The Arts in Boston: An Outsider's Inside View of the Cultural Estate [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674335769, 9780674335745

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
1. Introduction: The Adams Legacy
2. Some Boston Voices in the Arts An Assemblage of interviews
3. Walking the Tightrope
4. Hold Fast! Help is on the Way Maybe
5. The View from City Hall
6. Sheltering the Troupes
7. Things That Money Can't Buy
8 Epilogue Etonne-Moi !
Appendix A: Corporate Contributions
Appendix В: Proposed Layout of the Hinge Block Complex
Notes. Index
Notes
Index
Publications of the Joint Center for Urban Studies

Citation preview

A publication of the Joint Center for Urban Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University

The Arts in Boston

The Arts in Boston Bernard Taper

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts

1970

© Copyright 1970 by Bernard Taper All rights reserved Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London Library of Congress Cataiog Card Number 76-113186 Printed in the United States of America

To Wilbur J. Bender, who cared about the quality of life in Boston

Acknowledgments This study originated at the request of the Permanent Charity Fund of Boston, which supplied the necessary grant. The work was carried out under the auspices of the Joint Center for Urban Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University and of the Cultural Foundation of Boston. The assistance of the Junior League of Boston should also be acknowledged, for making possible an academic seminar on the topics with which this study deals. None of these organizations should be held accountable for the findings and opinions expressed here, which are solely the author's. To exculpate them from responsibility is the least I can do for those who have been generous in their help. The seminar mentioned above proved of value, particularly in providing a broader perspective on some of the issues, when the time came for final reshaping and revision of my manuscript, and I would like to thank the participants. Papers for the seminar were prepared by James S. Ackerman, Leon Kirchner, Timothy Mayer, Henry Mülon, Lewis Mumford, and John R. Watts. Others who took part in the discussions were: Nelson W. Aldrich, Wayne V. Andersen, Wübur J. Bender, Robert Brustein, Hale Champion, Peter Chermayeff, F. Douglas Cochrane, Thomas DeGaetani, Eli Goldston, Osborne F. Ingram, Daniel P. Moynihan, Francis Park III, Lloyd Rodwin, Gunther Schuller, and Francis W. Sidlauskas. Among others who read portions of this manuscript and offered useful criticism were Morris Axelrod, Talcott Banks, Joseph R. Barresi, Ralph Burgard, Sinclair Hitchings, Kaiman Novak, Martin Shefter, and Robert C. Wood. Jack Fowler and Mary Ellen McCalla assisted with the survey of business contributions to the arts. My special thanks are also due to Janet Shefter for research and secretarial help and for her mastery of the files. B. T.

Contents 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 δ

Introduction: The Adams Legacy Some Boston Voices in the Arts: An Assemblage of Interviews Walking the Tightrope Hold Fast! Help is on the Way—Maybe The View from City Hail Sheltering the Troupes Things That Money Can't Buy Epilogue: Etonne-moi! Appendix A. Corporate Contributions Appendix B. Proposed Layout of the Hinge Block Complex Notes Index

1 9 46 69 89 107 126 139 141 149 159 165

The Arts in Boston

1

Introduction The Adams Legacy

In a letter to his wife, John Adams once wrote, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have Uberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." Expressed here, I would say, is a quintessentially Bostonian attitude. It is Bostonian in its worthiness, its prudence, its admirable weighing of obligations, present and future, its deferment of delight even unto the third generation, its conviction that only through programmatic self-denial may one earn the right to the sensual satisfactions of beauty. Ultimately, it seems to me almost as perverse as if he had said, "I must be celibate so that my grandchildren may have the right to enjoy fornication." Adams' statement seems to exalt the arts, yet in reaUty it diminishes and disparages them by cutting them off from the practical affairs of everyday life, consigning them, in effect, not to the real world but to some remote Elysian Fields. His words were prophetic. Boston did later produce its generations of aesthetes, men of the most exquisite and cultivated sensibiHties, like his own direct descendant Henry Adams; for them the mimdane world was distasteful, its demands almost too much to bear. They turned to the arts as their sanctuary, their private garden, their club. Men such as these have set their stamp on the history and quality of the arts in Boston. The arts have been more honored in Boston than in most American cities, and by "the best people"; but they have possibly been enjoyed rather less than they have been honored. Never have they played a meaningful part in the life of the whole Boston community. A schism between art and practical life is characteristic of the United States in general, and always has been, but I doubt that in any other city has this

Introduction

separation been so fastidiously cultivated. Those who patronize the arts in Boston have kept aloof from politics, business, practical afifairs. They put art on a pedestal and labeled it "Do Not Touchl" In Boston, the Philistines and the aesthetes have had nothing in common except an agreement on this one point: that art and life should be kept apart. In the summer of 1967 an interesting controversy took place betvv'een the Boston Redevelopment Authority and the Metropolititan District Commission. It vv'as over the question of including some art—a piece of sculpture, perhaps, or some murals—in a recreational center that was being built in the Roxbury district as part of an urban renewal project. This would have fulfilled a BRA regulation that 1 percent of the cost of a renewal project must be allocated for works of art. The MDC, however, flatly refused to comply, letting it be known that it was not going to waste money on such nonsense. "Art is a waste of time," declared Max Rosenblatt, associate commissioner of the MDC. "What Roxbury wants is a facility to swim in and skate on. If their artistic sensibilities are affected, they can go to the art museum." My own viewpoint is almost the direct opposite. I favor desegregation—in art as well as in other matters. People's "artistic sensibilities" ought to have the opportunity to be affected in myriad ways and places in a city, not just in one or two official establishments. Cabot, Cabot, and Forbes, the developers of the New England Merchants National Bank Building, completed in 1968, have commissioned a Henry Moore sculpture for the plaza outside of the building on Washington Street ( at the site of the Boston Massacre ) and two large, high-spirited Larry Rivers murals, on the theme of Paul Revere's ride, for the waUs in the main banking area. These works will enrich the life of the city much more in those sites than if they were installed at a museum. (The BRA 1-percent-for-art regulation is involved in this instance as well, since the building is part of the Government Center urban renewal project; the difference is that in this case the developer has not only complied with the regulation but has taken it seriously, treating it as a meaningful opportunity. In the

Introduction next few years, as urban renewal developments come to completion, a considerable amotmt of art may become part of the Boston environment because of tliis regulation, provided the BRA. director makes the effort to see that the developers comply. For the Government Center project alone art expenditures could total almost a million dollars. An obscure administrative regulation, in the mixed enterprise America of today, may sometimes prove a most remarkable engine for change. ) I hope I am not giving the impression that I underrate museums. Mainly, I am contending with those who overrate them. My dispute is with the all-too-widespread assumption that if a city has a splendid museum and a splendid symphony orchestra ( as Boston does have), it has all the culture it could possibly require. Ideally, the whole city should serve the purpose of satisfying the need for beauty, as well as the city dweller's other diverse needs. There exists a letter by Franz Schubert in which he vmtes about his native Vienna. It was a city in which he suffered cruel economic hardships; yet in this letter he exults in the city's musicality. By that he did not mean—as we might mean today in proclaiming some American city an outstanding place for music —that it had a fine symphony orchestra, complete with charismatic conductor, and an excellent opera company. What Schubert meant, and what delighted him, was that nearly everyone in the city, it seemed to him, cared about music and was joyously involved in making it. "Music streams from every window," he wrote. Or take Florence. When one thinks of that city, it is not just the Uffizi that comes to mind, admirable as that museum's collection may be, but rather the widespread, complicated, pervasive presence of beauty, all mixed up with the functioning life of the city. More memorable than the experiences I have had in the Uffizi have always been the chance encounters with art which one may have in Florence while walking through the streets on the way to a restaurant or to a business appointment— or even while on the way to the Uffizi. The often unexpected

Introduction nature of such experiences undoubtedly contributes to the intensity of the pleasure; one has received a gift, a joy one had not reckoned to have that day. Boston offers some such experiences now, but not as many as it might. Despite its many real charms, Boston is a drabber place than it need be; it could certainly be made more delightful, more beautiful, more festive and, to use a vi^ord fancied by the artist Gyorgy Kepes, more heraldic. I would hope that someday Boston would become a city in which the arts are more intimately involved with the daily life of the community. The arts, I beheve, should be recognized as a human need, not a luxury; nor should they be something to which we pay solemn, periodic respect—like going to church on Sunday. Most relevant is the view expressed in Art and Society by Herbert Read: "We have seen that it is dangerous for a society to be too conscious about art; but it is nevertheless necessary for society to support the artist. Art must be regarded as a necessity like bread and water; but like bread and water, it must be accepted as a matter of course; it must be an integral part of our daily life, and must not be made a fuss of. It should be treated, not as a guest, not even as a paying guest, but as one of the family." This, then, expresses something of the philosophy I bring to this project. This book is not intended as an aesthetic treatise, nor even as a work of arts criticism. The study's fundamental purpose is to seek fairly specific answers to the questions: what is the state of the arts in Boston today and what measures might be taken to foster, strengthen, enrich, and invigorate these arts, and to make them meaningful to a larger segment of the citizenry? The term "arts" is meant here to signify a broad spectrum of the visual and performing arts, including some which may be unconventional, novel, or informal but which have their place in the life of a lively, modem, civilized metropolis. Some aspects of the study are peculiar to Boston, but many of the problems and themes discussed are relevant to the situation of the arts in other metropoHtan areas in the United States today.

Introduction

Boston is, of course, very well endowed in some aspects of the arts, but in others less so. Some of its arts institutions are world renowned. The standards of these major institutions are high, but they tend to be oriented toward the past. The dominant attitude might be termed custodial or curatorial, rather than creative. One is not aware of any great creative ferment in the arts in Boston. What can be done to foster new work of high caliber is hard to say. It has been suggested that Boston's two most hallowed institutions—the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Museum of Fine Arts—could exert more leadership than they presently do in encouraging contemporary work. This point seems to me to be valid. Because of the presence of the many universities and colleges in the area, an abundance of amateur and semiprofessional arts activity takes place. "It's not the number of Broadway shows playing in the big downtown houses that gives Boston theatre a flavor of its own," wrote the weekly Boston After Dark. "What makes the city theatrically interesting and original are the small companies performing in coffeehouses or churches, in the playgrounds or in the streets." The quality of the work naturally varies widely but some of the efforts—in other arts as well as in dramaare remarkably compelling. All of this makes, in my opinion, for quite a civilized climate. I would deplore a society that was divided into a small group of certified arts practitioners and a large mass of arts appreciators, with nothing in between. Some of the universities in the area-Brandeis and M.I.T. in particular—have been active in fostering and presenting new work under official aegis. One of the most potentially rewarding programs under university sponsorship is the work being done at the new Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T., where explorations of new forms are being carried on by a commtmity of artists, scientists, and engineers working in collaboration. At and around Harvard an extraordinary amount of artistic activity goes on, but with less official encouragement or sponsorship. At Harvard, the attitude toward the arts has been, at least until lately, strictly scholarly: the purpose of the university

Introduction is deemed to be scholarship; art is to be studied there, not created. In Harvard's music department are some fine composers, including Earl Kim and Leon Kirchner, whose String Quartet No. 3 for Strings and Electronic Tape was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1967. Superb concerts are given by the faculty and students, but these concerts sometimes have the appearance of having been given only minimal assistance and affection by a department that for years was oriented principally toward musicology. I am told that a Harvard music student, exasperated with this emphasis on musicology, once scrawled on a wall, "This is the Music Department. Do not whistle or huml" Money is important to the condition of the arts in Boston. Financial problems plague nearly all of the arts organizations. There was once a time when wealthy, civic-minded individuals hke Henry L. Higginson could single-handedly underwrite the cost of the symphony or other such endeavors. That time is past. The nature of the patronage required is changing. Other, newer cities in the United States have recognized this, but Boston has tried to continue on the old pattern, and it is not working out. There is an urgent need to find some new formula for financial support, not merely to keep arts organizations alive—and for many of them each season is like a tightrope walk over Niagara Falls—but to enable them to expand their activities and lengthen their season. The Opera Company of Boston, for instance, though it has been widely praised for imaginative presentations, is able only to put on opera in short, rather erratic seasons; the financial crises of the Opera Company of Boston, and the measures taken to cope with them, are the stuff of legend thereabouts. By comparison, the San Francisco Opera Company, which also does imaginative work, is maintained in a relatively commodious and secure style, though it must be said that no opera company in America, including the Metropohtan Opera, can be considered financially secure. Even less secure than the opera company is the Boston Ballet. For lack of funds, it offers only a few evenings of dance a year. The Boston Ballet's situation is so acute that the company may

Introduction

have ceased to exist by the time this volume appears. Dance, in general, is not strongly represented in the Boston area. Neither is film, though for many of the younger people in the region it is the most vital art of all. The establishment of a film institute to aid film-makers of talent with their projects, would be highly desirable. In addition, the pubhc should be provided more opportunity than presently exists to see and study films of merit, historic importance, or experimental interest. All this requires adequate, reasonably assured financing. An analysis of the financial state of the arts is made in Chapter 3. In Chapters 4 and 5,1 examine two sectors that have heretofore contributed little to the arts in Boston—namely business and government—and consider what future prospects might be. For the business chapter, a detailed survey of the larger Boston corporations was made. Analysis and tabulations of their responses are presented in the Appendix as well as in Chapter 4.1 sometimes feel, as E. E. Cummings once argued, that nothing measurable matters "a very good God damn" and that all truth is immeasurable. Particularly would this seem to be the case when one deals with as fanciful an element as the arts—not to mention the possibly even more fanciful element of finance. Nevertheless, the survey was made with care, and the findings may be of interest. One of Boston's most conspicuous deficiencies is its lack of physical facilities for the arts. There is an acute need for theaters of various proportions for opera, ballet, drama, cinema, and music. Exhibition space is also needed. In the past decade or so many fine theaters have been torn down, including the Boston Opera House. It would have taken $350,000 to reinforce the pilings on which the opera house stood and make the other required repairs. Rather than spending that amount, the owners—who were the Shubert brothers—chose to sell the building and it was demolished. A dormitory of Northeastern University now stands on the site. When they disposed of the opera house, the Shuberts got $135,000 for it. To construct an opera house like that today would cost at least twenty million dollars.

Introduction Boston had seven legitimate theaters in 1956. By 1969 it had only three, in addition to the Music Hall, which is occasionally used for large spectacles. The latest tìieater to come down was the Back Bay Theater in June 1968. The Music Hall and the Wilbur Theater are slated for demolition by 1980. The time may be approaching when Boston may not even be able to continue to enjoy the dubious satisfaction of being a drama try-out town for Broadway, for there may not be places in which to hold the tryouts. Meanwhile the opera company and the ballet company are homeless, and the two professional drama repertory companies are miserably housed. Accompanying the need for metropolitan facilities downtovra is the need for neighborhood facilities. A significant, and very promising, effort toward meeting this need in one of the neighborhoods is being carried forward by the dedicated Miss Elma Lewis, who has been striving to raise funds for the conversion of two buildings formerly owned by a synagogue in Roxbury into an arts center oriented principally, though not exclusively, toward black artists. It is called the National Center of Afro-American Artists. Ways ought to be found to assist her in this effort, and other neighborhoods should also be provided with adequate facilities. This problem is considered more closely in Chapter 6. There I discuss what other cities have done in recent years to achieve the necessary cultural facilities and put forward a proposal which I think could meet Boston s needs without placing undue strain either on the impoverished city treasury or on those private donors who are all too often duimed when the arts find themselves in need. These, then, are some of the main issues considered in this study. But before I pursue my own conceptions further, let us hear first what some of those who actually work in tìie arts in Boston have to say.

2

Some Boston Voices in the Arts An Assemblage of interviews

From an Interview with Sarah Caldwell Artistic director of the Opera Company of Boston (May 11,1967) Caldwell: All of us in the arts have one problem in common. That problem is how to survive.

From an Interview with Perry Rathbone Director of the Museum of Fine Arts (November 10,1967 ) Β.Γ.: One unusual thing about your institution is the fact that it is still privately supported. As far as I know, yours is the only major museum supported this way. Rathbone: It all depends on what you call major. I suppose one of the most distinguished museums that are privately supported is the Cleveland Museum. They are half as old as we are, but have about three times as much money. Cleveland is a big, rich, industrial community; they have a lot of transplanted New Englanders out there who appreciate culture as New Englanders do, and they have more money than New Englanders. It is interesting, but that's it in a nutshell. They do, however, have some support from the education department—from the city through the schools. A certain number of educational workers are paid by the school system. Ours is strictly speaking the only great museum in the whole world that has no pubhc support. It's an astonishing achievement. B.T.: But do you think it can continue that way? Rathbone: No. It can't. Certainly not. B.T.: Has the situation changed to the point where it's no longer practical to operate without public subsidy? Rathbone: Absolutely. I mean we struggle here to maintain the standards that were set down by the leaders of this community who had tax-free incomes and who, before the income

Some Boston Voices in the Arts tax, were able to say, "I want an opera house," and they built one, "and a music hall for the conservatory," and they built one —Jordan Hall. And another group got together and said, "We want to have a great museum and we can have one. All we have to be is generous." And they certainly were. Look at this place. They even bought the land—twelve acres. They bought this land in 1899, when they hadn't been in the museum s original location at Copley Square for twenty years. They realized they had outgrown their ambitions already, and they said, "We'U make it a truly great museum." Nobody could do it today, except Mr. what's-his-name in Texas who left a hundred million dollars. But nobody aroimd here could give you a hundred million. B.T.: The existence of the income tax today is one thing that makes it unlikely, I suppose. The other thing is the escalation of costs. Rathbone: Yes. No individuals such as those who built this place are going to pull us out of thefiscalproblem we have. Foundations have begun to help us, but only in the past two or three years. B.T.: Have you approached the city and been turned down? Rathbone: Not the city—the state. We made the application a year ago, and it was turned dovm by the Ways and Means Committee. First it was cut in half tofiftythousand, and then it was turned dovra. So we intensified our approach and sought out the leaders of the Senate and the House. For example, we had them here for lunch, gave them a tour, showed them the education division, and wrote them letters and follow-up memoranda. An allocation for us is supposed to be included in the supplemental budget. Unfortunately, there's been such a long session and such endless debate about the budget. B.T.: This request is for $100,000 for the education program? Rathbone: Yes." B.T.: A hundred thousand dollars still is a very minor part of your total budget. Rathbone: It's a drop in the bucket. You know it costs about • The legislature did subsequently vote approval of this request.

10

Some Boston Voices in the Arts fifteen thousand dollars a day to keep the doors of this musemn open. B.T.: Have you ever discussed vi'ith officials of the city the possibility of any support? Rathbone: The city's financial situation really is as desperate as they say. Collins, an enlightened mayor, vi'ho was as sympathetic as any mayor, said publicly when we were having orientation sessions for new elected city officials about cultural resources of Boston, "Well, no matter what the problems of the museums are, you're not going to rely upon the city of Boston for any support at all—we're broke." I made a crack about having to pay a sewer tax to the city of Boston. Here's this great resource for all the people, and still we have to pay the city of Boston a sewer tax. B.T.: Yet San Francisco, which is comparable in size and many other respects to Boston, finds it possible to make sizable annual subsidies to its museums. Rathbone: The two major San Francisco museums together, of course, don't make this museum by any means—in importance, size, anything. We would need twice as much money as San Francisco gets from the city. Б.Т.: You would be happy to get even partial assistance, I presume. Rathbone: Of course. The Metropohtan gets a million five himdred and fifty every year from the city of New York-in cash or in wages to guards, etc. They get that and their land is cared for by the city. We have to take care of all this land aroimd here—mow it, and shovel the snow and trim the trees. The city doesn't even trim trees that belong to it. We have to do that or they wouldn't be trimmed. The Metropolitan also gets one half of the cost of any building expansion that it wants to undertake. So it has expanded a lot since the war. B.T.: What about corporations? Rathbone: In our campaign, our present campaign, we've had considerable response from Boston corporations for the first time. That's for capital funds for expansion.

11

Some Boston Voices in the Arts B.T.: Is this a new factor on the horizon? Rathhone: It is. I can teU you an interesting thing about the mentality of our trustees. When I first came here, after I'd become adjusted to the job and its problems, I said, "Well, I think it's time we went after corporate support for this museum." The reaction inevitably was, "No, you'll never get anything from Boston corporations. They know the museum is rich and, if it's rich, they're not going to give it anything. They'll give it to something that they consider poor." And I said, "Well, Harvard is rich and they continue to give to it, and M.I.T. is rich and the corporate contributions are enormous." Of course, we're not poor, but we can't do the job with what we've got. We run into a deficit of two himdred thousand or more every year. That's not beingrich—andwe're only doing half the job we should. It's taken a long time to break down this attitude. Part of the trouble is the fact that the trustees were less single-minded than the founding trustees. They take the museum rather for granted. It took a long time to get them out of that frame of mind. They said, "We won't permit you to go after corporate money. We won't authorize you to raise money from corporations. It would be a waste of time." Finallytihisattitude was eroded away. We have now got a lot of corporations to aid us, but there are many that haven't been touched yet. Б.Т.: What do you see as the future of support of this museum? Rathbone: This is the way I see it in a very broad style. Going back to the ambitions of the men who buüt this place is what interests me. When this building was designed in 1909, it covered this entire twelve acres. It looked like the Louvre. That was the ambition of men with private, untaxable income. They could think that big and do big things, and they conducted a magnificent expedition in Egypt, which made ours the greatest collection of Egyptian art outside of Cairo. When the income tax was instituted and big wealth was heavily taxed, that money was drawn off from this community and taken to Washington. As the years have gone by and the federal government has gotten more powerful and become more of a 'Ъig brother," it has handed 12

Some Boston Voices in the Arts back a certain amount of diis money to colleges, to universities, to hospitals, to certain schools, to welfare programs, to all sorts of things for the public good except museums and symphony orchestras. This is characteristically American—that if it's artistic it is therefore somebody's private concern, not the govenunent's. That's it in a nutshell. That's vt'hy most museums are in financial straits today, but the government doesn't see it yet. I look to the federal government in time for the kind of annual grants that will make the museums in this countryflourishthe way they should, and without government interference. We could do much bigger and more effective educational programs here if we had the means—much bigger. In putting our case to the legislators, we have made it clear we request fimds in order to subsidize visits to this museum and other educational services for the school children of the commonwealth—the service of television, for one thing. For years we have had an extensive service for the schools with display sets about one culture or another, which is a very effective means of stimulating interest in art and the museum. But it serves only the immediate vicinity. It isn't a statewide program. We could do more lectures for the schools. We have a couple of staff members who are good enough to talk on thirty different subjects. There's a rising interest that everybody's conscious of today, but the means at hand just don't suffice. That miserable auditorium of ours was built in 1915 for 360 people. It's uncomfortable. It's badly ventilated. The sight lines are poor. The acoustics aren't good, but to build a new one —a half million dollars. This is but one of the demands on our capital, not only for improvement, but also for maintenance. For example, we have had to spend a million dollars just on the roof in the past ten years. B.T.: What do you think of the idea of branch museums, touring stuff, getting stuff out of the basement. Is that practical or does it conflict with other roles of the museum? Rathbone: I think it varies from place to place. In Virginia, I think it's almost essential. Virginia has one center of cultureis

Some Boston Voices in the Arts Richmond—and that museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, has an artmobile or two that go around into the boondocks regularly and are a great success. Here you have museums of lesser stature scattered all the way across the state as far as the Berkshires. It would make more sense, I think, if we could provide those museums with touring exhibitions from here rather than with an artmobile. It should be realized, however, that there are certain restrictions on things here. There are lots of things, of course, that are immovable. And some things that it would be inadvisable to move for other reasons. But there are deep resources in this museiun which can be more widely spread." B.T.: One hears it said of the museum and also of the symphony, "Why should Bostonians support what is really something that the suburbs enjoy much more than the people of Roxbury, Dorchester, South Boston and so on?" Is that a legitimate complaint? Rathbone: No. It isn't in our case, because we're supported by people in the suburbs as much as in the city, perhaps even more so today. There is a ladies committee which has been very successful in stirring interest in the museum, in making its needs known and its services knovm. This committee is a large one —numbering sixty-six—and it is made up on a regional basis. It's a changing committee. Every community round about, whether it's Winchester or Quincy, Lynn or Concord, is represented. This has stirred marvelous suburban support for the museum, so that our membership reaches out over the whole mosaic of thirtyseven communities which constitute Greater Boston. B.T.; Obviously, there ought to be some form of regional government that would provide a regional tax base for an institution like this. Rathbone: No question. The way we are unfair to Boston is that the people in the suburbs enjoy this institution, which is on tax-free land, and we are depriving the Bostonians, in a sense, • With the aid of a private grant, the Museum did initiate use of an artmobile in the summer of 1969. It is also sending displays to schools in specially designed, tamper-proof cases.

