Revisiting San Juan Hill, the neighborhood destroyed to make way for Lincoln Center

By Anastacia Tsioulcas, NPR

Think back to the opening of the 2021 film version of the musical West Side Story. The very first thing we see is acres of rubble, and a sign: “This property purchased by the New York Housing Authority for slum clearance.”

That’s an allusion to a real neighborhood that was destroyed to make way for Lincoln Center. In the 1950s, San Juan Hill was mostly a community of Black and Puerto Rican residents. Their story — and even the name of their neighborhood — has been mostly scrubbed from history. Now, a new piece of music being premiered by the New York Philharmonic aims to acknowledge that past.

Long before Lincoln Center existed, San Juan Hill was a nexus for African American and Caribbean culture. It nurtured many jazz greats, who lived and played there — including alto saxophonist Benny Carter, who grew up in the neighborhood, and pianist Herbie Nichols, who was born there to parents from St. Kitts and Trinidad. Duke Ellington and cornet player Rex Stewart even co-wrote a tune named in tribute to this community, where dance halls and jazz clubs thrived.

But in the 1950s, the powerful urban planner Robert Moses led the effort to have San Juan Hill razed, with the intention of establishing a midtown campus for Fordham University and creating Lincoln Center. He displaced more than 7,000 families as well as some 800 businesses. In a 1977 interview with New York’s public television station, WNET, Moses defended destroying San Juan Hill.

[…]

60 years after Lincoln Center’s opening and a $550 million renovation later, the New York Philharmonic’s home at Lincoln Center, David Geffen Hall, is reopening this weekend. Lincoln Center is taking this opportunity to readdress the narrative of its founding.

It invited Etienne Charles — a composer, trumpet player, percussionist and Guggenheim fellow — to think deeply about that complicated past, and create a piece of music that would acknowledge that hidden history. So Etienne Charles created a new work for the Philharmonic and his band, Creole Soul called San Juan Hill: A New York Story.

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Construction similarly displaced residents in one Detroit neighborhood. Combined with redlining, these actions contributed to economic struggles.

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