Lincoln Center is the world's largest performing arts complex. Lincoln Center was built between 1962 and 1969 on land cleared by Robert Moses's urban renewal program, a displacement that demolished a neighborhood of mainly Black and Puerto Rican residents who were moved from their homes to make room for culture. The neighborhood is the setting of West Side Story, which was already a Broadway hit when demolition began.
Today the Lincoln Center campus contains twelve resident arts organizations including the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the New York City Ballet, the Juilliard School, and Lincoln Center Theater. The Josie Robertson Plaza at the center, with its Revson Fountain, is one of the finest outdoor gathering spaces in the city. On summer evenings the plaza fills for free outdoor performances.
The three main buildings, in white travertine marble, were designed by Philip Johnson, Eero Saarinen, and Wallace Harrison, and their facades line the plaza in a unified classical composition that has grown more loved over the decades than it was when new.