14

Some Boston Voices in the Arts

of the tax that we would pay on this land. That's true. B.T.: There are school systems which bring their children? Rathbone: Oh, yes. B.T.: Does the Boston School System take advantage ofthat? Rathbone: They use it less than the suburbs. When we had the Tutankhamen show—this was two or three years ago—I don't know how many thousands of school children came to the exhibition. We had only a handful from the Boston schools. All the rest were from far and wide. That's the school system's fault, and a fault we have now corrected. This is a much more important museum than you would expect to find in a city of this size. It's the second greatest comprehensive museum in this hemisphere—the Metropolitan being the greatest. That's amazing for a city of six or seven hundred thousand people. It's not in Philadelphia, which is an enormous city. It isn't in Chicago. It isn't in Los Angeles. It's in this httle place—Boston. Β.Γ.; If you were an arts advisor of the city, would you have any recommendations in general about what might be proposed to improve the cultural milieu? For instance, would you think it a good idea to have a cultural affairs office in the city? Rathbone: Svire. I'm certainly fond of music and theater and attend it all the time, but my principal interest is in the visual expression of man, and I don't think nearly enough emphasis is put on the beauty of one's daily surroundings. And that cultural office ought to have some control over what is done from the point of view of maintaining beauty in the city. I mean there should be control over where the billboards are placed. They shouldn't be within so many hundred feet of our public parks. This kind of thing ought to be strictly enforced. In St. Louis where I was before I came here, there was an art commission of which the museimi director was an ex officio member. And we had billboard problems every time we sat down—once a month. We were terribly strict about this regulation and it certainly helped. I don't think there's much control here. There should be control over developers, highway engineers, neon sign makers and parking lot operators. The mayor should be encouraged and 15

Some Boston Voices in the Arts

guided. There should be support for the Parks Department. A city can be a work of art, sustaining its citizens, not brutalizing them.

From an Interview with Tom Leiirer (July 29,1967) Lehrer: What are you going to be doing in your Boston study? Are you going to be writing about how to keep the symphony alive? And how to keep museums alive? And theater? Why bother? Those things are essentially dead, and nobody really cares about them any more, except in terms of social rather than artistic events. The symphony's only real role now is in making recordings, and the theater, except as a workshop or training ground, has practically been replaced by the movies. These things concern only a small minority, and I am no more disturbed by their decline than I would be by the demise of polo.

From an Interview witli Warren Lynch Soloist with the Boston Ballet Company (October 27,1967) Lynch: I've been with the company for five years. I'd love to stay but I wonder if I can afford it. I may have to go to another company somewhere else in the country or give up dance altogether as a career, though I'd hate to do that. But I'm married, and it's almost impossible to make a living here in dance. In some other states, dancers can get unemployment insurance during the lay-off periods between seasons. This keeps them going. For many of them it's the thing that makes all the difference, even though it's not much money. But in Massachusetts it seems that you don't get unemployment insurance if you work for a nonprofit outfit. It's not so bad for the girls in the company. They can live at home during the lay-off period. But it's reaUy tough on the men, particularly those who are married.· * Mr. Lynch did, in fact, leave the Boston Ballet Company at the end of the 1968 season, and move to Nevtf York.

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Some Boston Voices in the Arts An Interview with E. Virginia Williams Artistic director of the Boston Ballet Company (October 3, 1968) Williams: I have encountered a great deal of apathy about the state of the performing arts in Boston. It is shocking that a city—one which has a cultural heritage, as Boston has—should appear to show little or no interest in developing indigenous ballet and opera companies, and repertory drama companies as well. The patrons of the arts in Boston seem to be perfectly content with visiting products. When asked to contribute toward the support of the Boston Ballet Company, many have asked: "What do we need a company of our own in Boston for, when the best foreign companies come here on visits?" Yet these companies do not come often and they play very limited engagements in Boston, dancing only ballets with minimal scenery, since there is no theater available in Boston that can accommodate fuU-sized, complete baUet or opera sets. I don't understand why Boston doesn't feel that it is imperative to build and develop its own performing arts companies, to take pride in its own burgeoning artists. We employ between eighteen and twenty-six dancers. About 90 percent of our dancers are bom and trained in New England. We offer them the background of a stable classical ballet school attached to the company. Our Boston season is still comparatively short. Outside of Boston, the Boston Ballet Company performs for schools, colleges, civic organizations, and television. Larger audiences for all the arts must be developed in the northeastern United States. This takes continuity and time. Until very recently our chief support has come from New York —from George Balanchine and from W. McNeil Lowry of the Ford Foundation. People think we are rich because we have had a Ford Foundation grant, $100,000 a year for three years, but the grant pays for less than a third of our yearly expenses, and will run out in October of 1969. What then? B.T.: How has Balanchine helped? Williams: He has helped in every conceivable way. He has lent us costumes and scenery, he has given us choreography for 17

Some Boston Voices in the Arts many of his own ballets. He gave us a set of Symphony in С costumes, and a set of men's costumes for Scotch Symphony that were no longer used by the New York City Ballet Company, and he lent us scenery and costumes for Prodigal Son. I wouldn't blame Mr. Balanchine if he ignored our requests—he has his own company to think of—but he never has. Sometimes when I get discouraged I think it would be easier to leave Boston and go to New York and work with one of the established dance companies. But when I tell Mr. Balanchine this he says: "You can't give up. You have to make a ballet company in Boston." That's what he usually says, but I remember once he just looked at me for a long time and then said, "If I had had the obstacles you have in Boston, I'd have become a farmer instead of making a ballet company." B.T.: The ballet company was involved in Summerthing. How did that work out? Williams: It was a wonderful experience for us aU. In many of the neighborhoods the dancers developed a close rapport with the people. It was gratifying to see that happen. It is amazing that Americans, particularly those who have very Httle opportunity to attend live theater performances, are so conditioned to home television that they have forgotten how to be audiences. At first we had to compete with many distractions—noise, running back and forth, babies crying, etc. But always, as the evening wore on, one could feel attention increasing and an absorption enveloping the audience. We all found this very moving. In one of the most difficult places, a small crowded city park, the people were unusually restless and noisy. There was no place to sit down and those who came had to stand up for the whole program, which was an hour and a quarter long. Our program included one American folk work and two classical ballets with music by Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn. When a dancer came on the stage in tights in Scotch Symphony, some young people started to whistle and shout. But as the man started to dance, their attention increased and they became interested and intensely quiet. At the beginning of the program there was

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something in the faces out there we didn't understand. Anger? It was difficult to say. Yet, little by Uttle as the dancing went on, one could see the faces changing, almost in spite of themselves. A look of peace, serenity, and quiet came over all their faces. It was awesome. Some of our dancers had been nervous about dancing out of doors because they had read about summer riots in other cities. But I persuaded them to dance, and they all got enormous satisfaction from dancing for the enthusiastic audiences—talking to people of all ages—from youngsters to senior citizens. They found they made many new friends. Β.Γ.; When did you say your grant runs out? Williams: In October of 1969. B.T.: What will you do then? Williams: I just don't know.

From an Interview with Sinclair Hitchings

Keeper of prints, Boston Public Library, and member of the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities from 1966 to 1969 ( September 29,1969 ) Hitchings: In the arts, Boston is great in what it has. It should also be great in what it does.

An Interview with Elma Lewis

Founder of the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts and the National Center of Afro-American Artists (December 10,1969) B.T.: I once heard a definition you gave of the arts that impressed me. "My personal form of expression is the arts," you said. "The arts to me are education, the arts are our cultural heritage, the arts are the dignity and soul of man. That's what it's all about." Lewis: Did I say that? I'd forgotten. That's part of it, certainly. 19

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B.T.: Would you like to amplify? Lewis: Oh, it's too early in the afternoon to try to be profound. Let's just talk a while and maybe come back to that later. B.T.: O.K. I'd like to catch up on what's happening at the school and center here. It's been, I think, about a year and a half since the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston donated to you these two buildings at Elm and Seaver—the Temple Mishkin Tefila and its school building. You had planned to transform the temple building into a performing arts center. How is that project coming along? Lewis: That part is going more slowly than we had hoped. B.T.; Why? Lewis: One word—money. We've had architectural plans made for the conversion of the building, but it's going to cost something like three million doUars. When we foimd that out, we thought of tearing the building down and starting from scratch. But to do that—to put up a new building for the center—would cost six million. So we go along just as fast as we can on that. I'm trying to raise capital funds from the business community. Our largest gifts so far for this have been from the Cabot Corporation and from Eastern Gas. They each gave $25,000. The Globe has been generous too, in a variety of ways. I wish I could get the Greater Boston community to see what a significant achievement it would be if they would band together to raise the three million doUars necessary to rehabilitate these buildings and make the National Center of Afro-American Artists a moniunentaUy beautiful reahty. If they would do that, we could say, "Look, Jewish people gave this. Black people put this with it. The business community added that. The foundations did fte—and aU together, look what was producedl" It would be a magnificent re-statement of this country's ideals, and it reaUy wouldn't cost anybody a great deal. And even those who are insincere could salve their consciences. B.T.; You mean, you don't care what their motives are so long as they do the right thing?

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Lewis: That's right. I don't examine people's motives. That's their responsibility to God. I have enough trouble discharging my own responsibilities. Β.Γ.: Meanwhile, the school is in operation, isn't it? Lewis: Oh, sure. The school is in full swing. We have now four hundred students enrolled—from six years of age and up. You can be any age and still stay here. We make only a nominal charge. Nobody is turned down for lack of money to pay the fees. This school is too important to these youngsters' hves to tum them away for that. The students are enrolled in 155 different classes offering instruction in dance, drama, music, art, costiuning, and technical theater. Most individuals are enrolled in several different disciplines of the arts and take as many as ten classes per week—so that we give maybe 3,800 lessons in the course of a week. We have a staff of some sixty people—a paid staff, at least twenty-five of whom are involved in music instruction, because of the different instruments. All this is almost impossible to fimd. Our main source thus far has been a Ford Foundation grant of $400,000, which was to cover a four-year period for teaching music. The first year's portion was an outright gift of $100,000. That was this year. Starting next year—1970—we must match the grant dollar for dollar. We can match it with any kind of program or administrative money; we cannot match it with bricks-and-mortar money. I'm afraid we have not done too good a job of remaining solvent so far. Our operating expenses have been probably $7,500. All we've had coming in was about $3,500 a week. So you can see we've been doing deficit spending of $4,000 a week. We've been fortunate to be able to go to some of our philanthropic friends and business concerns and have them pick up some of this deficit. And we do all sorts of things to try to keep alive. You may have seen some posters on your way into the building. The Globe paid for the plates for them, and for the paper. We're selling them for two dollars apiece. We do what we can. Our situation wiH be somewhat better now, because our dance teaching program is going to be funded. 21

Some Boston Voices in the Arts Б.Т.: That is to be funded by the $330,000 Rockefeller Foundation grant that was announced this week? Lewis: Yes. That grant is for three years, in diminishing amounts-$130,000 in 1970, $110,000 in 1971, and $90,000 in 1972. So now two of our programs are funded but we still need to fund our drama, costuming, technical theater, and art programs. Our grants bring into the school something over $200,000 a year, but our annual expenses are around $500,000. So obviously we still need lots of help. B.T.: Some people are unclear as to what the difference is between the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts and the National Center of Afro-American Artists. Lewis: You could compare it to Lincob Center. That's the big, overall center, with the various arts groups as well as Juilliard all part of it. We propose much the same thing. What gives people difficulty perhaps is that the school startedfirst—nextyear wiU be our twentieth anniversary. But then JuiUiard also started before Lincoln Center did. The Ehna Lewis school is the teaching arm and the center will be the professional operation and the national platform. We get mail from all over the country alreadyasking for help, for advice, for performing units, for written material. And we're making alliances with arts organizations in other cities. This center then wiU be the parent of the Elma Lewis school. I don't know how the child gets bom before the parent, but it happened. B.T.: "The child is father of the man-" Lewis: Something like that. B.T.: How would you summarize the aims of the center and the reason for its existence? Lewis: When black people are presented in the context of white arts—white arts groups or programs—we find we are presented as . . . as some exotic piece. Well, we really don't feel like exotic pieces. We feel like the very stuff of hfe. Also, in that context we're presented from the point of view of someone else's bias—not necessarily malicious bias, but simply lack of ability to understand another kind of person's viewpoint. We think it 22

Some Boston Voices in the Arts cannot be valid for white people to play that role. We think that black people have got to present ourselves as we see ourselves and as we know ourselves. It seems to frighten some white people that we want to do that, that we want to know ourselves— that we want our own thing. I don't see why that should be so frightening. When you came into this yeshiva building today, you may have noticed that you walked across the Star of David. Each doorknob in this school has the Star of David on it. And the menorah and the Torah and all the walls have such symbols. To me, that doesn't declare that Jewish people hate Christians. What it says is that Jewish people love themselves and their own heritage. And that's fine, I think. It's beautiful. But as soon as black people assert that kind of pride, somebody calls it racism. I caimot for the life of me understand such an attitude. To my mind, this center is to be a platform where we say, "This is who we are. This is what we're about." I am engaged in teaching people to become artists. But when they do become artists, how can they be expected to wait around until that rare and occasional moment when white Western civilization says, "All right, you exotic one, this is your moment." And then a little later says, "That's enough—crawl back in the woodwork!" That is just what has happened to us in the past. Every now and then they would smile on a black artist—on a Sidney Poitier or some other. Even people like me, I sit here and say to myself, "Tomorrow, they can decide not to print my name in the newspapers any more, and it's all over." It's as simple as that. We've had to depend on white people's whims. Well, we can't exist on people's whims. If I help to create an artist, I am obligated to help provide that artist vvdth a platform. If a little girl leams to dance, she—logically, just like a little girl studying dance with Virginia Williams—wants to be able to dance in a company eventually. So I have to make a company in which that girl can dance. Nor is it right for white Americans to say, 'Tou have the Alvin Alley Company. What more do you want?" We have to have alternatives just like anybody else. And one alternative should be for the little black 23

Some Boston Voices in the Arts girl to dance in a white company, if that's her ambition. That too should be her privilege. In short, black people have to have the same opportunity, the same interchange, the same mobility that anybody else has. That's vs'hat the National Center of Afro-American Artists is all about. B.T.: Would you take white artists into your companies? Lewis: We do. We have the Talley Beatty Company. One of the main dancers is a Swede. We don't at the moment happen to have any white dance teachers but a number of our music teachers are white. Б.Т.: So you think it is possible for a troupe or company to achieve that sense of racial pride and integrity you spoke of without necessarily being exclusively black? Lewis: I really don't think a Christian could have played the "Fiddler" role like Zero Mostel. There's something there that he knows and understands by virtue of his heritage. I dare say there were a lot of Christian people in that cast. I don't suppose you were asked, "Are you Jevdsh?" when you came for an audition. But still I do think there had to be a significant number of Jevdsh people in the cast to keep that special flavorto make that thing as beautiful as it was. I don't feel that something like that is a rejection of me. I don't think I ought to expect to be the president of Hadassah. Similarly, I don't understand why white people want to come into our things and run them. What I'm saying is that a people's heritage is something to be treasured. B.T.: The black children in your school do Shakespeare, and also traditional ballets, so perhaps— Lewis: When we do such a program before a black audience, it vidll win fantastic applause, cheers, a standing ovation— everything. Yet I can tell you that that audience doesn't give the response to the ballet that they give to the drums. There is something about a people's mutual identity. There must be some reason that all those Jewish people live together around Cleveland Circle, around Nevrton. They hke the savor, each of the other. The same with Italian and vidth Irish neighborhoods. 24

Some Boston Voices in the Arts I do not have to live in Roxbury. I do because I like the savor of these people around me. Jewish people pay more attention to identity than anybody I know. And they are also the most tolerant of other people's identity. I think that's because they pay so much attention to their ovra. I don't think you can love anybody else until you know how to love yourself. B.T.: We have been talking about what you are doing for the black community in Boston. But it seems to me that what you are doing goes beyond that and is of major import for the whole city. Lewis: I hope so. I hope I'm doing something for America. I speak bitterly of America, you know. I speak bitterly because I am unloved. When one loves unrequitedly, one becomes bitter. I think that's really what the bitterness is you hear from the blacks. This is our country and we're angry because we loved it and it didn't love us back. Yet I think we do keep trying to love it and improve it. What people think they hear us saying is that we hate the coimtry. But that couldn't be true or we would all be expatriates or we would in fact tear it dovra or something. But we do keep trying. The Playhouse in the Park, for instance, is one of the ways I have been trying. B.T.: You will be continuing that playhouse this summer? Leuns: Certainly. In fact, I am opening a second scene in the park. You know, I started the Playhouse in the Park so that we could have a nice classical theater in the middle of the park, which would be free to everybody all svimmer long. Now some of the young people have been coming around and talking and distracting people's attention. So I find that I must offer them a certain amount of their kind of fare—soul music and such. Next summer we'll open a second scene in which we'll do a totally different kind of thing from what we have been doing in the playhouse. We'll have both kinds of things going. Franklin Park is in a nice position strategically. It's bounded on one side by the black commimity, on another by the Irish, and on stiU another by the Jewish commimity. I think the mayor is going to be helpful to us. So we'U have two things going out there. 25

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Incidentally, I would like to recall one thing about our Franklin Park programs. We have been there now four seasons without any policemen. On some nights we have had up to five thousand people. Those have not been the hard nights. Those are the easy nights, because the very fact that you've attracted five thousand people means that you've had an extraordinary show. The hard nights have been the nights that attracted two hundred people—because the show must, of necessity, not have been too great, and people aren't paying attention and are wandering around. But even on those difficult nights, in a park where the electricity failed three or four years ago and was never repaired—imagine a great 490-acre space with no lights!— all those people have been able to gather perfectly peacefully, with no policemen and no crime. Think about thatl I think it's a tribute. This, I think, is what black America is about. Б.Т.: To return to the matter of the two buildings donated to you by the Combined Jewish Philanthropies—for that's a remarkable story—there was to be discerned in some quarters on that occasion the feehng that now at last Elma Lewis should be grateful and satisfied and stop being such a pest about her needs. Are you grateful? Are you satisfied? Lewis: I am far from satisfied, but I am grateful—for the start. I'll be even more grateful when the buildings are rehabihtated. I am also grateful—no, "grateful" is the wrong word. I am giad that I was able to convince the Jewish community that doing what they did makes more sense and makes for more peace and harmony than using something hke those buildings to the nth degree while making a great deal of money from the people in that community and then abandoning them and letting the wrecker's hammer hit them rather than letting the people use them. Because that, you see, cannot make for peace—it cannot. And I am also very grateful to Mr. Goldston. You know, when this property was transferred to us, twenty Jewish businessmen put die money together to give to the people who were in this property—the New England Hebrew Academy—the sum they 26

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needed in order to move to Brookline. The people who owned the buildings were poor. They needed money in order to establish themselves in Brookline. And the money did not come from Combined Jewish Philanthropies, except in a pro forma way. It came from wealthy Jewish businessmen, contributing from their businesses or personal resources. But Mr. Goldston was the only one who then turned around and added another contribution onto the other side of the table, recognizing that the buildings were in rotten condition and would have to be rehabilitated. I said to you I was glad I was able to convince them that this action made sense. Because all the way along we black people have been giving our money to the white community. Whenever we hght the gas, we have to pay Mr. Goldston's gas company. Whenever we go to Stop and Shop, we have to take our money to the white community. Whenever we buy clothes, we have to take our money to the white community. Everything we do, we have to take our money to the white community. And then when we go ask them for something, they say, "Blacks are always begging." Isn't that ludicrous? We have not been allowed to build any businesses. We are just now getting to start little tiny ones—and, you know, that's going to take six generations to make a fortune. B.T.: You don't want to wait that long? Lewis: We won't. It's as simple as that. We won't.

From an Interview with Harold Tovish Sculptor and Fellow of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T. from 1967 to 1969 (March 30,1968) Tovish: For an artist there are certain advantages to living in the Boston area. You can live a much more normal, a more human life here. New York is hell, by comparison. For instance, I can run an errand—let's say to buy some materials—and be back in my studio in a couple of hours. In New York that could 27

Some Boston Voices m the Arts be an exhausting all-day expedition. In general, the quality of life around Boston is better—fewer irritations, fewer demands on your energy. We moved here about a dozen years ago and bought a big house in Brookline, big enough so that—my wife, Marianna Pineda, is a sculptor, too—we both have studios. It would cost a fortune to duplicate our setup ia New York—it would be out of the question. Another thing—artists in this area don't see much of each other. You don't find cliques here as you do in New York—you know, they engage in ideological warfare down there and it can get pretty bloody—downright vicious at times. On the whole, I think it is a good thing that artists here tend to be "loners"— not that differences don't exist; they do, certainly, but it somehow doesn't matter as much, it does not become a burden. In general, the pressure on us is less intense. New York is jammed with artists all fighting for attention—they have to get it or go under, and it makes for an atmosphere of hysteriadesperation. Some artists actually hire press agents to keep them in the public's eye; anybody who did that up here would be laughed out of town. It would be pointless—an idiotic waste of money. I believe that any artist who has real ability can get his work shown in Boston. Not that good artists are never neglected here—I can think of a few who are—but that generally speaking, fewer are ignored. An artist doesn't become "obsolete" overnight the way he can in New York. The latest fashion in art does not intimidate people around here the way it does in New York. Boston is slower to accept an artist, but it is also slower to drop him. Once an artist establishes his reputation here, his work will be taken seriously; it won't be condemned as "irrelevant" because it does not appear to be up-to-the-minute. It may not always be like this—there already are indications that the New York scene is having its effect on Boston. Of course, it is not all peaches and cream—a very small handful of artists in the area make their living as artists; most have to teach or do something else. The art market up here is 28

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minute compared to New York. It is a fact of life that an artist does not earn a national reputation by exhibiting in the Boston area. Eventually, he must show in New York and establish himself there. If he can do this without having to go live in New York, he win be a lucky man, I think, because he can work more peacefully, more thoughtfully, in this part of the country.

