The concert hall broken ground that day would become the New York Philharmonic's new home, the first piece of a complex that now anchors the city's performing arts scene.