Jones Lang LaSalle


Arts Center Has a Plan to Help Newark Revive

By RONALD SMOTHERS
Published: March 16, 2006
NEWARK, March 15 — For nearly 40 years, Newark has been trying to fight its way back from the riots of the 1960's and a generation in which people and businesses spilled out of the city to the suburbs on the highways that crisscross it.

Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times

Lawrence P. Goldman, chief executive of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, said that "no city can be great without downtown housing."

In fits and starts over the last decade, residents have seen some progress in rebuilding the state's largest city: a minor league ballpark, the start of construction on a new hockey arena for the New Jersey Devils, the addition of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.

But the benefits, like jobs and tax revenues, have not been obvious, and the urban ills of poverty, high crime, gang violence and substandard housing have persisted. To many, a sense of excitement may not have caught on, and they question whether Newark has actually turned a corner.

Now civic leaders and city officials are hoping to give the city another little push toward revival, this time pinning their hopes on the performing arts center.

Built nine years ago, at a cost of $187 million, the center has been a surprise success story, drawing both crowds and interest, and serving as an effective good-will ambassador for downtown Newark.

On Wednesday, Lawrence P. Goldman, the president and chief executive of the arts center, announced a plan to expand both the scope and presence of the complex, in the hopes that it will transform that part of Newark into a haven for artists and art lovers.

The center is seeking developers interested in becoming a partner in the construction of 250 units of mostly market-rate housing and street-level retail space on a plot of land it owns across the street from the red-brick-and-glass building that houses its concert hall and theater and restaurant complexes.

Mr. Goldman said the proposed housing towers, like the performing arts center, would look out over the Passaic River and form a southern boundary to an area now envisioned as a "theater square."

Under the plan, 20 percent of the apartments would be set aside for artists with modest incomes, Mr. Goldman said; the rest would be market-rate rentals. The project involves the first new residential construction in downtown Newark in a generation, he said.

The project is necessary, he said in an interview, "because no city can be great without downtown housing."

If the project gets off the ground, it will be only the latest residential development downtown. Public and private partners are also creating 324 housing units in a former office building, and Rutgers University is building a dorm for its Newark campus a block away from the arts center.
In nearby neighborhoods, Mr. Goldman said, town houses and two-family homes are sprouting on vacant lots where for years there had been only wildflowers and tall grass.

"Urban transformation has always been in the performing arts center's DNA," Mr. Goldman said. "Now we want to ride the wave and amplify the wave of what is happening in Newark."
The cost is estimated at more than $100 million, and most of it would be privately financed, but the center will probably seek some public money to help defray the cost of an underground parking garage. Mr. Goldman said he was confident that public money would be found.

He has some experience in this kind of project. Before coming to Newark, he was the vice president of Carnegie Hall, and he promoted its expansion into housing and office space. The Carnegie Hall Tower includes a mini artists colony in Midtown and has generated considerable income for Carnegie Hall.

Newark is not the only urban area to pin its revival hopes on an arts institution. Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Brooklyn — around the Brooklyn Academy of Music — and myriad smaller struggling cities have hoped to lure more artists and related businesses to their struggling downtowns.

Although arts institutions are important, said Michael D. Beyard, a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute, they alone are not a "silver bullet" against urban blight. "If an arts institution is lucky," he said, "they do not have to take much action after they are built, and the private sector will do the heavy lifting of revitalization. But that is the exception and not the rule. Many downtowns have declined so far that to recreate the market is not easy."

But Arthur Stern, the chief executive of the Cogswell Realty Group, said he saw other signs that Newark was ripe for revival. His company has already staked more than $200 million on efforts to rebuild the city, including the purchase and renovation of the city's tallest building, a historic office tower. The building, at 744 Broad Street, which reopened in 1999, is nearly full and includes a Starbucks on the ground floor. The company is also completing the renovation of a 28-story Art Deco office tower into 324 units of market-rate housing, with health clubs and a bowling alley for tenants.

Mr. Goldman said that the performing arts center would seek proposals from several dozen developers with experience in urban settings. Arthur F. Ryan, chairman and chief executive of Prudential Financial, who is co-chairman of the center's board, said the company that was chosen would have to share the center's commitment to "artistic excellence, opportunity for all and racial diversity."

The performing arts center has attracted more than four million people to performances in the nine years it has been open, said Mr. Goldman, who called it an artistic success. Consequently, he said, now was the right time to make the foray into housing.

The planned housing will not provide anywhere near the income for the center that Carnegie Hall's office tower has, he said. But he noted that the Newark center owns another nearby parcel, which it would seek to develop next.