An Interview with Frederick P. Walkey Executive director of the DeCordova Museum (November 10,1967) Walkey: You want my opinion of what's going on in the visual arts in Boston? I'll tell you. I've said it for publication several times. The city is dead artistically, particularly in the visual arts. And it's dead because there's no adequate leadership on the part of our major institutions. Basically, they are just not doing the job that has to be done. If the Museum of Fine Arts would do a more aggressive job in the area of the contemporary arts, this whole region would be a much more creative place. For one thing, the museum should be encouraging private collecting among the wealthy leaders of the community. In New York this is done but in Boston it isn't. In Boston a business leader who collects modem art is considered a freak. He's considered an outlandish, peculiar type of personality. The conservatism here has been disastrous. In St. Louis, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Cleveland, the major museums have done an extraordinary job in developing collectors and bringing important artists to the museum. Here they do nothing. They don't even give any space to major contemporary shows. They don't develop the collections in the New England area. They simply have decided that this is not something in which they wish to become involved. B.T.; The museum would contend that its responsibihty is to the ages—to history. Walkey: I don't agree with that. I believe that a balanced 29

Some Boston Voices in the Arts program must be stressed between responsibility to the past and responsibility to the present and the future. An institution like that is not only a repository, it's a social institution and a social force—a social force for good, I hope. B.T.: Specifically, how do you think the Museum of Fine Arts could function to exert this kind of leadership? Walkey: Well, every five years or so it could have a major exhibition of American contemporary works. This would dramatize the fact that the Museum of Fine Arts believes that these things are important and believes that it's wortìi putting its weight, its prestige, and its curatorial departments at work to put on a major exhibition of the contemporary period. B.T.: And you think that that would stimulate private collecting? Walkey: Absolutely! No question about it! It would give credence and importance to the role of tìie collector. It would assist the commercial galleries. There are a thousand and one things it would do. It would have real meaning in a city like this; it would be contagious. B.T.: But isn't this the function of the Institute of Contemporary Art? Walkey: No, because the ICA is a weak institution, with no money behind it. You can't exercise leadership if you don't have the money to exercise leadership and if you have people involved in it that are using it for every reason except its primary purpose. B.T.: The private collections in Boston are not of significance? Walkey: How many are there? You can't even name them. There are only two or three, and they're not very significant. Those who do collect don't get any credit for what they are doing. Max Wasserman's the first one who's done any substantial collecting. Outside of his collection you can't find another. I'm constantly scouting and searching around to find one. Saltonstall originally had some good ideas. Steve Paine's working hard on it—he's got a good collection. Brandeis is doing something of significance in this area, but I don't think it's as impressive now as it was when Sam Hunter was there. Sam was a real dynamo. 30

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B.T.: Do you have any expectations that the Museum of Fine Arts will change its policy or its attitude? Walkey: No. It's a lost cause. I think it's gone backward in the last ten years. It was much more forward-looking a few years ago. B.T.: But if that's your premise, then what do you think should be done in the Boston area to achieve the kind of creative ferment you would like to see here? Walkey: Some of us have been toying with the idea of bringing some of the cultural enterprises together, forming a kind of alliance. We're thinking of calling it the Metropolitan Cultural AUiance. It wouldn't have the very biggest outfits in it. They are happy to go it alone. But it would have a number of the other stable, professional cultural organizations as members. We think it could be useful. Naturally we hope that it will help to simplify and augment fund-raising. Probably we could do something in the way of sharing mailing hsts and a number of other things. Those are things for our benefit. We're also thinking we'd like to do some things for the region's benefit. One thing that I, at any rate, would like to see if we could do would be to get some money together—from the state and from some other sources—and then band together and put on about every three years a festival of the contemporary arts in the War Memorial Auditorium. We would use the existing institutions йке the opera company and the ballet company and some of the musical groups that are to be found here in the city and also bring in some other outside organizations. We'd try to put on something important, albeit necessarily restricted because of the financial limitations, and not too pretentious—a good festival of visual and performing arts within the capabilities of the institutions that are doing it. B.T.: How would that differ from Winterfest, from the old Boston Arts Festival? Walkey: Winterfest was never conceived as an important cultural enterprise. It was more of a free-for-aU with everything in it from karate to police dogs. The Boston Arts Festival was a 31

Some Boston Voices in the Arts perfectly good thing except that it wasn't viable ia that physical location as an outdoor festival. You cannot do things of importance in the rain and in the fog and in the muck. And you can't really do a thing like that on an annual basis. It's too exhausting an effort. I would say that about three years is the proper cycle for such an enterprise. And I think it should be professionally run. I'd like to see it run by a group composed of the directors of institutions like the Charles Playhouse and the Boston Ballet and the Institute of Contemporary Art and ourselves—people at that level. Then you have a professional point of view about what's happening. So about every three years you would come up with a kind of grand contemporary pubHc celebration. In the interim period you could do things through television. You could sponsor community things within other areas of the city. There are a thousand and one ways that a lively arts-oriented agencysupported somewhat the way the United Community Fund is supported—could be a vahd and exciting and important contribution to the city's life. No, I don't mean the city's life, I mean the metropolis' life. This alhance or council should take in an area of aboutfifteenor twenty miles from the state house, embracing almost everything within Route 128 or even beyond. And then you have a viable metropolitan area. With something that broad you could go to industries all up and down Route 128 and get support from them for such a community fund of the arts. What I'm getting at, I think, is that we should have some way to spark an excitement within the city, to generate some new kinds of activities. The old arts power structures aren't doing it. Right now it's a very static situation. It ought to be possible to do wonders for Boston, to make Boston really important in the arts. There's no organization doing it now. We are just carrying out our own little selfish roles at the moment. B.T.: A city administration which cared about this sort of thing could prove a great stimulus, I would think. Walkey: Of course it could. The mayor would have to understand the need for metropolitanization though. That is 32

Some Boston Voices in the Arts paramount. The old political dynasties in Boston are unbelievable. We also have to bring the different ethnic groups into what we're doing. We haven't got any Catholics or Irishmen involved in the arts here. It's terrible. They support only the church. The Italians barely have gotten in, but there's no leadership there. The arts are stül in the hands of either the Jewish community or the Brahmins. It's too bad. We are never going to get anywhere until the people who run the arts and the people who run the government begin talking with each other. It's incredible how far apart they are. You know, the Boston Symphony doesn't have a box set aside for the governor. I think there should be a box for the governor and also for the mayor. And on concert days the mayor should be able to give out tickets to his box if he doesn't choose to use them and the governor should be able to do the same thing. I went to Berlin a few years ago. When we couldn't get tickets for a performance my friend said, "I'll get them." So we got to use a box that the head of the Department of Education or something of that sort had. It was a beautiful box up in the side of the new opera house, and that's where we sat because the political administrators had those tickets. The mayor should go to the symphony from time to time and he should bring some of his cronies or his friends or his other people. In the old days when the Boston Arts Festival was in existence, once a year some of us who were involved in it would have a meeting with the city council. Boy, that was terriblel They always acted as if we were a bunch of Communists and hippies and everything elseeven though we were rather distinguished representatives, quite respectable people really. But their attitude toward people in the arts was pretty negative, because they were outside it. We never had any other contact with them. Nobody ever made them feel a part of that thing. What I'm saying really is that the arts ought to have an interplay with all of the power structures. I think the cardinal too should have a seat in Symphony HaU or a box and go there from time to time. But do you ever see this? Do you ever see the cardinal being made an important

33

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person in Symphony Hall or getting involved vnith any of the arts? No. This is сгагу. There's ecumenical activity going on all over the place nowadays—in every field except the arts, it seems. From an Interview with Kaiman Novak Director of the Community Music Center of Boston and conductor of the Civic Symphony of Boston (April 30,1969) Novak: To my mind, the cultural excitement of a community should be measured in terms of the number of people who are doing things in the arts, not just the number of people who are buying tickets. I was talking recently with some people who bought a house in Belmont. They are amateur musicians who love to play. When I asked them why they chose Belmont, they told me that they had looked in the national directory of amateur chamber music players—that's a directory you can use, wherever you happen to be, to find someone with whom to make music for the pleasure of it—and they had found that for its size Belmont has a higher saturation of chamber music players listed than any other town in the country. That, to me, is very significant—that on any given night there may be hundreds of people playing string quartets in their living rooms there. I think of that as a much more important phenomenon than the fact, say, that on a given Friday afternoon twenty-sis hundred people will be in Symphony Hall—maybe listening to the orchestra, maybe just listening to each other coughing and whispering. Similarly, I find what happens at the DeCordova Museum very exciting—with all the art classes filled to capacity and with all the activity that goes on there. It's a museum that has really involved the people of the area. Again, this seems to me more significant—well, let's say as significant—as the number of Rembrandts in the Museum of Fine Arts. I wouldn't want to do away with the Rembrandts in order to have nothing but museums like the DeCordova, but the Rembrandts aren't enough. That's the whole point. 34

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B.T.: In the Civic Symphony you conduct, the musicians may be doctors or lawyers or— Novak: That's right. One of the virtues of the Civic Symphony is the opportunity it gives people from all walks of life and from different economic levels and ethnic backgrounds to come together and do something together that matters to them. There may be a Lincoln Lab scientist sitting next to a retired MTA worker. This is the kind of cross section you find in a community orchestra. These people get to meet and know each other as equals in a way that seldom happens in our society. Along this hne, one of the most exciting things I've ever experienced was a meeting last summer in the mayor's office of representatives of all the neighborhoods in Boston to talk about how to organize a summer festival in the neighborhoods—the project that later became known as Summerthing. A summer festival is itself a pretty exciting business, but to me the most exciting aspect was to see people coming together from Roxbury, Hyde Park, Jamaica Plain, East Boston, and the rest—people who otherwise would never have had any reason to be in touch with each other. It was a wonderful experience.

An Interview with David Wheeler and Frank Cassidy Wheeler is the artistic director of the Theatre Company of Boston; Cassidy was until 1969 the company's producer. ( The interview was November 16,1967. ) B.T.: I'd like very much to hear you talk about what the situation is in Boston and what the outlook is. Wheeler: There's an irony here. The artistic possibilities are enormous in Boston. There's a marvelously sophisticated audience that challenges you to do your best. On the other hand, it's very hard to raise money here, probably because Boston has such a strong cultural tradition that people don't feel they have to do anything. B.T.: Is that really a fact? 35

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Wheeler: I suspect from the way people from Atlanta and Houston talk to us that their money-raising is easier. Cassidy: In given towns—in the Midwest—industry will put money into a cultural organization because it knows that it's one of the things that will attract key personnel. Boston doesn't need it. There is an enormous working intellectual group who are attracted by the other elements in Boston, by the cultural institutions that are here. They come to Harvard, they come to M.I.T., and they stay. They go out on Route 128. You don't have to cook up something to attract them, and the business community knows it. B.T.: How big is your income gap—the difference between what you can earn and your total expenses? Wheeler: Somewhere between thirty andfiftythousand. We had twenty-two-five from the government last year. We have fifteen from the government and twenty-one thousand from the Rockefeller Foundation this year. Β.Γ.: How much of the money that you're getting from the foundations can you expect to continue to get? Wheeler: That's a good question. The "private" foundations tell you that you should think in terms of phasing out their aid, and that's not so easy as they diink. Our Rockefeller grant is specifically for new plays. We can't use it for our building fund, for example. It is earmarked for three new productions and six staged readings. The foundation recognizes that we continue to be one of the few theaters in the country that have this interest and put new plays regularly on the schedule. Instead of trying to make afive-weekor four-week run for every play, we cut the new plays down to two. We work on the new plays very hard, do them thoroughly but quickly, and keep tìiem on subscription. B.T.: Can you get an audience for two weeks for a new play? Wheeler: Yes. It's the subscription audience, who say in advance, "We want to see what you do, including the new plays that excite you. We'll go to seven plays, so long as you give us four powerful old plays"—"old" like Pinter and Arden. 36

Some Boston Voices in the Arts B.T.: I like that definition of an old play. Wheeler: They are plays somebody else has produced somewhere, even if not in America. We can count on only about two thousand subscribers, and though we'll try to have students in at cheap rates, we'll also plan just the two-week runs for the new plays. Cassidy: We get the subscribers for the new plays, but we get practically no box office business otherwise, almost regardless of the reviews. What we ask the Rockefeller Foundation to do is pick up the difference between the average weekly gross on an "old" play and the average weekly gross on the new one. B.T.: How big a company do you have? Wheeler: It goes from seven or eight to fifteen or sixteen Equity, and we'll work with from two or three to fifteen local nonprofessionals. We had fifteen local nonpros (primarily students ) for Marat Sade, who were paid small stipends. B.T.: Are there difficulties in keeping a company like this going in Boston? Wheeler: We try to get the New York actors to come up for two or three shows, about half a season. Some actors stay with us for the whole season, but we really don't expect that. New York is so close, and actors return to us with great zest because they prefer this work to television—except monetarily. In effect, we use a pool of actors—Theatre Company of Boston actors— who are regularly in New York and who will come any time their schedules allow. Obviously, this is a much less expensive arrangement than having them here steadily, and they prefer the chance to make solid money in New York on occasion. Moreover, they all know one another now—there's really a "regular" group of about twelve, and in each play there are usually only one or two actors who haven't worked together before at TCB. This system has come about accidentally, from financial necessity, but an "ensemble" really has developed. B.T.; So you really find that arrangement perfectly satisfactory? Wheeler: Let's say that it has worked very well, and I keep seeing problems with other theaters' "ensembles." They can 37

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become indebted, so to speak, to their veterans, so that they're not willing to take a chance on their youngsters, giving them roles that might develop them quickly. The youngsters wait some three or four years for challenging roles when perhaps they could come along much faster. I think that's one thing the American Conservatory Theatre, in San Francisco, has done by virtue of having many productions; they're able to put heavy responsibility on many actors at the same time, and thus to develop them quickly. B.T.: I'd like to hear a little more about some of the special opportunities and problems of Boston. Why do you operate here rather than elsewhere? Cassidy: There is an enormous group of young people hereyoung professionals, young teachers, etc. B.T.: So for reaching a vital, young, alert audience, Boston is a good place? Wheeler: It's not what you do for them, but what they do for you—what they demand, what they require of you. They ask that you be excited about the plays yourself, and if you come up with something that shifts out of the ordinary and conventional, they are able to see it and go with it. Boston is known to be the great try-out town, with a literate, sophisticated, theater audience. If Homecoming is voyaging to the United States, the one port they will make before New York is Boston. B.T.: How did you happen to set up here rather than New York? Wheeler: When Frank and I came to Boston, there really wasn't any way to work steadily in New York with new "experimental" theater. A director had to work on the off-Broadway success for eight months while doing nothing else. The present off-Broadway situation discourages repertory totally. In 1965 the Theatre Company of Boston opened Arden's Live like Pigs off-Broadway, and since we had done E. E. Cummings' Him in Boston and Mrs. Cummings had loved it, we wanted to open that fascinating, funny show in a repertory arrangement. We told Equity we had good reviews for Live like Pigs, but we were 38

Some Boston Voices in the Arts struggling, and if we could put E. E. Cummings' piece into repertory with Pigs, it would honor our company and make the whole thing go. Equity said, "Only if you increase ( approximately double) the salaries you pay." So Him was not done, and the struggle persisted. It was simply enormously difficult. A writer I know has said, "In the New York theater you spend most of your time in lawyers' offices, and in the corridors of the mighty." Working out of Boston, to get a Pinter script, or an Arden script, to persuade a writer to come and experiment on his piece, you don't have such a hassle. B.T.: Don't you have to pay Equity actors the same salary here that they are paid in New York? Wheeler: You pay them more than off-Broadway, but here you can have a certain proportion of non-Equity performers in a large cast, whereas you get into problems with nonpros in New York. For Left-Handed Liberty next year we'll cast twelve Equity actors and fourteen Boston University students. B.T.: When I asked you about why you prefer playing in Boston, I thought that the one thing you might say is that you can make a splash here, whereas it's hard to make a splash in New York. Wheeler: No, it's not a question of being a big frog in a little pond. B.T.: I don't mean that. I mean that in Boston there is perhaps feedback—a sense of dialogue, of impact. Wheeler: There is a continuity of feedback, that's true. Even the American Place Theatre in New York, which has tried so hard to start this dialogue you speak of, has not gained an audience, I believe, that is in touch with their performers. Also, I think there's a better chance in Boston for being at the forefront of the American theater. This city can become a refuge for actors, for writers, for artists; whereas in New York agents are after them, producers pursue them, publishers entice them. For an actor confusion sets in between his image and his reality that gradually deprives him of freedom. 39

Some Boston Voices in the Arts

Cassidy: Our great worry, as the day came to do Live like Pigs in New York, was that the actors would clutch onfirstnight. They'd played for thefiveweeks up here and were very good, but we feared they might suddenly become tense. Wheeler: The funny thing was that two thirds of the cast were native Bostonians who had developed in the company: they'd become Equity with us and gone to New York with us. They really were not worried. It was the actors who'd come up from New York to do a few shows and were now going back who suffered from tension. The Bostonians carried the day. B.T.: Are you getting new plays from people in the area? Wheeler: Oh, yes. From graduate students at M.I.T. and Harvard, from writers who work in other forms, and we get many scripts from outside the area, from agents in New York. I think of our theater as an instrument for writers to use; in a way, we're a writers' theater. B.T.: You talked about the universities making special contributions in Boston arts. You were talking about it in terms of the audiences. What about the kind of competition that is offered you by the amateur stuff of the university. How does that affect your professional theater? Wheeler: I think sometimes it has its disadvantages for us. By and large, excellent theater promotes excellent theater, but there tends to be a university problem—that which is verbally original, or simply precise, becomes the sole criterion for excellence in the theater. If you see Long Day's Journey, let's say, over at the Loeb, it's scarcely performed—not two minutes of it. But I think the audience feels they've seen the play, whereas they've heard the play. On the other hand, when the kids get excited about projects, for example, the plays they did last summer at Agassiz, I think that's good theater. I only saw one show at the Agassiz, an adaptation of Aristophanes' Peace: it had a lot of pazazz. And many elements that were very good. It may have curled off at the end, it didn't make it all the way, but nevertheless— B.T.: There are those who think that the future for American theater is going to be an arrangement such as that at Brandeis 40

Some Boston Voices in the Arts or Yale—using professionals at the university theater, working with university drama departments. Are you excited about that? Wheeler: Sure. Foundations can then give money to universities and believe there'll be some continuity, that the money is not going to be squandered, etc. Obviously it's a trickier proposition to prove the benefits of giving to imcertain institutions like theaters. We've been talking with Boston University and we're planning to cooperate with their theater department, using students in Left-Handed Liberty next year, and seeking other arrangements that might be mutually beneficial. B.T.: That cooperation is more than a possibiUty, then? Wheeler: Yes. I've taught over there for the last couple of years, and Ted Kazanoff, who acts on occasion with us, does a good deal of directing in their student theater. They have a very splendid physical plant, and they have some good young actors. We've taken about one B.U. graduate a year into the company, I'd say. B.T.: If you people were offered a magnificent university plant, such as the Loeb or the one at Brandeis, would you jump at it, or would you be reluctant to take it? Wheeler: We'd want to examine the details with the theater, but, as I said, we've been talking with B.U. If a professional theater had its choice of graduating students, and if students coming into a university knew that there was a fine professional theater connected with it, I think that could help both the university and the theater. Professional theater tends to be much freer than university theater—and that's the thing that's hard for the kids to understand. They get locked into trying to do things very cleanly and neatly, and it turns out that real behavior and physical spontaneity are something else again. B.T.: The absurd question I want to put to you is does a vital theater need a crummy plant. Cassidy: I don't think it needs a crummy plant. I think the other absurdity is a greater one. There is no particular reason to build afive-miUion-dollarmarble palace because one is going to start a repertory company. One hopes to have a certain amount 41

Some Boston Voices in the Arts of physical amenity, but ultimately it's what goes on inside that matters. Wheeler: I think if you start with a five-million-dollar plant, then you say, "Let's go hire a million-dollar company." As a Harvard graduate student I was not professionally interested in theater, but I was struck by the discrepancy between the group that ventured all on the Wilbur and the group that had taken a tiny loft above a fish market down on Charles Street. The Wilbur group wanted to raise eighty thousand immediately and have a big first season, and of course they collapsed suddenly after producing three plays, while the Charles Street Theatre eventually moved and kept on growing. I think the answer is that a theater might do better to work into size, because it can be a limitation to start big. In other words, perhaps Ellen Stewart can use money now, but if she had had money that first year when she was starting the Café La Mama, it might never have achieved its fantastic success. I add that we at TCB could use money now. B.T.: What would be the ideal kind of arrangement with B.U.? Wheeler: We've been talking about doing Arden's LeftHanded Liberty there this year at Christmastime—in their theater with their students. We figure that there's nothing like an actual rehearsing and performing experience to find out how we might come together. B.T.: What I'm trying to envisage is what benefit there might be for B.U. to tell the administrators. Wheeler: I think the answer would be that we already have something of a national reputation. Therefore, B.U. would be able to get students to apply there who are qualified already to think of professional theater as their goal. Possibly also B.U. has a sense that if it's going to compete as a top-flight theater school, lacking the funds of Brandeis or Yale, and, so to speak, already behind, it's going to have to take some giant steps. I hope that's its supposition, that we might prove a giant step since we'd come into a imion with our history behind us. 42

Some Boston Voices in the Arts From an Interview with Andrew Hyde Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art ( October 23,1969 ) B.T.: Since you became director about a year ago, the Institute of Contemporary Art has undergone some reorientation in its direction and aims. What, essentially, is the nature of the change? Hyde: The institute was founded in 1936 by Nat Saltonstall and a group of friends to bring contemporary art to Boston. Its membership grew to perhaps two thousand by the middle sixties, and its exhibits were visited by many more than that, but there is no doubt that many in Boston regarded the ICA as a snobbish, precious institution. We're trying to change that. We are trying to reach way out beyond the membership and reach a hundred thousand—two hundred thousand—people. We have become involved in various communities of Boston—the South End, South Boston, Roxbury, and elsewhere—and are trying to bring to them an understanding of contemporary art, as it relates to the lives of the people of those communities today—not necessarily the sHck and the Op and the Pop from New York but something that does speak to the people, that connects with their own heritages and experiences. We still aim at high standards though. That's essential. And we also feel that it's essential to get art out of the ordinary museum situation, except for certain special shows. Art should be found at many different locations throughout the city. People shouldn't have to plan to go to a museum in order to have the experience of being involved with art; it should be part of their daily lives. This November, if you go into City Hall, you'll see four different exhibits—photography, contemporary Japanese prints, a hght show, and a sculpture construction show. People wiU see these shows who went to City Hall to complain about their water bills or attend the city council sessions or transact other such business. And our exhibit at the Loeb Theatre is to enable people who are going to the theater to enjoy drama also to enjoy contemporary art. We are also getting ready for a show from the Nat Saltonstall collection, to be called

43

Some Boston Voices in the Arts The Nature of Quality in American Art. That wül be a very different kind of thing. We have selected forty works from Saltonstall's collection and vigili hang them in a Boston town house—33 Beacon Street—to give an idea of what such art looked like in the intimate setting of a private house. B.T.: So basically what you are trying to do is bring art to the people of the city rather than to think of ways to lure them into a museum? Hyde: Exactly. And we are also interested in helping those people in the city who have talent to produce meaningful art. That is the basic aim of the ACT Workshop, a subsidiary of the institute. The workshop, you know, is in the old Edison building in the South End provided by the BRA. The purpose is to make available space and, whenever possible, materials for artists and craftsmen—so that they can create their own works and also work on community projects when these come up, such as BRA l-percent-for-art commissions or, on a smaller scale, specific neighborhood problems in the realm of the visual arts. We also want to encourage apprentices from the neighborhood to work with the artists and craftsmen there. It's been a unique effort. I won't claim it's all been a bed of roses. There have been lots of ups and downs. For an institution hke ours to go into a ghetto area and work with the people there means lots of problems, as you can guess. Inevitably you encounter neighborhood resentments, suspicions and conflicts. It's a touch-and-go situationfight all the way. But there have been lots of accomplishments, I think, and lots of satisfaction. B.T.: Has ICA been involved with the wall murals to be foimd in Boston neighborhoods? Hyde: Yes, that's been something we've been very excited about. We've done what we could ourselves to encourage that manifestation and have worked with Kathy Kane in the mayor's office, who has also been keen on tìiis. In fact, one of the shows I've mentioned that we are putting on in City Hall next month is a multi-media documentation of the Boston wall murals. There are about thirty of these murals now, and we feel that Boston 44

Some Boston Voices in the Arts

isn't sufficiently aware of them. People in a neighborhood will know about their own wall, but they won't be aware that there are many other marvelous walls in other neighborhoods. And some of the artists—I'm thinking of Chandler, Rickson, Cato— have never painted better. Their best work is on a wall. B.T.: You have spoken of decentralization and of community involvement as major themes of what ICA is now attempting to foster. Is there anything else you would stress? Hyde: Collaboration. That's one of my big words. There's so much talent and there're so many resources in this one small area —the xmiversities, the corporations, the city government, the artists, the public. There's so much to be accomplished if you can bring them together. I don't feel this was done very effectively in the past, and I think it's my job to do what I can to foster such collaboration in the visual arts.

