Report To The Community 2022

a new neighborhood,
a new destination,
a new era
Advancing its work on the redevelopment of
newark’s downtown will transform
the Arts Center and its home city
One Theater Square (viewed across
Chambers Plaza), the first market-rate
residential tower built in Newark in
decades, brought hundreds of new
residents into NJPAC’s corner of the city.
NJPAC opened in 1997.
But the seed of the idea
that grew into the Arts
Center was actually first
planted in New York
City, in the early 1960s.
That’s when a young man,
a graduate student of
history at Columbia
University, watched Lincoln
Center being built on
Manhattan’s Upper West
Side, and saw how the
presence of a performing
arts center utterly changed
the rundown area.
“I could see restaurants
coming in, apartment
buildings, hotels, stores …
it simply transformed the
neighborhood,” he recalled
decades later. “So the idea
of an arts center as a tool for
urban rehabilitation became
very compelling to me.”
The young man was
Thomas Kean, who went
on to become one of New
Jersey’s most revered
governors. After he
handily won his second
gubernatorial election in
1985, he used his enormous
political capital to advance
the building of a performing
arts center in Newark.
But Newark’s performing
arts center, Kean insisted,
should have what Lincoln
Center did not: ownership
real estate: a new vision for downtown newark
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njpac.org