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3

Walking the Tightrope

One of Boston's favorite sports is passing around stories of the financial crises of Sarah Caldwell and her nationally renowned Opera Company of Boston. "The Perils of Sarah" is Boston's longest-running weekly serial. Miss Caldwell may be able to stage only a limited number of opera performances a year in Boston, but her efforts to keep her company alive in the face of continuing adversity provide the stuff of drama the year round. Those in the know still recall the suspense involved in the production of Schoenberg's Moses and Aaron—a daring work to attempt under even the most secure of circumstances. Not long before the scheduled date for the first performance, certain commitments on which the company had counted fell through, and the company found itself in dire and immediate need of $100,000. All efforts to raise the money from patrons and past contributors proved unavailing. It appeared that the production would have to be canceled. At this point, as a last resort. Miss Caldwell got on a plane and flew to Washington to appeal for help to Roger Stevens, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. She knew him only slightly but was able to put her case to him most persuasively. She returned with a promise of $50,000 from the government, and on the strength of that pledge was able to raise the rest in local contributions. Moses and Aaron turned out to be a triumph. Another famous episode occurred during a subsequent season, when La Traviata was to be performed. The sets were being rented from the Dallas Opera Company for $15,000. But when the sets arrived in Boston, the delivery men refused to unload until they were paid—in cash, or by certified check. "But it's Saturday afternoon! The banks are closedl" "Sorry about that," replied the delivery men, 'Ъи1 those are the strict instructions we have been given." Sarah Caldwell rushes off. Several hours pass, while the truckers

Walking the Tightrope snooze in their trucks. At last Sarah returns. She is carrying a shopping bag jammed full of small bills—ones, fives, tens, twenties. The money is counted out laboriously—fifteen thousand dollars. The sets are unloaded. The show goes on. Sarah Caldwell has done it againl That's the story as it made the rounds. Where did she get the money? Nobody seems to quite know, but everyone who tells the anecdote oflEers his own speculation. One version has Miss Caldwell again flying to Washington to seek the aid of Roger Stevens. Another version has her recruiting as many of the company's board members as she can find, each of whom scurries around to hotels, restaurants and the like, cashing personal checks or getting cash through his credit cards. A variant of this last version prominently features Sidney Rabb, a benefactor of the company; he is said to have gone about the Stop and Shop markets he owns cashing his checks at the registers. Such tales, as they make the rounds, tend to take on the character of legends. What the ratio of fact to apocrypha may be is hard to say. I do know, though, that the first time I interviewed Laszlo Bonis, who is president of the Opera Company of Boston as well as president of a corporation in Natick, Massachusetts, our interview kept being interrupted while a series of impassioned long-distance calls were made, seeking to raise $10,000 by the next day so that the singers in the American National Opera Company, performing at that moment somewhere in the Mid-West, could be paid. This was in November 1967. The American National Opera Company, which had Miss Caldwell as artistic director and Mr. Bonis and other officers of the Opera Company of Boston on its board, had been established a few months before with the aid of a grant of $350,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities. It was described by Miss Caldwell as "a project of the Opera Company of Boston," but with a separate legal identity, and it was predicted that in a variety of ways the existence of the national company would ease the financial situation of the Boston company and help ensure a measure of stabiUty. Instead, the national company 47

Walking the Tígbtrope went bankrapt in May of 1968 after one season s tour of the United States, declaring liabilities of $840,000 and assets of only $150,000. One of the phone calls made by Mr. Bonis that afternoon I interviewed him was to a wealthy individual who had promised to make a contribution of $10,000 to the company but was not prepared to do it at that moment. He had tax reasons for wanting to wait a few weeks. Also he did not have the cash on hand, but would have to convert some stocks into cash. Mr. Bonis was trying to persuade him to do it right then, but the prospective contributor was resisting. When Mr. Bonis hung up, he said to me, "I'm glad you overheard that conversation. That's typical of what we have to go through. He's a very nice man, the one I was just talking to, but he doesn't want to be pushed. 'Don't push!' he says. Til give when I'm ready.' He's prepared to give in December, but that's not when the money is needed. "Look," he continued, "the Opera Company of Boston had $811,000 income from all sources including contributions last year—the 1966-67 season—and $754,000 expenses. This looks marvelous to someone who looks at our financial statement at the end of the year and sees that we're in the black. But we went through so many crises during the year, it's incredible. Although the $811,000 did come in by the end of the year, it didn't come in when it was needed. A certain cash flow is needed for the budget and for the productions and for the performances, and that money has to be there every time to pay for those things. So it can be there at the end of the year but not there when you need it. The crisis is when tlie payroll has to be met, or the bills. If it isn't met, the suppliers deny credit, and then you have to borrow money. Then you're really in a hole. I can't tell you how much trouble and blood and sweat went into getting through the year, in spite of the fact that we were in the black at the end of it." Mr. Bonis went on to say that Miss Caldwell gets criticized for being lavish and careless with money, when, in his view, she 48

Walking the Tightrope

really isn't. T h e argument many people use to avoid contributing to the arts," he said, "is to say, 'The trouble with the arts is that the artist spends too much. I don't want to give to them, because they just throw the money away.' It isn't true—in most cases, it isn't true. I can prove to anybody who's willing to take the trouble and look at the books that Sarah Caldwell in the last four years has never exceeded any one of the budgets. Her financial problem is simply that she doesn't get the money she needs. If the board of trustees votes for a budget of $510,000, say, she ought to receive $510,000. She never does. The first time she did so was tìiis last year, and her income ended up more than her expenses. But even when the income is more, as I've said, it doesn't come at the times she needs it." I asked Mr. Bonis about the sources of funds, aside from the box office, for the arts in Boston. He replied, "Actually there are three sources at the present time in Boston. One is the private individual, who is still basically the largest source. The second is the foundation. And the third and smallest at the present time is the corporation. Corporations, in Boston particularly, and it may be true to some extent in other parts of the country, are not motivated to give. "I'll never forget an occasion several years ago. I won't mention the name of the company. I walked into the office of the chairman of the board of one of the largest companies in Boston. He happens to be a Brahmin—from an оЫ-Нпе Boston family. I was trying to convince him to give me a donation for the opera. He said, 'My dear man, why should I?' I gave him all the necessary reasons. He said, 'Both my wife and I have wooden ears. We're not interested in opera or music—or supporting it, for that matter.' "So I reached into my briefcase and I pulled out a Simday copy of the New York Times, in which that particular company had a half-page advertisement recruiting labor. The advertisement said that Boston is a cultural city and blah, blah, blah, come and join our company. I put it down before him and said, 'Well, if for no other reason than to make you a true individual rather than a false individual.' So he said, Tovmg man, you 49

Walking the Tightrope don't have to say anything more,' and he gave me the check immediately. He was a good, willing man, but hadn't been able to find a motivation. He needed a reason." "How much did he give you?" I asked. "A thousand dollars. But I get that thousand dollars every year now." "A Boston corporation regards a thousand dollars as a big contribution?" "They don't consider it big. It's a small contribution. But if a man like this were inclined toward the arts personally, it would have been a five thousand dollar contribution. But he is not." In Mr. Bonis' opinion, the most hopeful future source of funding for the arts might be the federal government. He is not one who feels that federal aid means governmental interference in the arts. "In fact," he said, "you can get lots more interference from some private individual who may be giving you only a small amount but who expects all kinds of say in the way the organization is run." In his experience with government assistance, he said, the government had never tried to influence any of the artistic decisions in any way. At this point, the phone rang again. It was the manager of the American National Opera calling from New York, still trying to figure out how to raise $10,000 for the company's singers in the midwest. I said goodby to Mr. Bonis and left him wrestling with his crisis. If I have set down here anecdotes of a somewhat legendary flavor concerning the opera company and Miss Caldwell, it is not in order to cast ridicule. In some ways, these stories redound to the opera company's credit. They suggest how much effort, heroism, devotion and persistence is required to keep such an artistic enterprise aHve in Boston at this point io the twentieth century. Less determined artists than Miss Caldwell might have thrown in the sponge by now—and many have. No, the stories were actually intended to serve an exemplary

50

Walking the Tightrope purpose—to typify and illuminate the situation of aU the arts in Boston. The crises of the Opera Company of Boston are possibly more melodramatic than most, that being the nature of opera as weU as, perhaps, of Miss CaldweU, but all the nonprofit arts organizations in Boston except those few with large endowments are in pretty much the same dilemma. They all have to walk the tightrope. Dickens' Micawber made inimitably the point that to have a few coppers more than one spends means happiness, a few coppers less, misery. Table 1 provides data on the nature of the misery afflicting the major arts organizations in Boston." It can be seen that none of them earns its own way at the box office or at the turnstiles. This is the natxure of the arts. The economists WilHam J. Baumol and WilHam G. Bowen have thoroughly docimiented this situation on a national scale in Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma. M^at they reveal about the performing arts is even more true of museimis, for these can earn comparatively much less by way of admission fees; it has been the tradition of many American museums, in fact, to make no entrance charge at all, believing that they should be as readily accessible to the public as are public libraries. That was the long-standing policy of Boston s Museum of Fine Arts. It was not until 1966, under the pressure of what the trustees described as "a serious and persistent operational deficit," that the Museimi of Fine Arts instituted admission fees—$1 for adults at present (with Tuesday evenings free) and no charge for children up to the age of sixteen. In 1968, the revenue from admission fees amounted to $142,000—a substantial simi, no doubt, yet only about 4 percent of the total needed to operate the museum that year. Clearly, museums cannot rely for their continued existence on what they can take in at the gate. In most places the municipahty or the county picks up the tab for the local museum's expenses. Boston does not have that tradition, so the major local " These are organizations which reported attendance of 25,000 or more in 1968.

51

TABLE 1.

Operating Budgets of 13 Major Arts Organizations in Greater Boston for 1968»

Organization

Earned Income^'

Museum of Fine Arts Boston Symphony Orchestra Opera Company of Boston (1966-67) Gardner Museum Children's Museum (1968-69) Boston Ballet Company Charles Playhouse DeCordova Museum Theatre Company of Boston Institute of Contemporary Art National Center of AfroAmerican Artists Boston Philharmonia (1968-69) Handel and Haydn Society

$1,267 2,420 339 12 110 151 260 218 99 33

Total Percent of expenditure

$4,961

2 24 26

35%« 68 45 3 30 43 75 63 64 23 2 27 40 48%

Unearned

$1,969 857 472 470 195 114 54 118 57 108 106 67 37

Income'

55%« 24 62 114 53 32 16 34 37 77 93 76 57

$4,624 45%

(in thousands of dollars) Total Expenditure

Deficit'

$374 293 01 0« 60 89 31 8 0« 0 6 0« 2 $863

10%« 8 0 0 16 25 9 2 0 0 5 0 3 8%

information provided by the arts organizations. «Except as indicated, budgets are for either the 1968 calendar year or the 1967-68 fiscal year. ^Because of rounding or unearned Income surplus, percentages of total expenditures may not equal 100. «Figures in this column represent percent of each organization's total expenditure. "Organization ended the year with a surplus as a result of contributions or endowment income.

$3,610 3,570 757 411 365 354 345 344 155 141 114 88 65 $10,319

Walking the Tightrope museum without endowment—namely, the Institute of Contemporary Art—has always had to operate under precarious conditions. As can be seen from Table 1, the major arts organizations in Boston earned, on an average, almost half of their expenses in 1968—48 percent to be exact. They managed to obtain an additional 45 percent in unearned income from a variety of sources—contributions, foundations, government, endowment. This left them with a deficit of 8 percent that they could not obtain anywhere.® What they did to keep going was to borrow or put ofF creditors as long as they were able or dip into capital —if they had any. It is this 8 percent column in the budget that sooner or later can break the back of an arts institution and force it out of existence, even though in dollar amounts the sums needed may not be huge. ( In discussions of costs of the arts one often finds the term "deficits" used to describe all costs not met by earned income. "Income gap" is the term Baumol and Bowen find more suitable, as do I. To call this gap a "deficit" seems to me loose and misleading. Such usage suggests that the arts institutions had reckoned on earning their entire expenses and that falling short of doing so was some sort of surprise or miscalculation. I prefer to describe the various subsidies received as "unearned income," and to reserve the term "deficits" for those expenses that still remain to be paid after all the income, both earned and unearned, has been received. ) From these figures, one may note how dominant are just two organizations—the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Museum of Fine Arts—in the cultural life of Boston. The expenditures of these two organizations amounted to over $7 million, accounting for some 70 percent of the total arts expenditures of the major arts organizations. Their deficits—$374,000 for the museum and $293,000 for the symphony—add up to an even higher percent of the total. Fortunately both organizations have endowments on which * This adds up to 101 percent because of the unearned income surplus of some organizations, principally the Gardner Museum endowment income.

53

Walking the Tightrope they could draw but to do so is obviously not satisfactory as a long-term solution. The BSO, possessing the smaller endowment of the two, reacted in 1968 with the most alarm—especially since that was the second year in a row in which tlie endowment fund had to be tapped to help meet operating deficits. To have to dip into capital anywhere is regarded as unfortunate, but in Boston it is a sin. The crisis that hit the BSO was related to the signing of the new fifty-two-week musicians' contracts and a number of other factors affecting symphony orchestras today. The financial ailments of the symphony orchestra are on the scale of a nationwide epidemic. Between 1964 and the spring of 1968, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for instance, used up over $5 million of its $6,200,000 endowment. It remains to be seen whether the Ford Foundation s $80 million transfusion to sixty-one orchestras throughout the country will suffice to help restore them to health. Costs are increasing so rapidly that this aid is likely to prove only a temporary salve. The 1968-69 expenditures for the Boston Symphony Orchestra were expected to grow to approximately $5 milhon—an increase of $1,400,000 over the previous year; and the deficit was expected to amount to as much as $560,000, almost double that of the year before. For many years of its existence, the Boston Symphony Orchestra was principally sustained by a single benefactor—first by Henry Lee Higginson, who estabhshed the orchestra in 1881 and each year until 1918 paid its expenses, and after Higginson by Ernest B. Dane during the 1920's. One of the difficulties compounding the BSO's problems today, according to Talcott M. Banks, president of the orchestra's board of trustees, is the myth that some munfficent individual is always ready in the wings, waiting to bail the orchestra out. But that is no longer the case. In the days when Henry Lee Higginson was supporting the orchestra, the income gap seldom went above $30,000 in any year. In 1914 he reported that the total he had expended on the orchestra during the preceding thirty-three years amounted to about $900,000. It had been his estimate, when he was first dreaming of starting an orchestra in Boston that would be as fine as any 54

Walking the Tightrope he had heard in Europe, that he could pay for it with the interest on a capital fund he would amass of one million dollars; and that proved just about right. But conditions were very different then from now. The season was shorter, the orchestra had fewer members (72 in the first season compared to 106 at present), and the musicians were paid —in comparative, as well as absolute terms—much less than today. In a real sense, throughout all the years it has been the musicians, as well as Mr. Higginson and Mr. Dane, who subsidized the orchestra. In the early years, Mr. Higginson reckoned a musician could be hired for about $1,500 a year. As recently as 1938, the average salary for a member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra was $4,000 a year, just about half the salary of a fuU professor at Harvard at the time. Under the present contract, the average salary is about $20,000 and is just about on a level with that of a Harvard full professor. The minimum salary under the contract is $14,000. Even though that may seem a goodly recompense, the BSO, as well as other American orchestras, is finding it increasingly difficult to recruit first-rate talent, particularly for the string sections. Apparently, the rewards of being an orchestra member no longer seem adequate compensation for the extraordinary skills and the years of arduous training required. This is yet another aspect of the crisis confronting the symphony orchestra today. As one examines the figures in Table 1, one cannot help being struck by two thoughts. One is that, despite the great increase in costs which has taken place in recent years and the consequent economic crisis, arts institutions remain relatively small in scale compared to the scale of other kinds of major enterprise in present-day America. Eli Goldston, the president of Eastern Gas and Fuel Associates, commented on this in a review he wrote of the Baumol and Bowen book for Boston magazine. "Most businessmen fail to realize the relatively small scale budgets of the performing arts," he wrote. "A cultural conglomerate holding company which ran the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, along with the Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, and 55

Walking the Tightrope

Philadelphia Symphonies, the largest American dance group ( New York City BaUet ), a hit musical comedy, a hit play on Broadway, the largest off-Broadway theatre, and finally, a successful regional theatre would have gross revenues less tìian one fourth of the $110,000,000 in operating revenues which qualified Island Creek Coal Company as the smallest company to make the Fortune magazine directory of 500 largest industrial corporations in 1965." In their study, Baumol and Bowen estimated the size of the total income gap for all of the professional performing arts in the United States as ranging from about $20 to $23 million for 1964, and remarked on what a minuscule fraction of the nation's wealth this represented. "It is very important to recognize," they commented, "that a total income gap of less tìian $25 milhon for all the professional performing arts in the United States is an extremely small figure, given the scale of our economy. Twenty-five million dollars will not begin to pay for 25 miles of superhighway in a moderately populous area ( in urban areas the cost approaches $100 milhon per mile ). Nearly twice $25 million is spent on advertising every day of the year, and the advertising budgets of some companies are as high as $100 million per year. The federal government spends more than $25 million every two hours of the day and night, including Sundays and holidays. The total income gap is the price of perhaps three transatlantic jetliners. A substantial number of universities each receive more than $25 million annually from the federal government; a few receive $100 million or more per year in federal funds." A second, and corollary, thought to be noted is how extremely small are the sums required to keep in existence some companies that have a constant struggle to stay ahve. For instance, the deficit reported for the Charles Playhouse was $31,000; failure to obtain that modest sum could be crucial for that repertory company, especially since the company is still struggling to repay money borrowed to meet deficits in previous years. Even more modest are the sums required to maintain the whole potpourri of semiprofessional and amateur endeavors that

56

Walking the Tightrope

help to make Boston as culturally vital a place as it is. The annual income gap for the Civic Symphony of Boston, for example, is only $5,000. For some of the region s non-Equity theater groups contributions of only a thousand dollars could mean the difference between survival and extinction. It took but $1,000 to finance the extremely interesting summer series of experimental theater put on at the Agassiz Theater in 1967 and succeeding summers by Timothy Mayer and Thomas Babe. To put on a summer of delightful free rock concerts with voluntary talent, as Robert Gordon of New England Talent Associates did on the Cambridge Common on Sunday afternoons in 1968 and 1969, cost only $105 for the first summer, plus the sum of $200 taken up at a collection for the purpose of reseeding the Common grass. "Save Our Grass" was an appeal to which the audience readily responded, with a hundred young people contributing their labor for the re-seeding operation. And, far down on the scale of costs, one might also mention the efforts of a young couple named William and Lola Claffin, who instituted a program they called "The Message." By dialing 868-0959, one might hear three minutes of songs, skits, and poems. This cost the Claflins $300 a year, which they paid out of a small trust fund they have. On a couple of occasions, they put out a few low-keyed appeals for funds on their program, and received a total of 16/ in contributions. They were about to quit, but an anonymous benefactor came forward and xmdertook to subsidize the operation. Immediately, the Claflins began thinking of adding another phone—and soon they wiU probably be back in the hole again. There are probably well over a hundred performing and visual arts organizations in Greater Boston. The thirteen organizations whose budgets are here analyzed accounted for the preponderance of the amounts expended on the arts ( not including the simis expended through university and college departments ) in 1968. Their total expenditures that year amounted to $10,319,000.1 would guess that if one adds the budgets for all 57

Walking the Tightrope the other small arts groups in the metropolitan region to this plus the $264,000 spent on Summerthing (the Boston Neighborhood Festival of the Arts), one would arrive at a total expenditure on the visual and performing arts of $11,400,000. Again, this does not include universities and colleges. Table 2 gives the sources of unearned income for the thirteen organizations, showing how they attempt to cope with the income gap. It can be seen that aU rely strongly on contributions from private individuals and board members. Endowment income aside, the rest of the unearned income breaks down as follows: individual contributions, 58 percent; foundations, 22 percent; government, 16 percent; and corporations 4 percent. The main local foundation assisting the arts has been the Permanent Charity Fund. The fund's 1967-68 annual report noted, "Support for the arts continued to increase. Twenty-one grant payments totalling $250,775 and 10.1% of income were made in this category, a striking change from the $13,239 ( n% of income) invested in cultural programs and institutions during the 1962-63 year." More than half the total payments in this category went to helping some of the institutions meet their capital needs, through such grants as $50,000 to the Fund for the Boston Symphony, $50,000 to the Centennial Development Fund of the Museum of Fine Arts, $25,000 to the Centennial Fund of the New England Conservatory of Music, $7,500 to the Theatre Company of Boston to help in the preparation of new quarters at the Fenway Theatre, and $1,000 to the Boston Children's Theatre for a Volkswagen bus. The fund has also been increasingly receptive to efforts intended to reach new audiences, especially those in the inner city neighborhoods. With that aim, the fund has assisted such groups and projects as Summerthing; the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts, as well as the free performances Miss Lewis has staged for several summers in Franklin Park; the Library Creative Drama Program; the Community Music Center of Boston; the Institute of Contemporary Art, for its innovative program to reach into 58

TABLE 2. Organization

Museum of Fine Arts Boston Symphony Orchestra Opera Company of Boston (1966-67) Gardner Museum Children's Museum (1968-69) Boston Ballet Company Charles Playhouse DeCordova Museum Theatre Company of Boston Institute of Contemporary Art National Center of Afro-American Artists Boston Philharmonia (1968-69) Handel and Haydn Society Totals, in thousands of dollars

Sources of Unearned Income in 1968" Individuals

Corporations

Foundations

Government

Endowment

8% 65 57 0 7 12 60 14 36 62 53 66 3

1% 6 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 15 4 0

0% 12 31 0 18 88 0 0 37 9 30 30 0

7% 0

85% 17 0 100 19 0 0 86 0 0 0 0 97

1,244

Information provided by the arts organizations. «Because of rounding, percentages may not equal 100.

88

466

11 0 56 0 39 0 26 28 2 0 0 357

2,469

Walkmg the Tightrope the neighborhoods; and the Boston Philharmonia, a cooperative chamber orchestra established in 1967. The bulk of the subsidies for operating expenses contributed to Boston arts institutions by foundations in 1968 came, however, from large national foundations, like the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. A Ford Foundation grant amounting to $100,000 accounted for 88 percent of the Boston Ballet's unearned income in its 1967-68 budget. Similarly, the bulk of the government money came from the federal government's National Endowment for the Arts, not the state or city. The 7 percent shown in the government column for the Museum of Fine Arts, however, principally represents a special appropriation of $100,000 from the Commonwealth legislature for the museum's education program. These grants, from the large foundations and from the federal government, have been gratefully received but they also carry hazards. The donors think of them as "seed money" that will enable an arts institution to "get on its feet"—after which the grant will no longer be needed. But the income gap, like the poor, will always be with us and is mherent in the nature of the presentation of art today. As Baumol and Bowen write, "We believe we shall be able to demonstrate that the basic difficulty arises . . . from the economic structure of Hve performance. This conclusion has implications that are rather sobering. It suggests that the economic pressures which beset the arts are not temporary—they are chronic. It suggests that if things are left to themselves deficits are likely to grow. Above all, this view implies that any group which undertakes to support die arts can expect no respite." The national foundations have not yet come to grips with the full implications of this. One further note should be made concerning the categories in Table 2, and that is that it probably contains some error because of variations in the way the responding organizations defined each of the categories. The symphony, for instance, classifies gifts from local family foundations as coming from private individuals. Gifts

60

Walking the Tightrope

from corporation-sponsored foundations may appear under the "foundations" column or under the "corporations" column, depending on how the respondent viewed them. In my own study of corporate philanthropy ( Chapter 4), I have treated company foundations as a conduit for the parent company's philanthropy and thus put these gifts under the "corporations" heading. One also encounters some discrepancy, and even minor subterfuge, in definition of the nature of the gifts. In examining the records of a number of corporations and foundations, I have noted a number of gifts to the arts listed under some other, apparently more respectable category—such as "Civic Contributions" or "Social Welfare." The most frequent category under which a corporation, reluctant to come right out and admit that it has taken to sponsoring beauty, will disguise an arts grant is "Education." This has been so, at least, in recent years. However, if the present disorders on the campuses continue much longer, "Education" may lose its respectability as a category with some donors—already has, we are told. Who knows, the time may even come when a corporation, wishing to donate a few dollars to Harvard University, may have to tuck the gift away under "Arts" and hope that no angry stockholder will notice it is really for education. As I have estimated, the total arts expenditure for Greater Boston in 1968 was about $11,400,000. It can be further estimated that about $5.4 million of that sum was earned income, that about $5 million was unearned income, and that there remained a total deficit of around $1 million. For the organizations merely to continue to survive in their present uncertain way thus requires an additional $1 million annually. I would guess that probably an additional million on top of that would be needed to enable them to expand and improve—as well as stabilize—their operations, and also to help finance new ventures in the arts. In short, if the arts are to thrive, additional revenues amounting to a total of around $2 million are required. The bulk of this amount

61

Walking the Tightrope will have to be provided as unearned income—that is, subsidies and contributions. And obviously, continued inflation would necessitate upward revision of this estimate. Possibly this amount could be reduced if arts organizations managed their operations more efficiently. There exists a rather widespread belief to this effect. Undoubtedly some arts institutions are being operated in a not-too-businesslike fashion ( as are also some businesses), but Baumol and Bowen have concluded that this is not the heart of the problem: "One can . . . produce examples of waste and mismanagement which have clearly aggravated the financial problems of the arts, but they too are not the main culprits—there are too many well-managed organizations that incur substantial deficits for us to credit incompetence as the central cause of the economic problems of the arts." Nearly all the arts organizations conduct fund drives of one sort or another to help meet the income gap. For the most part, these have not been organized as systematically or thoughtfully as they might be. In the opinion of one professional fund-raiser with whom I spoke—a man who knows the Boston scene well —the local arts groups have been "sloppy, lazy and hysterical" in their approach to fund-raising. He said, "They don't work out a long-term careful study of their needs and possibilities but rather wait until the last minute, when they find themselves on the verge of collapse, and then begin to emit hysterical cries for help. They rely too much on the mails and not enough on their shoe leather. Their board members don't spend enough time actually going out and calling on prospects. They prefer to sit around and genteelly wring their hands. And they haven't sufficiently involved the broader community. It's always the same few people who get solicited over and over." And then along with this, as part of the fund-raising scene, there are the black-tie benefit performances, the champagne suppers for board members and benefactors, the auctions, the galas, the after-performance gatherings or first-night dinners, and all the other hoopla on behalf of the arts one reads about in the 62

Walking the Tightrope society pages—and which probably offend as many untapped and potential sources of funds and allegiance to the arts as they attract. In the days when private patronage was all the assistance that arts institutions required, the social atmosphere approach may have worked well enough. This approach may still be the most successful way of generating contributions from the board members of arts institutions and other individuals—a category of contributions that, as Table 2 reveals, accounts on an average for about one third of the unearned income obtained by arts organizations. But the arts are now urgently having to reach out for new sources of funds. The mere existence of these black-tie social events, and particularly the wide publicity given to them, is hkely to have a negative effect on the new potential donors—on corporation officers and foundation and government officials. The new breed whom the arts are trying to woo are not likely to have the inborn conviction that, so to speak, black tie is beautiful. Reading about a fancy charity ball for an arts organization or some soiree where the champagne has flowed freely, a skeptical corporation president who has been approached for a company contribution, most likely with a heartfelt plea as to the dire nature of the art group's need, may not stop to reason that such affairs, like them or not, seem to be the most efficacious way of buttering up a constituency that suppUes a sizable portion of the budgetary needs, but is apt to make a grumpy mental note that arts organizations are too damned wasteful to deserve support from a sound, no-nonsense business organization such as the one he runs—after which, possibly, he and his vice presidents can go back to planning their annual midwinter business conference jaunt to Honolulu or the Bahamas. It is, without doubt, a tricky situation—this complex problem of how to solicit support simultaneously from constituencies with different motivations, interests, and even life styles without finding that the devices or methods that delight one segment repel the others." • See the letter on this theme on page 84.

63

WaBcing the Tightrope One alternative approach often advocated is tìiat of a united fund for the arts. Twenty cities were reported to have conducted such federated campaigns in 1968-69.** They ranged from Battle Creek, Michigan, where $37,000 was raised, to be shared by four arts groups, to Los Angeles, where the Performing Arts Council of the Music Center raised nearly $2 million. This federated approach can be considered to have worked quite successfully in some cities—most notably Los Angeles, St. Louis, Cincinnati, St. Paul, and Milwaukee. In Dallas and New Orleans it has proved a fiasco. Advantages most often cited are that this concerted approach eliminates needless competition and redundancy of fund-raising efforts by the arts organizations; that it enables a more professional, efficient fund-raising operation to be conducted than individual organizations—especially the smaller ones—are able to carry on; and that it has often managed to reach out and obtain new sources of funds for the arts. Among disadvantages that have been encountered is the fact that such united fund efforts tend to favor the established arts groups of a city and to neglect newer, experimental groups. Internecine warfare may arise among the member organizations over the distribution of the funds obtained, and it has often been the case that individual arts organizations acutely regret having to submerge their individual identities in a common effort. Two of the country's most experienced professional fund-raisers —George A. Brakely, Jr., and James V. Lavin—expressed a rather skeptical view of what they called "the united game" in the course of a joint presentation they made to a national conference of their colleagues in 1968. "On the evidence," they commented, "it's pretty much our conclusion that united giving campaigns for culture have yet to prove themselves and, lacking a strong track record, should be approached with some caution." • These cities were Mobile, Fort Wayne, Louisville, New Orleans, Battle Creek, St. Paul, Charlotte, Greensboro, St. Louis, Winston-Salem, Cincinnati, Providence, Columbia, Memphis, Fort Worth, Milwaukee, Hartford, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Erie.

64

Walking the Tightrope One of the most thoughtful analyses to be found is that made by Michael Newton, executive director of the Arts and Education Council of Greater St. Louis, in an article in Cultural Affairs, published by the Associated Councils of the Arts. In it he spoke of the dilemmas as well as the achievements of his organization, the ambivalence created by such an approach as well as the responsibility. His observations are worth quoting at some length: The Arts and Education Council is known to the public in St. Louis as the organization which operates the annual united appeal for ten institutions concerned with the arts and education. The Arts and Education Fund campaign is based on the same principles as the United Fund campaign for health and welfare. Its methods are similar and its principal merchandising argument—that potential donors are soUcited only once rather than many times—is the same. Because of the prestige attracted locally through the Fund, the Council has also developed as a channel for money in addition to that raised from the community of Greater St. Louis. During the past year the Council has sought and received Federal, state, and private foundation funds on a significant scale. In fact, last year more than 50 per cent of the Council's total harvest of one and a half million dollars was directed to activities outside the formal Fund campaign . . . It is when council programs become allied with general social problems that power begins bringing with it the dilemma of responsibility. The Arts and Education Council is a federation of 90 cultural and educational organizations, although only ten of these benefit directly from the Arts and Education Fund. Should the Council's purpose be to provide for the needs of these member organizations? Or should it be guided by the needs of the community to be served? If the needs of the community are paramount, this may mean bringing into St. Louis quality services from the outside that could damage the interests of an existing local organization which is also a member of the Council. If there is a projected increase in the amount to be raised by the Fund, should the additional money be used to help the strained budgets of the existing beneficiaries or should it be shared with a

65

WaUdng the Tightrope non-funded organization which displays vitality, artistic accomplishment, and promise of future excellence? Curiously, the dilemma is made more acute by success. While funds raised by the Council still fall far short of the real needs, the campaign goal was passed for the first time in 1967. The Council has, moreover, raised more money in a united appeal than any other community in the country and has increased the level of giving by 50 per cent in the last four years. This success is due in great part to the business community and particularly to a compact, elite leadership. However, one by-product of business commimity commitment is that it is now increasingly difficult for cultural organizations outside the Fund to elicit support from the major local corporations. The response "I'm sorry we only give through the Arts and Education Fund" tends to dry up a ma or possibility of support for worthwhile new organizations unless the Council can make some other provision for them. Through the Arts and Education Fund, the Council supports a major symphony orchestra, a small symphony, a botanical garden, a public televison station, a music school, an educational music program for schools, a summer institute for high school students, a museum of science, and an adult education organization; but it does not provide direct assistance for any theater, opera, dance, or for Üie plastic arts. Furthermore, the Fimd's natural tendency to favor an increasing rate of support for the present beneficiaries—on the principle that their budgets are based on fixed operating costs—tends to freeze the status quo. This conservatism is reinforced by the fact that the community is not generating enough money to support a full array of educational and cultural institutions. Tbe Fvmd even now maintains its member organizations at only a subsistence level despite the increases, and these stringent circumstances fortify the natural conservatism of an organization that represents a union of diverse interests. The problems, of course, are not of the Council's making; certainly few would argue that the Council has not been a positive force. Its existence rather focuses attention on the precarious state of the arts as a total community problem instead of a set of unrelated difficulties experienced by a number of organizations . . . Any survey of the activities of a community arts council inevitably gives one a sense that all the solutions are stopgaps, 66

Walking the Tightrope merely tinkering with the problems of movement and development in the arts. We find little time for major questions. What are we doing for the individual artist in our community? Why do we not have opera or ballet of the front rank? Why is theater so poorly served? Why do we permit such ugliness in our environment? Why do so many of our creative people leave? In the last analysis, perhaps the most useful role of the Council will prove to be as an agent of change in attitudes at the deepest levels. As far as Boston is concerned, I would say there is httle likelihood of there being established as comprehensive an arts council as that in St. Louis. Neither the Boston Symphony Orchestra nor the Museum of Fine Arts would be inclined to participate. Each has its own carefully-cultivated body of patrons, whom it would not wish to share. Nor would these cultural bastions of Boston wish to have their individual prestige dissipated in some common appeal. Furthermore, from the point of view of the smaller organizations, it might not be an unalloyed blessing to be federated in fund-raising with these two giants, because of the great difference in the scale of financial needs. However, a number of what might be called middle-sized arts and cultural institutions have attempted to organize some working arrangement that would prove of mutual benefit. In 1969 a council called the Metropohtan Cultural Alliance ( MeCA) was incorporated. Its founding member organizations consisted of the Charles Playhouse, the Theatre Company of Boston, the Community Music Center, the Children's Museum, the DeCordova Museum, the National Center of Afro-American Artists, the Boston Center for Adult Education, the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, the Chorus Pro Musica, the Boston Children's Theatre, and the Institute of Contemporary Art. An early statement made by the group as to what it might do went as follows: The Alliance will engage in projects which all or some of its members can best carry out by acting in concert. The 67

Walking the Tightrope

following suggests the variety of its potential: (1) Fundraising—supplementing, not replacing present efforts. ( 2 ) Cooperative administrative action—for example, mailing lists, schedules, printing and insurance. ( 3 ) Development of programs—such as for neighborhood centers, film or arts festivals etc. ( 4 ) Planning for joint facilities. As its modest and practical first step, MeCA sent out a mailing piece, to test the receptivity of the public to such an organization. The results were not encouraging. How successful MeCA will be is difficult to predict. If it accomplishes nothing else, it has done something unusual in Boston, where artists and arts institutions have tended to operate in isolation; it has brought some of them together to talk about common aims and needs. As I have made explicit earlier in this chapter, a substantial increase in contributions or subsidy for the arts is required if the arts are to flourish in Boston. Where will this money come from? I doubt that all of it can be obtained from private sources. Boston has relied overmuch on its old, noble tradition of private philanthropy in the past. Some new subsidy or patronage mix is required to meet present and future needs. The two potential sources that have been most neglected in this region are corporations and local and state government. These will be considered in the next two chapters.

68

Hold Fast! Help is on the Way Maybe

Some observers think that corporate contributions will eventually be the answer to the income gap plaguing the arts. A spate of national publicity lately has encouraged this belief. A number of corporations have made news with sizable gifts, of which the most famous was Eastern Airlines' contribution of $500,000 to the Metropolitan Opera to help pay for a new mounting of Wagner's Ring cycle. But the development that promised the greatest impact was the announcement in 1967 of the formation of the Business Committee for the Arts, an organization comprising eighty-one business leaders from throughout the country which aims to bring to the arts the same kind of massive, organized financial assistance that business has brought to education since 1952 through the Council for Financial Aid to Education. The committee's prime mover has been David Rockefeller, president of Chase Manhattan Bank. The chairman is C. Douglas Dillon, former secretary of the treasury and now president of the United States and Foreign Security Corporation. The board of directors includes Roger M. Blough, chairman of the United States Steel Corporation; Katharine Graham, president of the Washington Post Company; Gavin MacBain, chairman of the Bristol-Myers Company; Frank Stanton, president of the Columbia Broadcasting System; Thomas J. Watson, Jr., chairman of the International Business Machines Corporation; Edgar F. Kaiser, chairman of Kaiser Industries; Henry J. Heinz II, chairman of the H. J. Heinz Company; and Robert W. Sarnoff, chairman of the Radio Corporation of America. It would appear to be indeed a potent group. ( The founding membership contained no Boston representation. Subsequently two Boston business leaders—George Akerson, chairman of the Boston Herald-Traveler, and Louis W. Cabot, president of the Cabot Corporation—accepted invitations to join the committee. )

Hold Fast! A newsletter issued by the committee said, "The Business Committee for the Arts represents the first attempt by the business community in any nation and in any age to create an organization specifically devoted to enlarging business participation in the arts. This action stems from the conviction of the membership, each one of vi^hom is either the chief operating or chief executive officer of a major U.S. corporation, that the enlargement, enrichment and development of the arts is as much a proper concern for American business as are education, health and other social aspects of our environment." At the first meeting of this group, which took place in January 1968 in the serene, cloistered setting of the Metropolitan Museum's Spanish patio, David Rockefeller said, "If we, as a committee, can contribute to bringing about in this country a renaissance of beauty and creativity and greatness in culture, we will have made a significant contribution to our country and toward solving the problems that seem in one sense so remote from the arts and in another so close to them." To the beleaguered arts organizations of the United States, struggling with one crisis after another, such actions as the formation of the Business Committee for the Arts and such words as David Rockefeller's seem to be conveying the message: "Hold fast! Help is on the way." It's as if we are just about to get to the scene in the movie where the U.S. Cavalry, pennants flying, bugles sounding, come galloping through the pass. At the moment this is being written, however, the pioneers are still crouched behind their wagons and the Indians still circle menacingly. What the movies have not shown is that there must have been many occasions in history when the cavalry never did arrive. Nevertheless, in various ways an air of expectation has been generated recently. It is not only, we are given to understand, that the outlook indicates increased monetary contributions but ako that changes have taken place in the very nature of the modem economy and the modem corporation which should make these institutions increasingly receptive to the arts. In The Corporations and the Arts, a large, scholarly, exceedingly 70

Hold Fasti philosophic book, Richard Eells, adjunct professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business, postulates that, far from being inherently antagonistic, the arts and business have much in common and need each other. He perceives any number of traits that businessmen and artists share, if only they realized it: originality, ingenuity, persistence, the need to question, and aversion to totalitarianism, to name a few. This alleged mutuaUty of interest is at present only dimly perceived but as it comes to be recognized, there is bound to grow a corporate involvement with the arts that will far transcend the mere giving of money ("Merel" I can hear the artists cry). There will develop, Eells is convinced, a real symbiotic relationship—what he calls a "corporate-arts nexus." Another economist who believes that the times should be propitious for the arts, as far as corporate receptivity is concerned, is John Kenneth Galbraith, though his approach is much breezier than Eells's. In "Economics and Art," an essay published in his collection The Liberal Hour, he presents a Galbraithian, characteristically provocative argument. It is an established fact, he points out, that the aesthetic response is nourished by secure weU-being. "The artist may transcend hunger and privation— conceivably his senses are honed by his suffering. But not so his audience. It turns to art after it has had dinner." The modem economy is no longer the fiercely competitive model it once was, he notes. The great corporation, which is the centerpiece of the modern economy, has proved itself extremely resourceful and considerate in providing comfortable, lucrative berths for a vast number of executives, even the manifestly incompetent; featherbedding has become an essential part of corporate life, as it has become an essential part of those other great modem institutions, the govemment and the university. "Accordingly, the comparatively secure and remunerative life provided by the corporation should be hospitable to the arts. Eventually it will be —and for the good of the economy, it must so become." The only thing standing in the way of the new Renaissance is a failure to recognize the tme nature of things: the old myth of the business

71

Hold Fast! world as a tough competitive place still persists, so executives still feel they have to show a commitment, or a simulation of a commitment, to the old "demanding, no-nonsense, nose-to-thegrindstone, hard-driving existence." It is an ingenious argument, possibly of considerable validity, but it is probably not an argument that fund-raisers for the arts would be advised to push when they call on Gillette or Raytheon or the State Street Bank, begging for a handout. Nobody doubts that the corporation has indeed changed in significant ways since J. P. Morgan's time. As the Wall Street Journal wrote, in commenting on the formation of the Business Committee for the Arts: The existence of BCA itself would have been practically unthinkable up until fairly recently. In tìie past 10 or 15 years there has been a gradual, unmistakable broadening of the corporation's "enlightened self-interest" approach to involvement in public affairs. In essence this had amounted to determining an almost one-to-one ratio between corporate outlays for outside purposes and potential economic benefits to the corporation—for example, in supporting the community hospital used by the employees. THiis type of policy continues and, of course, it is all to the good, but meantime the entire concept of the corporation's role in the community has been undergoing its almost imperceptible change. In addition to being an economic institution, the corporation is more and more recognized as a social entity, carrying all the obUgations of citizenship within the community as rest upon the individual. Nevertheless, it would be well not to overrate what has actually happened so far. It has been more than three decades since the Federal Revenue Act of 1935 was enacted, making it permissible for corporations to deduct up to 5 percent of taxable income for contributions to charitable and educational organizations. According to the U.S. Treasury's "Statistics of Income," corporations gave $30 million, or 0.39 percent of taxable income, to all such causes in 1936. By 1945, this had increased to 1.24 percent, amounting to $266 пйШоп. Since then, though the doUar 72

Hold Fast! totals have markedly increased as the natural consequence of inflation and the growth of the national economy, there has been no discernible trend toward increasing the percent of profits contributed. In some intervening years it has dropped as low as 0.59 percent. In 1964, it was 1.16 percent—amounting to over $729 million, but in percentage terms somewhat below the 1945 donations. And of the donations made by corporations, gifts to the arts still represent only a small fraction, even though there has been a marked increase in this regard over the past decade. In 1968, according to the National Industrial Conference Board, just 4.95 percent of the corporate gift dollar went to cultural causes. Of this amount, well over half was for capital grants rather than operating funds ( Table 3 ). Alvin H. Reiss, editor of Arts Management, a newsletter published by the New York Board of Trade, was chairman of a seminar on business and the arts in the fall of 1967 at the New School for Social Research, in which many knowledgeable people TABLE 3. Corporate Contributions Dollar, 1968 Health and welfare

37.15%

Education

38.81

Culture (cultural centers, performing arts, museums, etc.) Operating funds Capital grants

2.18 2.77 4.95

Civic causes (municipal and community improvement, good government, etc.) Other

7.19 10.39

Not identifiable because donee unknown Total

1.51 100.00%

Source: Report on Company Contributions for 1968, triennial survey prepared by John H. Watson III for the National Industrial Conference Board (New York, 1969), p. 1.

73

Hold Fast! participated. It was Reiss's conclusion, after that seminar, that corporate assistance to the arts has been vastly overpublicized and has to date consisted of more talk than action. A number of corporations that have begun taking credit for being patrons of the arts tum out, on inspection, to be deluding themselves, or the public. One business thought it was contributing to the arts by featuring the community's new cultural center in its employee recruitment brochures, even though it had neglected to contribute anything to the arts organizations using the center. At the moment, then, large-scale corporate support of the arts, though a dazzling prospect, remains something of a mirage. Still, one cannot help but muse on the amounts that might be released by alterations in the corporate donation pattern. It seems not unreasonable to suggest that business could gradually afford to increase its total charitable contributions up to 2 percent of taxable income ( especially since the federal government would share the cost of that generosity). Nor does it seem far-fetched to propose that 10 percent of the corporate gift ( instead of the present 4.95 percent) might be a modestly reasonable share to allocate to the arts, particularly in view of the fact that the traditional recipients of business philanthropy—health and welfare, education—are receiving increasing subsidies nowadays from government sources. The proportionate allocation I propose is one that C. Douglas Dillon advocated in a speech he made on December 9,1968, at a City Center of Music and Drama anniversary celebration in New York. He said, "Is it asking too much to hope that business will come to direct at least 10 percent of its philanthropy to the arts and that this increase will come from an overall enlargement of corporate giving rather than by diversion from other needy causes? The growth of corporate giving to education provides an example of what can be done. From a figure of only $24 miUion in 1947, corporate support for education in twenty years shot up to $325 million. We ask only a modest portion of this increase for the arts. Surely the arts in America deserve at least the same degree of support by business that they receive in many foreign countries, where business income cannot begin to compare with 74

Hold Fast! corporate income in the United States—yet are years ahead of this country in support of the arts!" If the formula I have proposed had been followed in, say, 1964, business would have contributed $125 million to the arts. This sum would have taken care, many times over, of the entire income gap of aU professional performing arts organizations in the nation, which amoimted that year, according to the meticulously calculated estimates of the economists Baumol and Bowen, to something between $20 million and $23 million. There would have been money left over to subsidize any number of new opera companies, regional theaters, symphony orchestras, dance companies, and art movie houses, as well as a bevy of museums, galleries, happenings, and what-have-you. And there would have been fimds available to help support painters, sculptors, composers, film-makers, choreographers—aU those creative figures who are what art is, of course, all about but who are apt to be the ones most overlooked when grants are being made for projects in the arts. In short, business could have done wonders for the American art scene. And perhaps it will yet. C. Douglas Dillon is optimistic. "Happily," he said in his speech, "there is evidence that corporate giving to the arts is beginning to develop the kind of momentum that characterized the early stages of business support for higher education. Imaginative corporate arts projects are proliferating across the country. Companies that do become involved are reaping unexpectedly rich returns in good will from their customers, from their employees, and from the communities in which they are established. There is no public service that business can undertake that wül yield more dividends of good will than support of the arts, particularly in the localities where plants and company headquarters are located." Boston Business Now, what of Boston? Let us pursue this same line of calculations as we return to considerations of the local scene. Exact statistics for total net corporate income in Greater Boston 75

Hold Fasti are not available, but one may estimate, on the basis of tax figures, that in 1967 this may have totaled in the neighborhood of $1 billion.* If Boston corporations had follovi'ed the formula I have put forv^^ard—that is, 2 percent for philanthropy, of vi^hich a tenth goes to the arts—they would have contributed some $2 milhon to the arts. Annual contributions on this scale vi^ould, again, not only help remove the deficit burdens of the present arts organizations but would make it possible to foster many new and varied activities in the region. The Venetian merchants of the fifteenth century would not have deemed such a proposition untoward. They considered beauty in their city to be very good for business—not to mention, for life. Boston, in general, does not enjoy a reputation for open-handed generosity. People whose task it has been to raise money for worthy causes here say it is a city that errs more in the direction of prudence than lavishness. Ephron Catlin, Jr., senior vice president of the First National Bank and campaign chairman for the United Fund in 1968, asserted that per capita giving in Boston runs about 30 percent less than in cities of comparable wealth. Though the greatest complex of educational institutions in the world is in this metropolitan area, the region's philanthropic contributions to education do not match, in proportionate terms, those of Cleveland or a host of other cities. However, though not distinguished by its generosity, Boston may not be quite as tight-fisted as some beHeve. A survey I conducted of large corporations in Greater Boston showed that the amounts they reported contributing to all causes in 1967 averaged slightly under 1.2 percent of taxable income, which is * This estimate is derived from tax figures furnished by the Corporations and Taxation Department of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. These figures indicate that the total taxable corporate income for Massachusetts amounted to approximately $2 billion in 1967. This is not broken down by regions, but it seems reasonable to reckon that Greater Boston accounts for at least 50 percent of that total. ( The total Greater Boston payroll in companies covered by Social Security in 1967 was approximately 55 percent of the total payroll for the state. )

76

Hold Fast! remarkably close to estimates of what the national average was that year. The survey was primarily designed to elicit information regarding corporate contributions to the arts, but it also obtained data revealing some of the patterns of Boston's corporate philanthropy in general. Questionnaires were sent to all companies in the metropolitan area listed as having over 500 employees. Included were some national corporations with headquarters elsewhere but large operations in the Boston area. The companies responding had a wide range of net income. Some of the companies refused to disclose this information. Of those who did, 15 percent reported net incomes of over $50 million, and 35 percent reported incomes of under $1 million—with the median being about $2 million. Of the ninety-seven companies responding to the survey, only one company reported having made charitable contributions of over $500,000. The median for a company's total gifts was slightly over $20,000. Only two companies reported having a policy of giving the full 5 percent deductible under the tax laws; both of these were corporations of moderate size. Health and welfare received the greatest amount of contributions, followed by education. About three fourths of the total philanthropy went to these causes.**

Statements of Policy Some 33 percent of the companies surveyed reported that their companies had written statements of policy guiding their philanthropy. Seeking to ascertain what a company's motivations ' Of the ninety-seven companies surveyed, sixty-two make all their charitable contributions directly through company channels, twelve make all contributions through a foundation, and twenty-three make contributions both through the company and through a foundation. In the statistics presented in this chapter, gifts of a company and its foundation are usually combined, except where otherwise specified. Company foundations reflect tlie policies of the parent company and generally serve as a conduit for the company's donations. For a more detailed statement of the survey's aims and methods, as well as for additional tabulations, see Appendix A.

77

Hold Fasti are for making the gifts it does ( or at least what it thinks, or says, its motivations are), the questionnaire provided a list of a number of possible reasons for giving and asked respondents to rank them in order of importance. The one ranked first by most companies was the value or importance of the cause seeking funds. This was followed by considerations of potential benefit to the company and then by considerations of potential benefit to the community. The questionnaire also asked an open-ended question: "What factors does your company consider in deciding whether or not to give to an organization or cause?" As might be expected, most of the statements tended, except for a few refreshing exceptions, to be worthy, high-minded, rather antiseptic. How accurately statements of this sort reflect the reality of corporate practices is open to question. The personal interests and foibles of top executives probably play a much greater part than one would be led to expect. It is doubtful that Chase Manhattan would have the collection it has of contemporary sculpture and painting if David Rockefeller did not happen to have an interest in modem art. The Boston fund-raising expert James V. Lavin, of the Lavin Company, views with skepticism official statements of corporate philanthropic policy. "While indeed there are many companies that act as good corporate citizens and do try to play a responsible role in the community, I doubt that most firms actually follow exactly the principles they enunciate," he said to me when we were discussing the survey findings one day. "One of the major functions of a corporate philanthropy statement, as many companies use it, is as a way of providing a handy excuse for turning some cause down if they don't happen to want to contribute to it anyway." In the check list of reasons, only 2 percent of the companies had indicated that the reputation and influence of the person soliciting a gift from them played a significant part in determining whether they gave. Lavin described that finding as "sheer nonsense," pointing out that this factor appeared somewhat more

78

Hold Fasti

often than 2 percent in the responses to the open-ended question, though nowhere near as frequently as he believes it does in real life. He then summarized his long years of fund-raising experience in a blunt, succinct formulation of what motivates many companies to give. "It can be summed up in three factors: ( 1 ) Who puts the bite on whom. ( 2 ) Which of the top officers is particularly interested in this cause. ( 3 ) You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." It is probable that Lavin's formulation pertains more to new areas of philanthropy—when the corporation is being asked to contribute to a kind of cause it had never felt obliged to honor before, such as the arts—than to a request for a cause thoroughly established and accepted in corporate circles, such as renewal of the annual pledge to the United Fimd. Hovi^ the Arts Fare Up until a few years ago, it is doubtful whether contributions made by the entire Boston business community to the arts amounted to one hundred thousand dollars a year—if that. In January 1967 the Museum of Fine Arts launched its Centennial Development Fund Drive, seeking $13,400,000 for capital and endowment funds. By June 1968 the museum had raised $8,256,000 in gifts and pledges. Of this, a total of $433,700 had been contributed by 148 Boston business firms. The bulk of this amoimt, as is usually the case, came from relatively few donors, as Table 4 makes clear. Shortly after the museum's drive began, the Boston Symphony, spiu-red on by the challenge of a matching grant of $2 million from the Ford Foundation, launched a Fund for the Boston Symphony campaign, seeking to raise $5.5 million in endowment funds. By August 1968, the symphony had raised $4.2 million, thus more than meeting the one-to-two terms of the Ford grant. Of this amount, some $400,000 was contributed by twenty-six Boston business firms. As can be noted, corporate gifts represented only a small

79

Hold Fast! T A B L E 4.

Business Gifts to the IVIuseum of Fine Arts Centennial Fund (to June 1968)

Size of Gift

Number

Total Amounts

16

$331,000

$5,000-$10,000

8

49,000

$1,000-$5,000

25

35,300

Under $1,000

99

18,400

Total

148

$433,700

$10,000 and over

Information provided by the Museum of Fine Arts.

proportion of the funds received in these two drives. The preponderance still came from private individuals, in the old Boston tradition. Most of the corporations had never before contributed anything to the arts. A number of them say that they had never been asked. One might have thought that the competition resulting from the two big capital funds drives coming at the same time would have been damaging. Actually, the effect seems to have been beneficial; the two drives apparently reinforced each other in impressing the needs of the arts on corporations. An examination of the questionnaire returns indicates that a corporation that made a contribution to one of these institutions was apt to budget exactly the same contribution to the other. Though corporations did respond to the special, once-in-alifetime kind of campaign drives put on by the symphony and the museum, Boston business has certainly not embraced ( if one may use so passionate a verb for a relationship containing so little mutual ardor) the arts as a continuing responsibility. For instance, though the museum received gifts and pledges from 148 businesses for the centennial fund, only about twenty indicated a willingness to contribute on an annual basis. The largest of the annual pledges was $1,000 (with the average pledge being around $250 ), whereas the largest gift to the centennial

80

Hold Fasti fund was in the magnitude of $30,000—and the largest gift to the symphony's fund was $50,000. Meanwhile those Boston arts organizations that are not laden with the prestige of the symphony and the museum have yet to attract business support, except in minuscule amounts. The Boston Ballet, which needed to raise $200,000 in addition to earned income in order to meet its expenses, received only $300 in corporate support in 1968; the Opera Company of Boston, which annually needs contributions totaling anywhere from $200,000 to $400,000, received not more than $3,700 from business that year; the Theatre Company of Boston, which has won national recognition, received a total of $460 from corporations, a sum that represented less than 1 percent of the amount needed to make up the difference between what it costs the company to operate and what it can take in at the box office; the Boston Children's Theatre received nothing from business and had to borrow at the end of the year to stay alive; the DeCordova Museum, often cited as one of the liveliest, most flourishing museums in the coimtry, also got nothing from business.

Some Statistics f r o m the Survey Somewhat less than half of the companies responding to my questionnaire indicated that they gave something to the arts in 1967—the majority of gifts going to the two big campaign drives. Of those who did give, less than half gave over 10 percent to the arts. There were two companies, however, that gave over 60 percent of their total gift to the arts. These are both moderatesized companies, with the top officer in each case having a personal involvement as a board member of an arts institution. "We tend to support particularly organizations with which we may have a connection," the president of one of these companies wrote. "We are primarily interested in local organizations, and ones which may not have great general pubhc appeal." His company was also one of the two that has the policy of giving

81

Hold Fast! the full 5 percent of income permissible. Clearly, his is not the typical Boston company. The median gift to the arts by a Boston company in 1967 can be estimated as $4,300, as compared to a median gift of $12,700 for health and welfare, $7,500 for education, and $2,400 for other causes. In other years, as has been radicated, the median gift for the arts would have shown up as much less, and the differential would have been much greater. A composite profile of a company that gave to the arts in 1967 would have the following characteristics. It has its main office in the Boston area, is the kind of business which has direct dealings with the public, has more than 1,000 employees, has a net income of over a million dollars, gave over $20,000 to aU charities and has over the past five years increased the total amount of its philanthropy ( Table 5 ). T A B L E 5.

Characteristic

Characteristics of Companies That Gave to the Arts In 1967

yes

Gave to the Arts Number of No companies

Location of main office 32% Outside Boston area 59 In Boston area Contact with general public 45 indirect 61 Direct Number of employees 33 Less than 1,000 66 1,000 or more Total taxable income 39 Less than $1 million 57 $1 million or more Total amount given to all charities 32 Less than $20,000 73 $20,000 or more Change in amount of total gift over last 5 years 28 Remained same or decreased 60 Increased

82

68% 41

22 65

55 39

51 38

67 34

39 47

61 43

23 44

68 27

41 40

72 40

25 63

Hold Fasti

The same factors were influential in shaping the size of the gift. A company with the characteristics cited above was likely to make a contribution of over $1,000 to the arts; those which differed in traits, when they contributed to the arts at all, were likely to give a smaller amount ( see Table 6 ). Corporations engaged in manufacturing were considerably less generous—in their general philanthropy, as well as toward the arts specifically—than were other kinds of corporate enterprises. Of 44 firms engaged in manufacturing, only 18 contributed to the arts—and the contributions of 10 of these were less than $1,000. Most generous in all respects were firms engaged in finance, insurance, and real estate. There were 10 such firms in the survey responses. All but two contributed to the arts. Seven of them reported giving over $5,000, and one reported its contributions as between $1,000 and $5,000. TABLE 6.

Characteristic

Characteristics of Companies Related to the Amount They Gave to the Arts in 1967 Amount Given to the Arts Less than $1,000 Number of $1,000 or more companies

Location of main office Outside Boston area 80% In Boston area 26 Contact with general public Indirect 53 Direct 24 Number of employees Less than 1,000 70 1,000 or more 19 Total taxable income Less than $1 million 63 $1 million or more 14 Total amount given to all charities Less than $20,000 82 $20,000 or more 15 Change in amount of total gift over last 5 years Remained same or decreased 57 Increased 28

20% 74

5 34

47 76

19 21

30 81

10 27

37 86

8 22

18 85

11 27

43 72

7 32

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Hold Fast! It is possible to discern, from the data, an interrelationship of motivating factors at work in philanthropy. The geographical factor, for example, is probably not decisive in determining whether a company gives to a cause that is widely and conventionally recognized as a top priority. A company doesn't have to have its home base in the Boston area to be moved to give to the United Fund or, somewhat less urgently, to the secondary priority of a local educational institution. But when it comes to third, or lower, priority causes like the arts, the branch offices are going to shy away. A similar pattern may be traced when one observes whether a company has increased its contributions in general over the past five years. Those whose contributions have not increased tend to stay with the old, top priority causes. As new funds are added, however, opportunities are created for the claims of lower priority causes. And in addition there is to be noted in this interrelationship the effect of the changing patterns of corporate contribution that are occurring on a nationwide basis. The fact that increasingly the established recipients of corporate philanthropy are being funded by government sources is causing at least some companies to consider new outlets for their corporate benevolence.

How Business Views the Arts From voluntary comments, as well as from the statistical replies, it was possible to glean insights into the business community's attitudes toward the arts in Boston. There were a number of expressions of resentment concerning the "black tie" or "social page" aspects of the arts, and frequent assertions of the need to reach broader audiences. The most vivid of these comments went: Gentlemen, Ultimately aU questionnaires become unanswerable.—Our giving to the arts has been based on who is asking and how good a friend they are and how cheaply we can get out of it. 84

Hold Fasti It is like being against "Home and Mother" but I think the value of the arts is very marginal in coping with our great urban problems. Usually it is the art "owned" by the upper middle class which we are asked to support—for example the Symphony or the Opera. These are hard to duck, altho we try. At the other end of the system are the few art activities actively centered in the ghetto and doing worthwhile work on a limited budget. Here it is not really art that is fostered but, hopefully, a sense of dignity and the feeling that someone does care and that it is possible to participate in civilization. I have a simplistic formula: 1. Let the upper classes pay for their own delectation. 2. Let the middle and affluent working class get their "art" from television which they are going to watch anyway. 3. Let's go into the ghetto with every program tliat is constructive and meanwhile recognize that art programs are near the bottom of the priority list. Sorry to be beastly! Not many businessmen seem to grasp the essential deficit nature of the arts, so thoroughly documented in the Baumol and Bowen work. The impression seems to prevail that if arts organizations would just stop being so wasteful and reckless and would be more business-like in their management, they could make out all right. Yet when it comes to waste, recklessness, lavish frivolities, and even downright mismanagement, it could be argued that arts organizations are not in the same league with business. The money expended on expense-account booze by a typical major corporation in a year could probably keep a small repertory theater company afloat. One encounters in Boston head-shaking over how much Sarah Caldwell spent to stage Moses and Aaron but it was nothing like what Ford spent to produce Edsel—and Miss Caldwell's efforts certainly won more critical acclaim. As Eli Goldston has written, "Those who feel strongly about 'mismanagement' in the arts might ponder the fact that ten of the Fortune 500 [the roster of the largest industrial corporations in the United States] lost money in 1965, with the loss by a single company (Cudahy) enough to meet the current 'income gap' of all the performing arts." 85

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How tenuous is the sense of obligation or commitment to the arts on a continuing basis is clearly revealed in the responses to a question in the survey that stated: "Very often the arts cannot support themselves from earned income. How do you think this problem should be resolved?" There followed a list of possibilities, with the respondent asked to check one. Only 2 percent felt that the arts should obtain more support from the business sector—an interesting response in view of the fact that nearly half of the companies in the survey had indicated that they had contributed to the arts the previous year. They did it, this would seem to mean, but they didn't really believe in it and they weren't going to do it again if they could get out of it. Mainly they favored the old patrician Boston solution—"that the arts should obtain more support from private individuals and foundations." That solution was endorsed by 54 percent. Just 4 percent felt that the arts should be helped by federal or local government. Boston business, which like business elsewhere in the United States these days accepts the practice of government subsidies for various aspects of commerce and industry, still believes staunchly in rugged individualism for nonprofit organizations. It's like what Charles Abrams, the noted housing expert, said about the real estate operators who were opposing public housing while at the same time accepting federal mortgage insurance on virtually 100 percent of the total cost of tibeir speculations: "They're in favor of socialism for the rich, and private enterprise for the poor." In their choice of the specific measures listed, 16 percent thought central fund-raising organizations for the arts should be established, 11 percent thought the arts should charge more for tickets for performances, and 1 percent (that being just one company) said the arts should support themselves or close. The touching thing about the last statement is that the company that made it lost quite a lot of money that year. The survey also asked business what might be done to improve the arts climate in the Boston area. Many said they thought it 86

Hold Fast! was perfectly fine as it was and did not see how it could be made any better, or why one should try. A scattering of specific suggestions was offered, the one most favored being the construction of a new performing arts center. Some Thoughts and Conclusions In an article commenting on the formation of the Business Committee for the Arts, Alvrn H. Reiss wrote: A start has been made but it is not enough. While business groups organized to spur corporate art support have a key role to play in educating their coimterparts to the needs of the arts, they are powerless to act in the one area where action is desperately needed—raising fimds for the arts. Moreover, the specter of insularity and "self-speak" looms if the total effort, through default, is left to them alone. The dialogue must be broadened. A new "third party," composed of both businessmen and artists, must be organized to bridge the gap between existing groups and provide them with guidance and insight. This group, through the collective wisdom of its members, also can perform a vital function by acting as a 'Ъгокег" or repository for corporate contributions to the arts, and by disseminating these funds to those activities it deems most vital. Importantly, this group would become a "safety valve" for those corporations who are potential donors, but who are unwilling, imprepared or unqualified to make judgements on which groups to assist, and are fearful of the controversy which might be aroused by their giving to an avantgarde or experimental arts organization. His suggestion for a "third party" organization, bringing together businessmen and artists, has much merit. Such an organization might well prove useful in Boston. Looking ahead, it is difficult to guess whether business will ever play the role in the arts that Richard Eells envisages. There are some, like Andrew Hacker, who argue that business has had its chance to engage in philanthropy and hasn't used that opportunity either fuUy enough or significantly enough; therefore, the government should revoke the tax deduction 87

Hold Fast! privilege and directly take responsibility itself for all necessary or challenging subsidies. The time may well come when business will generally recognize that the single-minded pursuit of profits is not really the most profitable attitude. An economy that is motivated solely by economic considerations will, in the end, prove uneconomic, for human beings ultimately rebel against being treated solely as consumers. Galbraith has developed this thought in his essay "Economics and Art": "It is not the artist who has suffered from the alienation of art from economics but the reverse," he writes. "For the economic system the alienation is serious, more serious certainly than is imagined." And he contends that one of the causes of the unfavorable American balance of payments position is the American public's yearning for beauty. Offered unattractive American wares, they are turning increasingly to better-designed European products; faced with the increasing uglification of the American scene, they are traveling in increasing numbers to countries that still—in the short period left before they too become completely Americanized—offer aesthetic delights in city and countryside. No doubt it is a good thing for a business corporation to make contributions to the symphony or the museum or other arts institutions that solicit them, and I suppose I must favor their doing so. Yet when all is said and done it is still a rather arid, second-hand gesture—the company president who has no interest in music sending off a check to the orchestra just because he has been solicited or persuaded that it is a worthy cause. What I would really like to see happen is that each company do as much as it can to create beauty within the area in which it exercises absolute power. A company should make its products as beautfful as possible, its buildings as beautiful as possible, the quality of the environment in which its employees work as beautiful as possible. If business would make that its goal, we would have a society in which there would be no need for fund drives. The arts would simply flourish. And I think business would too. 88

5

The View from City Hall

The facetious Tom Wolfe recently wrote that government support of the arts is really unconstitutional. The Constitution requires the separation of church and state, he said, and the arts have become the new religion in America. If so, the city of Boston must be considered one of the last bulwarks of constitutionality. When I began my research for this study in 1967, one of the first things I did was to telephone a Boston budget official to inquire how much money the city government spent on the arts. My query seemed momentarily to perplex him. "Arts?" he asked. 'Tes." "You mean—like music, painting, that sort of thing?" "That's right," I said, "What I'm trymg to leam is what subsidies or other contributions the city makes to the arts—to the museums, orchestras, opera, theater, dance groups, film and art festivals, creative artists, and so on. I'd like the overall total and also an itemized breakdown of these contributions." "Oh, good heavens," he replied genially, "you'll find we don't do much of that sort of thing in Boston. We do have an art commission, but it doesn't amount to much. Fellow named Aldrich is in charge of it. All it does is take care of monuments —cleaning and small repairs, you know. It has a total budget of—let's see now—yes, here it is—a total budget of $2,547. Aside from that, in the past the city on occasion contributed to the Boston Arts Festival—something like $30,000 a year. It contributed to Winterfest this year and last year—about the same amount. And that, I would say, is just about it." It was now my tum to be perplexed. I was new to the Boston scene then and not familiar with its customs and practices. This was my first experience with a city which didn't even subsidize its museums. "What about the budgets of the various departments

The View from City Hall

—library, school, parks, and so forth?" I persisted. "Is it possible that arts subsidies of consequence might be foimd listed there?" "Well, the School Department has a budget all its own in Boston. As for the Library Department and the Parks and Recreation Department, I can tell you who to call at those places, but I doubt you'll find much. Arts, hmnm?" There was a pause. I could hear pages being riffled. "Do you count decorating the Common at Christmas time?" he asked, after a moment. "There's $7,500 for that listed here. In fact, all told I see $116,000 in the budget this year for what we call major celebrations and special observances—hke Evacuation Day, Bunker Hill Day, Columbus Day, Dorchester Day, Veterans Day, and of course Independence Day. But I guess that's not quite the kind of thing you had in mind, is it?" "Not quite. Primarily, as I said, my interest is in determining what the city spends to support or assist arts activities and organizations. Most other major cities do subsidize the arts to some extent, you know, though the amounts expended vary widely." "Well, Boston has always been lucky in that respect," he commented. "Very lucky. We've never needed to use public funds to support such institutions. You see, we've always had this pattern of Uberai support by generous-minded private citizens to keep the museums and the symphony going, and the other cultural institutions. We're fortunate to have had that, for otherwise I don't see how those institutions could be maiotained. The city doesn't have the money to do it, that's for sure." This conversation, as I mentioned, took place in 1967. The following summer the city initiated and officially sponsored Summerthing, a summer-long arts festival in the inner city neighborhoods. I b e city's contribution was $124,000 out of a total cost of $264,000; the remainder was provided by the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities, the Permanent Charity Fund, and by contributions from other foundations, businesses, and individuals. This represented the largest subsidy 90

ТЬе View from City Hall of the arts ever made by the city of Boston, and its most direct involvement. Summerthing took place again in the summer of 1969, with the city contribution this time amounting to $150,000 out of total expenditures of $338,000. Though the city's motives in putting on Summerthing stemmed at least as much from social welfare considerations and fear of inner city disorders as from concern for bringing beauty to the populace, this action nevertheless represents a significant step for the city to have taken. Even with Summerthing in the budget, Boston's expenditures for the arts are less than those of any other major city government —less, to name several at random, than San Francisco, New Orleans, Milwaukee, Detroit, Buffalo, San Diego, Rochester, Chicago, Miimeapolis, New York, Fort Worth, Dallas, Baltimore, Atlanta, Newark, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Seattle. Bostoniane, I have found, tend to be quite insulated in respect to cultural matters, perhaps because of a hereditary selfsatisfaction, a certain cultural smugness passed on from one generation to another—in those circles, that is, which have any cultural interests or pretensions at all. I am referring now to those Bostoniane ( many of whom now dwell in the suburbs ) who have always thought of themselves and their families as the anointed and dutiful custodians of culture. They don't seem much to enjoy the arts, but they have taken them on as their burden, their responsibility. Possibly I am being unfair. Maybe they really do enjoy the arts but just don't think it proper to show it. Among them one encounters the assumption that Boston, as the self-styled Athens of America, continues unchallenged in the vanguard of this nation's culture. They tend not to be aware of what other cities do on behalf of the arts and how little their own city government does. I recall a conversation I had with one such Bostonian at his charming house one day. It was at a time when there had appeared in the press some items to the effect that the city council of Newark, faced with the prospect of a steep increase in the city's already high property tax rate, had voted to cut off funds for the Newark Museum and the public library system, which 91

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would probably necessitate the closing of those institutions.* My host was properly scornful. "Newark!" he sniffed, looking down his nose—an organ seemingly designed by nature to be looked down in just such a manner. "Well, after all what can you expect from a place like Newark? I'm surprised to hear that it even has a museum." I asked him if he had any idea how much Newark's city government contributed annually to its museum's operations. He said he didn't. When I told him that it amounted to over $760,000, he raised his eyebrows in astonishment. "As much as that!" he said. "Well, well!" Then I asked him whether he knew the extent of Boston's contributions to its own justly renowned Museum of Fine Arts. Again he pleaded ignorance. When I told him that unlike every other major city in the country, Boston had never contributed a cent to its museum—to its construction, upkeep, or operations—he seemed again rather surprised. "Is that a fact?" he said. He was thoughtful for a moment. Then he brightened, and said proudly, "That's quite a distinction, you must admit." A city to which Boston is often compared is San Francisco. The two cities are similar in size, each around 700,000 in population at the last census, and serve as the central city for a metropolitan region of around three million; both are unusually compact in area. Essentially commercial rather than manufacturing centers, each is located on a great harbor; the sea has shaped the history and the character of both. In both cities Catholics predominate and both have a high percentage of foreign-bom residents. ( The last census ranked New York City first of any city in the country in this respect, with San Francisco second and Boston third. ) Both are noted for the great * The aftermath of the Newark episode might be of interest to some readers. On March 11, 1969, the city council reversed itself and granted the museum and the libraries a nine months reprieve. The councü asserted, however, that since 70 percent of the museum's attendance came from outside the city, the city should not be expected in the future to be the museum's sole source of support. Governor Richard Hughes then proposed that a reasonable formula might be to have one third of the funds come from the city, one third from the surrounding counties, and one third from the state. Such a formula might be relevant for many other cities as weD.

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educational institutions in their vicinity and both have proud cultural traditions. Both of them have much charm, though each is markedly distinct and individual in character. A comparison between these two cities in regard to their patronage of the arts, however, shows them to be a continent apart in their funding philosophy and practices. Whereas Boston has the distinction of being the city with the least public patronage of the arts, San Francisco is the city that proportionately contributes the most. Direct subventions to the arts by the San Francisco city government amounted, in 1967, to $3,600,000. These funds went to the city's museums, symphony, opera, ballet, modem dance groups, repertory and experimental theaters, film festival, and a variety of other efforts. Of this total, $496,000 was provided through San Francisco's chief administrative officer from proceeds of the hotel-motel tax, $580,000 was provided through the city's Art Commission, $346,000 through the Recreation and Park Department, and the remainder through the city's charter obligations. City subsidies to three museums amounted to $2,200,000 and paid for virtually the total cost of operating these museums. These direct contributions to the arts amounted to approximately 0.8 percent of the city's total budget. If Boston had subsidized the arts in the same proportion as San Francisco, the city's subsidy would have amounted in 1967 to about $2.5 million.' I interviewed San Francisco's Mayor Joseph Alioto shortly after he took office and was impressed by his keen interest in the arts, his firm conviction as to their value to the city and the city's responsibility for nurturing them, and his detailed knowledge of the situation. "The arts give a flavor or a luster which is important to the personality of a city," he said. "Just as people are composed of body and spirit, so, in a sense, a city has to be both. And the element of spirit consists of the city's social services and its " For truer comparability to San Francisco's budget, I have used the figures for Boston's gross municipal expenditures for 1967 ( which includes school, transit, and other costs ) rather than the more limited official city budget.

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The View from City НаП cultural services—the two together, which, in the final analysis, I don't distinguish between." Though he had not been apprised beforehand what the topic of our discussion would be. Mayor Alioto had copious and exact information at the tip of his tongue. He knew what the various arts cost to maintain, what was needed to improve and expand operations, and he had plans formulated as to what he thought ought to be done. He spoke at some length of San Francisco's need for a new symphony hall, which would permit an expansion of their seasons for the symphony orchestra and the opera company, both of which at present share the use of the War Memorial Opera House, a splendid house built by the city in 1932. Though the voters had turned down a bond issue for a cultural complex not long before, the mayor seemed confident that he could gain the electorate's approval for a new, modified, and somewhat less costly bond issue for a new symphony hall, to be built on a site directly behind the opera house. "We have reason to beheve tìiat private sources in San Francisco will put up approximately two million dollars to enable us to make purchase of the property," Mayor Alioto told me. "This would then put us in a position to go to the people and say, 'We aren't going to ask you to vote on a twenty-five or thirty million dollar bond issue for a cultural complex at a time when there are dire social problems which ought to be met, but we are going to do what needs to be done. We've already purchased the site, and we can build a great symphony hall for twelve to fourteen million dollars.' I believe the voters can be induced to approve that." He spoke also of his desire to see operating subsidies to the arts increased, so as to foster an intensification of cultural activities in the inner city neighborhoods and also to enable San Francisco's performing arts groups to give performances in the beautiful setting of the vineyards around the San Francisco Bay Area during the summer. The funds for such expanded activities he hoped to derive from a commuter tax he intended to propose. As elsewhere, commuters have benefited from the city's facilities

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The View from City Hall and institutions but have not helped to pay for them. The tax, which would be 1 percent of earnings, would bring the city approximately $13.6 million. "Now out of that $13.6 million," he said, "I see nothing wrong with spending $1.6 million, for example, on cultural activities to bring about the things I have been talking about." · In contrast, Boston's mayor, Kevin White, whom I also interviewed not long after he became mayor, had httle to say on the subject of the arts. He was not familiar, in more than a general way, with the city's arts needs or with the endeavors and problems of the individual organizations, and he had no program to offer relating to the arts. Like the Budget Department official I once spoke to, he seemed somewhat surprised that an interviewer would even ask the mayor of Boston questions concerning the city's arts—questions that carried the implication that coping with such matters might be part of a mayor's job. The interview took place in a httle anteroom off his office at the old City Hall. It was at the end of what had undoubtedly been a strenuous day. The first thing the mayor did after greeting me was to shuck off his coat and loosen his tie with a sigh of rehef. We talked for almost an hour, sipping Cokes that at one point he had bounced up and got for us from somewhere down the hall. On many aspects of the city, particularly those dealing with social needs, he spoke knowledgeably and with obvious concern, from time to time getting up from the sofa on which we were sitting and restlessly pacing back and forth in the httle room as he spoke, as if impelled by the need to get his whole body into what he was saying. On the state of the arts in Boston, when that topic arose, he did not pretend to any more knowledge than he possessed. He asked me some questions about what I had learned in my study of the subject thus far; he hstened thoughtfully to such information as I could give. But he did not in any way suggest that the arts were about to be moved up to a high priority on his agenda. ® This tax proposal was submitted by the mayor and passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. However, as a result of a taxpayer's suit, the ordinance was ruled invalid in the courts. The city has appealed this ruling.

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The View from City Hall In juxtaposing these two interviews, it is not my intention to convey the impression that I think Joseph Alioto more worthy of respect than Kevin White because he happened to be better informed about the arts. Rather, my intention was to underscore the difference between the two cities in respect to patronage of the arts, a difference arising from different pohtical considerations, necessities, and traditions. With the recognized success of Summerthing, Mayor White's appreciation for the value of the arts to the city has indeed increased markedly since that interview. Neverthless, the fact remains that art, you might say, has traditionally just not been a Boston mayor's bag. During the last political campaign in San Francisco, one of the leading candidates for mayor ran on a more-help-for-the-arts platform. It is hard to picture a Boston politician doing that. Nor do I mean to suggest by the comparison I have been making that the arts institutions are automatically better off in the city which provides generous municipal subsidies than in the other. Some of San Francisco's institutions are in just as precarious a state as their Boston counterparts—in San Francisco's case because of meager contributions from private sources. "Don't knock that private support that Boston has," Mayor Alioto said, "We could use more of it in San Francisco. That's our problem." To explain how it happened that two such different traditions of patronage arose and persisted would be a worthy challenge for a social historian. Though in both cities Catholics predominate, Boston is run by Irish Catholics, San Francisco by Italian Catholics; that may explain much about the difference in the attitudes toward art to be found in the two city halls. Then, too, the West in general, as a more egalitarian, less class-conscious society, has tended to look to the public treasury for many services which in the East have been traditionally privately supported. The most notable example is education, the great educational institutions of the East being private, those of the West, with rare exceptions, public. Boston, of course, is a much older city than San Francisco. In 1870, when a group of Boston Brahmins of wealth, social prestige, 96

The View from City Hall cultivation, and civic concern vv^ere founding the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for the edification of the city, San Francisco was still very much a boisterous, raw frontier metropolis, a boomtown with very little past and a future consisting chiefly of speculation as to what the next bonanza after gold and silver might be; some thought diamonds and proved fair game for one of the great swindles in American history. Not that San Francisco did not also like paintings then. If one can credit Mark Twain's account, a steady stream of art lovers flocked to the Bank Exchange saloon where Samson and Deliiah hung; they gazed appreciatively at the half-nude Delilah but had reservations about her scissors. "Them scissors is too modem," a budding art critic at the saloon was apt to assert, according to Twain. "There wam't no scissors like that in them days, by a d--d sight!" Both cities were wealthy, but the possessors of the wealth were very different in the two cities. In Boston, the wealth was in the hands of an extraordinary elite—men who, in effect, were the sons of the sons of John Adams and had known the security and the leisure to cultivate their taste and sensibilities, carrying out the wishes expressed by John Adams in the letter to his wife I quoted earlier. They had grovra up imbued with a remarkable sense of civic responsibility. Philanthropic, high-minded, dutiful, they were accustomed to think of themselves as the trustees of civic virtue and to act accordingly. They had the welfare of the city in mind when they founded the great Boston arts institutions, but they took care to keep control in their own hands. In other old cities patterns of private patronage of the arts were gradually modified to some extent by the passage of time and adaptation to new social conditions. Boston's pattern became fixed, a kind of anthropological curiosity, as a result of the capture of City Hall by the Irish around the tum of the century and the retreat from practical affairs of city government by the Yankees. It came to be taken for granted by those mnning City Hall that the arts were the private preserve of the Yankees, not the concern of the municipality. If there had been in this century any disposition to alter that viewpoint, the condition of near 97

The View from City Hall bankruptcy in which the city languished for many years would have effectively inhibited much being done about it. The temptation for those who care about the arts nowadays is to excoriate Boston s phüistinism and to exhort the municipality to match San Francisco's munificence. But when one examines the matter closely, one soon comes to realize that such exhortation would not be realistic as things stand today. Boston's financial difficulties are exceedingly acute. "Boston is in a tough financial squeeze—the worst, perhaps, of any large city in the United States," Martin Meyerson and Edward C. Banfield wrote in Boston: The Job Ahead. The city's revenue source is virtually limited to the property tax, which in Boston is higher possibly than in any other city. Whereas San Francisco had revenues in 1967 of $445 million, Boston's revenues (including those for the School Department) totaled only $316 million. Contributing to the difficulties of a city which relies almost exclusively on the property tax is the fact that more than 40 percent of the property in Boston has tax-exempt status. Nor does Boston enjoy anything like San Francisco's leeway in imposing new taxes or in obtaining legislation of benefit to the city. San Francisco, by virtue of being at the same time both a city and a county, possesses an exceptional degree of home rule and makes use of a wide variety of taxes—including income, sales, gross receipts, and other taxes. Boston's powers and prerogatives are severely restricted by the state. "Massachusetts meddles in the affairs of its cities more, probably, than does any other state . . . Boston is the most interfered-with city in Massachusetts, and probably the most interfered-with city in the United States," wrote Meyerson and Banfield. Until 1962, the city did not even have power to name its own police commissioner. That appointment was in the hands of the governor." • A new home rule amendment was enacted by the legislatvire in 1966. Its full scope and effect are still unclear, but it is possible that a mayor and city council that now acted boldly to meet Boston s legitimate needs might find themselves possessed of more real power than Üiey have been accustomed to think. Mayor AJioto put fbis activist philosophy forward forthrightly in his first annual message to San Francisco s Board

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Obviously, the city needs new and diversified sources of revenue if it is to supply the services and the amenities that are appropriate to a metropolitan center. One such that might reasonably be proposed as a source for operating subsidies for the arts would be the hotel-motel tax. About a million dollars is raised annually in Boston as a result of this tax. All of this sum goes into the state's general fund, although the legislation authorizing this tax specified that one third of the proceeds would be devoted to the promotion of tourism and industrial development. San Francisco allots about 60 percent of the money derived from its hotel-motel tax to its Visitors and Convention Bureau for direct promotion of tourism and about 40 percent to performing arts organizations. I would urge that Boston seek to obtain these funds and that it adopt a formula similar to San Francisco's. The adoption of such a formula would result in annual subsidies from the city to the arts organizations of around $400,000 a year. Their share of this subsidy might mean the difference between existence and extinction for some of the city's arts groups. If one needs economic justification for this proposal, it is not difficult to supply. A massive study prepared by Northeastern University's Management Institute, entitled "An Inventory of Recreation, Tourism and Vacationing in Eastern Massachusetts," has estimates as to the income generated by these activities. On the basis of the figures given there, it can be estimated that visitors from outside the eastern Massachusetts region spent over of Supervisors: "Hence, I strongly urge that your Honorable Board should not be deterred from acting on our own city problems . . . by doubts, however grave, that some other legislature 'has occupied or preempted the field.' This should be so, particularly if that 'other legislature' exhibits an inordinate disposition to substitute talk for action or where there is sufficient basis to believe that the subject matter is controlled by economic influences with a demonstrated capacity to stifle or emasculate needed legislation. This is but one way of saying that the cities must look to their own legislative powers on problems that are peculiar to them and leave to the courts the unpredictable business of determining who has or has not 'occupied the field,' to what extent and wherein joint action is deemed complementary rather than contradictory. This is a nebulous area of the law at best. We should resolve doubts in favor of our power to act rather than in favor of our disabiUty to act."

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The View from City Hall $360 million in 1967. The study conducted a survey to find out what features of Boston visitors liked best. Historical sites vigere the top choice, vv'ith cultural attractions—especially museums—a close second; after that came the city's restaurants, its people, and its shops, in that order. The survey found that the typical visitor was in his thirties or forties, married, with one or two children, was a college graduate, a professional by vocation, and had an income of over $15,000 a year—in short, had much the same characteristics as Baumol and Bowen found to be possessed by the typical customer for the performing arts in the extensive audience surveys they conducted. The authors of the Northeastern University study write, "We have no way of knowing how many tourist dollars Boston's 'aesthetic infra-structure' attracts, but it could hardly be regarded as less than a major asset." Consequently, they urged that the city's culture be assiduously promoted. In their view, incidentally, cultural attractions do more to bring in visitors from outside the region than do sports events and are thus economically more significant. Writing paragraphs like those above, it must be said, goes somewhat against the grain. One should not have to base the argument for support of the arts on economic reasons, but in the United States that is pretty much the way it has to be done. This is, after all, a nation in which the government is perfectly willing to subsidize you to take someone to the opera ( or theater or ballet or a concert or what have you ) so long as you can demonstrate that you went there not to have a profound or moving experience but to consummate a business deal. Commerce takes precedence over catharsis at the 1RS. Even with the proceeds of a portion of the hotel-motel tax, the arts in Boston would still need significant aid. Their best hope, as far as future significant municipal assistance is concerned, would be for the city to get its hands on a great deal more money in general—so it can build housing, improve transit, renovate its parks and playgrounds, put up new schools and attack the myriad other problems crying to be taken care of. All the cities in the nation are in the same quandary. Not until these other pressing 100

The View from City Hall needs are taken care of are city officials likely to be in a position to lavish largesse on the arts. As has been mentioned, Boston needs to be permitted to diversify its tax sources. Additional revenues for the city could also be obtained by payments in Heu of taxes by some of the institutions that now occupy tax-exempt property. Boston's total tax-exempt property in 1967 was valued officially at $1.2 billion. The general belief among the public, especially among those who have listened to local politicians, is that it is the educational institutions which are occupying the bulk of this tax-exempt property, depriving the city of sorely-needed funds. In actuality, private nonprofit institutions ( including churches and hospitals, as well as colleges ) occupy only about one third of the total tax-exempt property in Boston. Some two thirds ( valued at about $800 million) is occupied by federal, state, and city facihties and properties. The chief occupant of tax-exempt properties in Boston is the city itself: its properties were valued at $427.4 million. Of the remainder, property valued at $257.2 million is owned by the state and property valued at $113.7 million is owned by the federal government. Mayor White has been seeking voluntary payments in heu of taxes from the colleges and universities, though at the same time recognizing that many of them are almost as hard pressed for funds as is the city itself. He has said that in practical political terms it is not realistic to expect any in-lieu payments for federal property, but I do not see why this should be so. I believe that both federal and state agencies should as a matter of course make appropriate payments in lieu of taxes for all properties they occupy within a city, as a recompense for the valuable space they take up and for the municipal services they receive. There is precedent for this. Public housing authorities, which are federal agencies, customarily make payments in lieu of taxes—a policy originally adopted to soften local objections to their programs. The state also has an in-lieu-of-taxes agreement with the city for at least one of its Boston properties—the state office building in Government Center. If all state and federal agencies would make 101

The View from City Hall such payments, and at a rate commensurate with the 1969 property tax rate ($144.40 per thousand dollars of valuation), this would result in additional revenues for the city of over $50 million. Boston would probably accept with gratitude even some modest portion of this amount right now. Beyond these measures, which are all a kind of tinkering within the present revenue structure, it has become widely recognized that some more thoroughgoing overhaul is needed. Some rational revenue-sharing method must be devised for returning to the desperately impoverished cities some of the tax dollars being collected by the states and the federal government. A number of proposals to this effect have been put forward in recent years. The time has come to enact such a measure. Let me return now to the more specific questions involved in the funding of the arts by the municipality. The problem Boston confronts when asked to subsidize the arts is the same as it must grapple with in regard to many other needs and services: the problem of metropolitanism. Boston has the obligations and trappings of a metropolis but not the powers to function as one. Severely restricted by its pohtical boundaries, it is yet expected to offer to the subiu-banites and the exurbanites, as well as the numerous visitors from beyond, all the facilities, opportunities, and delights that only a metropolitan center can provide. Certainly the arts in Boston are of metropolitan importance. Yet within the city proper, the arts have, so to speak, scarcely any political constituency. One has only to compare statistics as to the composition of the audience at a typical Boston Symphony Orchestra concert with the vital statistics for the population of the city of Boston to be struck by how different these two constituencies are. A Baumol and Bowen survey of the audience at a Monday evening concert in 1964 found the median annual income of those present to be $12,326.09. Shghtly over half the respondents were male. Of them, 69 percent were professionals or artists and 20 percent were in the managerial category; only 2 percent were blue collar workers. In regard to educational 102

The View from City Hall attaimnents, 67 percent of the men and 31 percent of the women had done graduate work. By comparison, the 1960 census showed the median family income for the city of Boston to be $5,747 and the median education for adults twenty-five years of age and over to be 11.2 years of schooling. Additional details are supplied by a survey conducted in 1965-66 by the Commimity Research Project of Metropolitan Boston. This survey showed that in the city of Boston, 25 percent of the household heads had incomes under $3,000, and 45 percent had incomes between $3,000 and $5,999. Only 4 percent had incomes above $10,000. In occupation, only 26 percent were professional or managerial. In education, only 4 percent had college or higher degrees—in fact, only 17 percent had any college education at all. Some 46 percent had failed to complete high school. Obviously, it is not at aU poHtically easy for a mayor of Boston to advocate subsidizing arts institutions that seem to exist primarily for the edification of suburbanites. He may argue that the maintenance of these institutions is essential to Boston's metropolitan image, but that argument is hard to sell in Dorchester or Charlestown. What the city can readily do, however, without political repercussions, in addition to the suggestion I have already made concerning the hotel-motel tax, is to support and subsidize arts activities clearly aimed at the population of the inner city. It can support Summerthing; an arts and arts workshop program in the neighborhoods the year round, not just the summer, as the Institute of Contemporary Art has sought to foster; and such activities as Elma Lewis has generated in Roxbury at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts and the National Center of Afro-American Artists. It can help establish branch museums in the neighborhoods and sponsor neighborhood performances. In doing so, the city would provide aid to some of the Boston arts organizations by giving them additional bookings and employment. The Boston Ballet, for instance, can be hired to perform in Allston, or 103

The View from City Hall Other neighborhoods. The ballet benefits, as well as the residents of Allsten, and no political protests ensue. This helps, but it still leaves the arts organizations in need of additional financial assistance from governmental sources. One naturally wishes that some appropriate metropolitan agency, with tax powers, could serve as a channel for subsidies or assistance to those Boston arts organization that should be aided. The most obvious such agency already in existence is the Metropolitan District Commission, which has the broad mandate to provide recreation facilities for the Greater Boston region. However, its officers do not appear to have much sohcitude for the arts and it seems unwise to suggest that this burden be thrust upon them. Besides, the one significant experience which the MDC had with the arts proved so traumatic that the agency would undoubtedly not welcome any further involvement. That was the venture called the Metropolitan Boston Arts Center ( MeBAC )—for which the agency in 1959 put up a canvas-roofed theater on a bank of the Charles River across from Soldiers Field Stadium. It was a delightful idea in many respects, and the site was an agreeable one, though afflicted by traffic noise from Soldiers Field Road and not conveniently accessible by public transport, but the project was fuzzy in its conception and bungled in its execution. Within two years the theater was abandoned and left to rot, and eventually it was destroyed—amid volleys of public criticism, some of it sheer know-nothingism, and a scathing legislative investigation. The most logical agency to assist and help foster the arts of Boston, as well as the rest of the commonwealth, then becomes the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities. It has the virtue of being in existence and being administered by people of intelligence and sensitivity, who consider the arts to be of some importance to the commonwealth's well-being. The agency's greatest disability in performing the role it should is lack of funds. In 1967, its first year, it received only $25,000 from the commonwealth and languished ineffectually. Under the chairmanship of John Watts, however, it has established more effective relations 104

The View from City Hall with the legislature, and in 1968 received $100,000, plus a supplementary grant of $30,000.1 would recommend that the legislature vote the council at least $500,000 a year—which would still be only about one fourth what New York State distributes to the arts through its state arts councü." Finally, there is the hope of increased federal aid. Eventually, it may well be that the most likely way for the Brookline opera lover's dollar to get to Boston will be via Washington. There is always the hope that when the Vietnam war ends at least some fraction of the vast sums expended by the militaryindustrial complex can be diverted to humane purposes. Meanwhile, in his message to Congress on December 10,1969, President Nixon asked that the legislation creating the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities be extended for an additional three years beyond its termination date of June 30,1970. He further proposed that Congress approve $40 million in new funds for the foundation in fiscal 1971. This would be almost twice the previous year's appropriation. "At a time of severe budget stringency, a doubling of the appropriation for the arts and humanities might seem extravagant," President Nixon said. "However, I believe that the need for a new impetus to the understanding and expression of the American idea has a compelling claim on our resources . . . Few investments we could make would give us so great a return in terms of human understanding, human satisfaction and the intangible but essential qualities of grace, beauty and spiritual fulfillment." I guess the President is to be praised for the stand he has taken. There had been uncertainty as to whether he intended to come to the assistance of the foundation at all. But it makes one sad, very sad, when one goes on then to think of how our nation ranks its priorities—of the billions the nation squanders on • In his January 7, 1970, message to the New York State legislature. Governor Nelson Rockefeller asked that the appropriation for next year be increased ten-fold—to $20 million—so pressing does he consider the needs of New York's cultural institutions.

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The View from City Hall the awesome gadgetry of destruction, and which the President, that same President who can use the word "extravagant" when speaking on behalf of an appropriation of $40 million for the arts and humanities, proposes to continue to squander. And it makes one ashamed when one compares what other countries do to foster those spiritual elements our President so eloquently praises. To take but one small example: the city of Göteborg, Sweden, whose population is less than half a million, allocates annually from the public treasury for its arts and cultural institutions the sum of $10 million—a sum amounting to 4 percent of its total budget. Consider the billions that an equivalent percent of the U.S. budget would amoimt to! In short, when one contemplates the President's statement, one is left wondering whether to applaud—or to weep.

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The need for additional or improved physical facilities for the arts in Boston has been extensively documented. The 1966-67 annual report of the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities drew attention to the fact that in Boston "key New^ England enterprises" like the Opera Company of Boston, the Charles Playhouse, and the Boston Ballet "are inadequately, precariously housed, with neither the material advantages nor the sense of stability and significance that comes with having one's own establishment." Other names could be added to the list. "There is a widespread frustration," the report said, "at lack of space, housing, equipment." This frustration was expressed by nearly all of the major arts organizations to which I sent questionnaires. Even Symphony Hall, with its venerated acoustics, needs extensive work. The only organization that seems satisfied with its present quarters the way they are is the Gardner Museimi—and that is not surprising, since the museimi's trust agreement forbids any alterations whatsoever; pictures and furniture must remain forever the way the fanciful, strong-willed Mrs. Gardner left them. Anyway, who would want to alter or try to improve the most captivating nineteenth-century example of a fifteenth-century Venetian palazzo to be found anywhere? The biggest, most obvious need is for an opera house. An Arthur D. Little study made in 1960 stated that the principal theatrical requirements in Boston were not so much new seating capacity per se but a proper stage for opera and the baHet with outstanding acoustics. Because of these limitations, the report observed that there was not a single facility in Boston that could be considered desirable for the production of opera and ballet. Nothing that has happened since that was written would alter the appraisal. The Back Bay Theater has been torn down, and the War Memorial Auditorium has been built. The auditorium, where the Metropolitan Opera performs for a week on

Sheltering the Troupes its annual tour, is not at all suitable for opera or dance. It is far too big, the acoustics are such as to require amplification, there are no proper back-stage facilities, the cost of renting the hall is astronomical, and the place is hopelessly devoid of glamor. Boston's social set, all dressed up at a Met opening night, are a rather touching, if not comical, sight as they stroll at intermission about the dreary, bam-like lobby of the auditorium, with its few potted pahns, trying to behave as if they are in the midst of a brilliant scene. The society columnist of the Boston Globe once scolded in print a young couple who, she was horrified to note, had come to the opera in ski clothes. That seems to me a more suitable garb for the auditorium than mink or black tie. One may be sure that the Met would not perform in a place like the auditorium in New York, but apparently anything is good enough for the hinterlands. All this is academic, anyway, because the auditorium, even if it were suitable, is booked solid throughout the year with conventions and exhibitions. In fact, Boston already needs additional convention space. For that matter, the Back Bay Theater, though mourned, was not physically very satisfactory either. Its stage was extremely shallow and its acoustics were erratic, particularly for those seated under the projection of the balcony. I remember asking John Updike during an intermission of Tosca how he was liking the performance. He replied, "It's very restful. I can't hear a thing." Still it was a home of sorts for the opera and ballet companies, as well as available to visiting attractions, and it could be rented at a price the local companies could afford. Rental for the Back Bay Theater was $3,000 a week. Such alternatives as are available cost many times that. The Shubert, which the Opera Company of Boston rented for eight weeks during the 1969 spring season, cost the company $8,000 a week, though its seating capacity is only about half what the Back Bay Theater's capacity was. Rentals for the Savoy are $15,000 a week, and for the Music HaU —where the Boston Ballet performed The Nutcracker during the 108

Sheltering the Troupes 1968 Christmas holidays-go as high as $20,000 a week. These two houses are currently available only for brief bookings; it is more lucrative to run them as movie houses. "Our budget is strained enough as it is," says E. Virginia WilHams, artistic director of the Boston Ballet. "When we have to spend a lot to rent a theater, it means that we have that much less to spend on the productions, the orchestra rehearsals, the number of dancers we can afford, guest stars, choreographers, costumes and sets." Add to the rental costs the additional economic burdens, for a company without a house in which it has some continuity of tenure, of having to scrounge rehearsal and storage space. When one considers these costs one becomes aware that the issue is not just whether the Boston companies will have an agreeable showcase in which to perform, but rather whether they will survive. The price of not having a home could be extinction for these groups. In addition to the problems of the local companies, the lack of a suitable opera house also limits the Boston public's chances to see visiting attractions. According to Walter Pierce of the Boston University Celebrity Series, many attractions pass Boston by simply because there is not a suitable place to perform in the city. Some of the ensembles that do come, says Mr. Pierce, have to limit their repertory to works that can be done on a shallow stage and do not require the most elaborate sets or stage effects. One further argument for a new opera house can be made, but I almost hesitate to make it. More convention space is needed —not of the exhibition area sort, but of the nature of a hall such as an opera house would have. A study indicates that about one third of the national convention groups require theater-type seating and/or a stage and orchestra pit. Thus, rentals of this sort could help pay for the house when performing groups were not using it. As I say, I hesitate to mention this, because convention business considerations have a way of swallowing up everything they touch and taking priority over all other considerations. It would be regrettable if Boston compromised with the quality of 109

Sheltering the Troupes any new hall it built in order to incorporate in it features to please the convention trade. Nevertheless, convention needs are a factor to keep in mind. One of the questions much debated of late is whether the "cultural boom" is real or apparent; it is a debate that becomes almost as mystical as the earlier one over the "missile gap." One thing is certain: whether or not a culture boom exists, this country is without a doubt witnessing a cultural center boom. In large cities and small, throughout the length and breadth of the nation, arts centers are being built at an unprecedented rate. An informal survey made in 1967 revealed that 52 arts centers and 121 theaters had been completed since 1962, and that 109 arts centers and 70 theaters were then in various stages of planning and construction. These vary enormously in size, shape, cost, and desirability. The super-center of the world, of course, is New York's Lincoln Center, built at a cost of $184 million. At the next level down come the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington ( $60 million was an early estimate ) and the one in Los Angeles ( $33 million ). Then there is the Atlanta ( $13 million ) and Milwaukee ($12 miUion) level. And then they range all the way down to such mini-centers as the one constructed for $250,000 in Cherokee, Iowa (population 8,000). The total cost of all this cultural center construction is estimated at somewhere between two-and-a-half and three billion dollars for the period 1962-1970. It has become intellectually fashionable to scoff at this arts center construction as nothing more than a manifestation, on a national scale, of an unfortunate and compulsive "edifice complex." The billions spent on concrete and glass culture palaces should have been channeled to the creative and performing artists, the critics say. That's what America would do if it really cared about the arts. AU too often a city puts up an arts center, then realizes that it has no arts organizations to use it; and all too often a city that has spent millions on the buüdings shows no interest in helping arts groups raise the annual operating funds they need to keep them in existence. Fund-raising for annual operations doesn't have the glamor of fund-raising for fancy buildings. 110

Sheltering the Troupes The criticism contains much truth, but I don't subscribe to it completely. Realism tells us that if the money had not been spent on the real estate aspect, most of it would probably not have gone to the arts at all. Not all of the new centers are monumental monstrosities; some of them are very beautiful indeed. No law requires them to be ugly. And though it is true that in some places centers have been built but no local comparues fostered, I suspect that the very existence of such centers will eventually act as a stimulus to the development of local arts groups. However, I may well be mistaken in my optimism. In any case, the situation in Boston is, ironically, the reverse of what one finds elsewhere. There exist here companies of high quality—of national reputation, in the case of the opera company —but no buildings in which to show what they can do. Something should, indeed, be done about this. The question, of course, is what. After devoting considerable inquiry and thought to this question, one conclusion I have come to is that Boston should not attempt to construct the conventional arts center—the kind characterized by a group of free-standing monumental buildings, placed in expansive grandeur in a park or plaza. This may work well in some cities, but it is my feeling that it would not be the most appropriate concept for the new Boston urban environment that is presently evolving and beginning to manifest its own distinctive quality. Something more fitting and more imaginative —in architectural, environmental, and human terms—is indicated. Certainly, whatever concept is envisaged must be practicable —that is to say, capable of being financed and executed. Regardless of any other considerations, I strongly doubt that a conventional arts center could be financed in Boston, with the money raised in the customary ways it has been raised in other cities. A rough estimate for an opera house today is $15 million to $20 million. If one includes a 1,000 seat repertory theater, a smaller theater-in-the-roimd of about 300 seats, an art cinema 111

Sheltering the Troupes house, a contemporary museum or exhibit space and, possibly, a television and film center or institute, one is up to around $25 million to $30 million. This is guesswork based on present-day costs—costs that invariably go up distressingly by the time the project is completed. In a number of cities—Atlanta, Milwaukee, Los Angeles—the requisite sums have been obtained by massive fund drives, combined with contributions from the city and county. A fund drive of this magnitude in Boston for an opera house, or an arts center, would not be likely to succeed at this time. Professional fund-raisers I have consulted concur. The region may well have reached the saturation point; I am told that the total fimds being sought in the various capital fund campaigns pursued in 1968 in Greater Boston amounted to $200 million. Boston, as has been mentioned, is more restricted in its taxing powers than most large cities, so whatever share the city might contribute would have to come from the property tax revenues. I have urged that the city persuade the commonwealth to grant it a share of the hotel-motel tax as a source of funds to the arts, on the justification that the arts help attract tourists, who are the ones who pay that tax. But it would probably be more advisable to draw on that source of funds, as San Francisco does, for operating rather than capital subsidies. One possibility is to put the fund request to the voters as a bond issue—whereupon it will be overwhelmingly defeated. I cannot quite imagine the voters of South Boston or Dorchester voting to increase their property taxes for the benefit of the underprivileged opera lover from Lincoln. As I noted earlier, even in San Francisco, despite its long tradition of municipal support of the arts, a bond issue for a new performing arts hall was rejected by the electorate in 1968. Bond issues, in general, fared worse at the 1968 elections than at any time ia recent history. All across the country the voters turned truculent and said no to everything. Even school bonds were widely rejected, causing one school system to close down entirely. Well, then, what about a cheap conversion job? In St. Louis 112

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and in Chicago, instead of new symphony halls being built, old movie houses were remodeled for the purpose and with most satisfactory results. Does Boston have a movie house that might be remodeled to serve as an opera house? As a matter of fact, it does. There is the Music Hall, on Tremont Street. Its greatest present shortcoming is the shallowness of the stage. Sixty more feet could be added and stage-loading facilities installed if the upstage area were extended toward Stuart Street. Lengthening the stage house would afford the necessary space for additional dressing rooms and other backstage requirements. This suggestion comes from Francis W. Sidlauskas, the executive director of the Cultural Foundation of Boston, who, in a memorandum to me, went on to write: "Directly across the street is the Shubert Theater. Within a few yards north of the Music HaU is the Wilbur Theater. All three buildings together might constitute the arts center that Boston, in my opinion, cannot afford in any other way. "Romancing even further, perhaps Tremont Street here can be depressed. Perhaps the Institute of Contemporary Art, other art gaUeries, restaurants, boutiques, book stores and all the ancillary impedimenta of the arts can find a home. One extremely practical aspect of this complex would be that Boston would have a second convention center which is already needed and should be planned now." As an alternative to costly new construction, this proposal undoubtedly merits serious consideration. The sums of money involved would be substantially less than the cost of building new facilities, but they would still be sizable. There is not really a "cheap" remodeling solution. To remodel the forty-year-old St. Louis Theater into a symphony haU cost $2 milUon, but this paid only to make the hall suitable for concerts, not for opera or ballet. The remodeling of the beautiful old Chicago theater designed by SuUivan cost somewhat more. To remodel the Music HaU in the manner suggested might come to $4 million. To this must be added the cost of acquiring the building from its owners. Tufts University—say $1 million. So the sum of $5 million would 113

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have to be raised through a fund-raising drive and city subsidies. The prospects for raising even this amount in Boston for this purpose do not seem encouraging to me. The biggest obstacle, however, is Tufts's plan to tear the Music Hall down by about 1980 and extend the New England Medical Center, on which construction began in 1968, onto that site. It is conceivable that Tufts might be persuaded that it would be a disservice to the city to demolish a much-needed theater but inquiries I have made do not hold out much promise for this. Years of planning have gone into the conception of the medical center, which embodies some major new principles in hospital and medical school layout. I am given to understand by the Boston Redevelopment Authority that the Music Hall site is integral to the realization of the plan and that there is simply no practical way of revising the medical center's design at this time. So there we are. Obviously some new approach needs to be explored—a new conception of an arts center, a new way of financing such a venture. And this brings me, then, to the proposal I am about to describe in some detail. It is one that has never been tried before. I think it might work. The site concerned is an entire block at the edge of the Common, bounded by Tremont, Boylston, Washington, and Stuart streets. The block, which has been designated for urban renewal, is referred to by the Boston Redevelopment Authority as the Hinge Block, because it occupies a pivotal position between downtown and the Back Bay. Two subway stations are adjacent to it, and it is only a few blocks away from the turnpike and the expressway. The plan to be suggested here for it involves private development, urban renewal, and a concept of mixed land use. Under this plan, Boston would get an arts center that included an opera hall and a number of other facilities—some $30 million worth of facilities, let us say, if created in the conventional way —for an outlay of only a few hundred thousand dollars. Even that outlay would be recaptured by the city within a short while because, were this scheme to be executed in the manner envisaged, the site would bring in possibly $600,000 a year more in taxes dian it presently does. 114

Sheltering tbe Troupes What is envisaged, very briefly, is that the BRA require the private developer who undertakes development of the Hinge Block to include the desired cultural components within a large-scale development consisting otherwise of a variety of commercial uses. His doing so would be a basic condition of the agreement. As inducements, the BRA wül be able to offer to the developer the advantages of land assemblage, vrate-dovra on land costs, zoning variances, and such abatements as may be appropriate. The whole project will, of course, have to shape up as a profitable one for the developer; otherwise he would not undertake it. It will therefore have to be a development of considerable size. At a guess, the overall cost of this development is going to be about $100 million. It may seem paradoxical that having decided that Boston cannot afford to raise $30 miUion for a new cultural center, or even $5 million for a remodeled opera house, I should then propose a $100 miUion job as a way of obtaining the cultural facilities Boston needs. All I can say is that it is paradoxical— and that's the American Way.

The Hinge Block Concept The basic conception of the Hinge Block as a mixed-use area, containing entertainment and cultural facilities as well as shops, offices, apartments, and restaurants, originated with the BRA planning team for the Central Business District. In 1966 the Committee on the Central Business District and the BRA together published a pamphlet titled: "The Hinge Block: An Opportunity for the Arts in Boston." The pamphlet said, "The 'Hinge Block' is seen as an important renewal proposal which can provide a major opportunity for the performing arts and related entertainment activities, and, at the same time, eliminate a blighting influence in the CBD." In its official plan for the Central Business District, approved by the city council in 1967, the BRA stated: The most important architectural feature of the Hinge Block should be its intimate interior pubhc open space 115

Sheltering the Troupes offering a great contrast to the openness of the adjacent Common and the strongly commercial character of the surrounding streets. This open space not only will function for pedestrian circulation, but will give strollers, shoppers and theatergoers an opportunity to experience a truly urban space free from traffic and noise during the day and night. Building design should take every advantage of the double frontage potential of the interior open space and the surrotmding streets. The interior frontages should form space which can be used for outdoor concerts and art exhibitions as well for sitting. The matter remained at that stage until early 1968, when a group of young Boston businessmen and professionals who call themselves the Boston Study Group Foundation came along. The group, whose purpose for existence is an expressed concern for Boston s well-being, consisted of Francis E. Park III, of M.I.T.; Peter Chermayeff, of Cambridge Seven Associates; Charles H. Hood, of H. P. Hood and Sons; Richard A. Johnson, of Amherst International; Arthur Blasberg, Jr., of Sullivan and Worcester; Arthur P. Contas, of the Boston Consulting Group; Louis I. Kane, of Kane Financial Corporation; and Mortimer B. Zuckerman, of Cabot, Cabot and Forbes. Several of them are board members of Boston arts groups. They made a special study of the Hinge Block, using Peter Chermayeff"s architectural talents, which resulted in an extremely imaginative and innovative architectural extension of the basic BRA idea, as well as an ingenious new approach to the financing of the project within the framework of BRA regulations and practices. It is their proposal, in essence, which I here espouse, though in fairness to the Boston Study Group Foundation I should add that I have felt free to suggest my own modifications where I think these may have merit. The most important of Chermayeff s ideas is his concept of treating the entire block as essentially a single, varied building, of which the cultural components are inner aspects. The BRA had, in its original plan, been thinking in more conventional terms of separate building elements in the block. This makes, of course, for a radical transformation. 116

Sheltering the Troupes Another important innovation is the transformation of what the BRA had envisaged as an inner open plaza into an arcade or lobby, one hundred feet high and completely roofed over wdth glass or other transparent covering. This permits the introduction into this indoor plaza of a wide variety of elements. It also makes for major efficiencies and cost reductions in operations. A detailed description of the proposal's essential aspects, as set forth in a brochure by the Boston Study Group Foundation, follows. Architectural plans may be foimd in Appendix B. "In concept this proposal is a single complex of substantial magnitude and density, in which the proportion of highly profitable land uses (hotel, apartments, offices, large shops) far exceeds the proportion of marginally profitable uses (theatres, galleries, and other arts facihties ). This allows facilities for the arts that are difficult to finance by themselves to be built as secondary but integral parts of a much larger and more financially viable real estate development. "The development is conceived as a single structure rather than as a group of individual buildings, so as to take maximum advantage of close integration of activities. When numerous related uses are combined in a single large scale structure, many economies begin to emerge. The sharing by numerous performing arts organizations of lobby space, rehearsal space, workshops, building perimeter, building structure, heating and air conditioning, elevators, escalators, parking and other facilities and services will allow each organization to avoid the high costs of coping with these expensive needs independently. Another important part of the concept is that all arts facihties within the development will be leased from a single non-profit organization. This approach allows each individual arts organization to concentrate its resources on its real creative activity, while utilizing the maximum and most efficient use of interior space within the complex. "The concept of leased rather than owned space also allows important flexibihty of production scheduling by the performing 117

Sheltering the Troupes arts groups, since access to a wider variety of facilities is made possible. For example, the preliminary conceptual design includes a 2000 seat theatre, suitable for opera and ballet, a 1000 seat theatre for repertory and touring productions, and a 300 seat theatre, suitable for numerous uses by diverse organizations. "Since art galleries are logical close relatives of performing arts facilities, major exhibition space is proposed as an integral part of lobby areas, again for additional economy through overlapping functions. The creation of a large interior space acting as a shared lobby for several theatres ( as weU as for other activities ) allows exhibits or shows to be mounted by museums or galleries without these organizations attempting to carry independently the high costs of appropriate space. "Numerous further advantages of a single structure include the close integration with arts facilities of related enterprises such as restaurants and small shops so that each can add to the success of the other. For example, if several restaurants are located directly off a theatre lobby, with cocktail loimges that are in effect part of that lobby, theatre patrons can be conveniently served before and after productions, as well as during intermission. "Financial benefits of this mixed development concept have been stressed, but perhaps its most important benefit is the creation of an exciting gathering place for large numbers of people, day and night. An interior space within such a complex can become a major attraction or focus in the downtovra, a place to go.' "For example, an evening out in winter weather could include parking one's car only once, checking one's coat only once, cocktails and diimer at one of several restaurants, a play, a ballet, a movie, or a social function at a hotel, a late visit to an art gallery or night club, and numerous other choices. "Perhaps the most appealing aspect of this kind of experience is the intense shoulder-rubbing of people with diverse but related interests. When restaurants, nightclubs, cafes, galleries, exhibition 118

Sheltering the Troupes halls, shops, theatres, cinemas, museums and so on are combined, the resulting liveliness is a stimulus both to participants ( artists and others ) and to their patrons—urbanity at its best. A complex of this kind will make a substantial contribution to the quality of life in the city. "The focal point of the preliminary design is a large interior space, entirely skyHt from above, and approximately 250 feet by 150 feet at ground level. "All paths of movement and almost all activities occur in relation to this main space vv'hich has a park-like character, flooded with daylight, planted with trees, and protected yearround against the weather. "Almost all public facilities are oriented toward the main interior space which in effect becomes a multi-level lobby and exhibition hall for the entire complex. The visitors arriving at the bottom of the space will see several banks of elevators, at opposite sides of the space, and free-standing escalators rising dramatically in the center. Theatre lobbies are shared platforms extending visibly into the main space. Other platforms within the main space include hotel lounge space, dining terraces, cocktail lounges, restaurants, and gallery exhibition areas. "Virtually the entire volume is available for periodic large scale exhibitions of contemporary art or other exhibitions, some of which might be suspended from the skyhght trasses. Substantial floor area for gaUery or exhibition use is available at ground level and on the upper theatre platforms. "Retail space is primarily located at ground level, with frontage to the outside streets as well as inwards toward the enclosed plaza. Servicing for the entire complex occurs below street level. Parking is located on two self-parking levels below street level, and on twelve mechanically operated levels above. "The site can be approached by car, taxi, subway, or on foot. Transit riders enter the main space from a lower concourse connecting the two subway stations at the north side. Drivers enter at Stuart Street, and after depositing their cars, arrive in 119

Sheltering the Troupes the main space via a large day-lighted opening in the center. Pedestrians enter primarily from three diagonal comers, reflecting the Ъinge' function of the site and the diagonal approach from Boston Common. The approach from Boston Common is dramatized by a slot that visually separates the hotel from the apartments, and that allovi's a generous vievi^ into the interior space. "The visitor within the space who rides the main escalators upwards, first arrives at the main theatre level, and continuing upwards on escalators and stairs, arrives at upper theatre and balcony levels. Via elevators or stairways he can go to any intermediate level, or to the roof level, there entering the communications center or the gallery. The gallery uses the roof at this point as an outdoor exhibition garden. "Hotel facilities frame the overall structure at the west side, with function rooms, dining areas, and lounges at the lower seven levels facing outwards to the street and inwards to the main space. Thirteen more floors, containing the hotel units, are located above, facing outwards, west and east. "At the north side of the structure, above the subway concourse, and above two floors of retail space, five floors of office and commercial space are oriented inwards to the interior space and outwards toward Boylston Street. Above them are twenty-four additional floors of apartment units, facing north and south over the city. "The preliminary design includes, for illustrative purposes, the following: 1600 parking spaces, 480 hotel units, 300 apartment units, 200,000 sq. ft. of office space, 180,000 sq ft. of retail shopping space at several levels, 40,000 sq. ft. of exhibition and museum space, four restaurants, two night clubs, numerous hotel dining areas, lounges and functions rooms, two 300-seat cinemas, one 2000-seat theatre for opera and ballet, one 1,000-seat theatre, one 300-seat theatre, rehearsal, shop and office space for the arts organizations, and a communications center for film, TV and radio. Total area approximately 2,200,000 square feet." 120

Sheltering the Troupes It should be stressed that all the details given above are of a preliminary nature and subject to extensive revision and modification. Nevertheless it is apparent that this proposal is an extremely imaginative conception—one that offers a truly urban, twentieth-century solution to the arts in the city. It w^ould promote, I believe, intensity of experience, flexibility, liveliness, and variety. I said in my introduction to this book that I favor desegregation of the arts. A solution such as this one would help make that possible and would help make the arts a daily part of the city's life. There will be objections to this solution from some who wiU consider it disrespectful or demeaning to the arts to tuck them in this way into a total, mixed environment rather than setting them off in isolated and solemn splendor in separate, free-standing culture palaces. Such objections seem to me essentially nostalgic. I think they will find it possible to have aestìietic experiences of a profound nature just as much—or even more so—as in a culture palace, and I think they will even find it possible to encounter a sense of festivity and glamor in this environment, though it will have a twentieth-century quahty, not an imitation Biedermeier glamor. One other comment, pertaining to the size of the opera hall, might briefly be made. The proposal indicates a 2,000-seat house. This is considerably smaller than most of the new halls now being built but it is probably the largest size that should be built for optimum human and aesthetic considerations. Those who are building larger halls are doing so from economic considerations, in the hope of reducing the opera or ballet company's income gap. To my mind they are making a serious mistake. Their so-called practical reasoning will in the end tum out to be profoimdly impractical. This is often the case with "realists." A house that is too big, so that more seats can be sold and more money taken in at the box office, wül become obsolete before long. Let us assume that it is going to take five years to build this opera hall. But within ten years of the present time we may be sure that opera 121

Sheltering the Troupes will be available on television, as will ballet, and in a way far superior to the TV presentations now possible. The first steps toward filming opera for television under natural conditions—if one may use the word "natural" for so artificial an activity as opera—were taken in November 1968 by a Japanese television crew, using extraordinarily sensitive new photo lenses. These lenses made it possible to film an actual production of a performance by the Metropolitan Opera without any additional lighting. Within ten years, certainly, color TV wül be satisfactory; there will probably be large fiat television screens that hang on the walls of one's hving room (the physics discoveries that will make this possible have just been patented ) ; three-dimensional effects will be possible and home sets will be equipped with high fidelity sound. Live opera or ballet, therefore, is going to have to be presented under the best possible conditions in the opera house, in an intimate and human atmosphere and under optimum aesthetic conditions. Otherwise people are not going to go to the opera house; they are going to stay home and watch it on television. The economic solution, then, is not to compromise with the size or quality of the house but to face up to the inevitable nature of the income gap situation. No matter how big the house is built, there will still remain an income gap. The answer, it seems to me, is not to tamper with the architecture but to find the proper formula for subsidization. Administration A variety of options are possible. Nothing is to be gained by spelling out administrative procedures in elaborate detail at this point. In general, the thinking of the Boston Study Group Foundation is that the cultural facilities would be administered by a nonprofit parent organization established for the purpose. The Hinge Block Arts Corporation, it might be called. The cultural facilities would be leased by the developer to this administrative entity on a long-term lease at $1 a year. The arts corporation 122

Sheltering the Troupes would in tum be responsible for scheduling the individual facilities and for renting or leasing them to various arts groups at reasonable and appropriate rental rates. Preference would be given to local groups but facilities, when not being used by local groups, would also be available for rental to visiting attractions. As stated, the administration of the cultural facilities is intended to be a nonprofit operation. It should also not be a deficit operation. Should profits result from rentals to visiting attractions, the proceeds could be used in various ways that would benefit the public and the arts in Boston—such as providing free or low-priced tickets to school children or low-income groups. Just as the use of shared space makes possible substantial savings in construction and operating costs—savings in heating, maintenance, and the like—so sharing the services of a parent administrative entity, like the arts corporation, should make possible certain administrative savings. Among these might be pooled ticket sales, promotional activity, and advertising for individual events.

Financing and Development Cost of assembling and clearing the land is estimated at about $5 million. A few years ago there would have been grants from the federal government to pay two thirds of this urban renewal project. The commonwealth would have paid one sixth and the city one sixth. Federal funds no longer seem to be available for dovratown renewal projects. Nevertheless, the BRA has indicated that it might be prepared to undertake the Hinge Block as a nonassisted urban renewal project, with bonds issued for the land acquisition. The private developer would be selected through the normal competitive procedures of the Boston Redevelopment Authority. Requirements in terms of land use, design, organization, facilities to be included, procedures concerning the administration of these faciUties, as well as other necessary conditions for 123

Sheltering the Troupes development, would be established by the BRA, whose responsibility it would be to see that the commitments were fulfilled by the developer. This is standard urban renewal procedure. As envisaged in the preliminary proposal, approximately 15 percent of the total space would be taken up by cultural facilities, the rest being available for major income-producing uses. It can be argued that even that 15 percent is by no means a total loss to the developer, for the presence of the cultural activities will serve to enhance the commercial value of the profit-making uses in the project—the hotels, apartments, restaurants, stores, and the rest. The cultural facilities will generate traffic pertinent to retail trade and wiU constitute a major attraction for the whole project.

Prospects I have talked with Mayor Kevin White and with Hale Champion during his tenure as BRA director about this project. They both declared themselves to be strongly in favor of the essential concept. Champion said he intended to give it a high priority. "Such a cultural-entertaiimient complex at the Hinge Block would not only be important to Boston s cultural life," he said, "it would also be of great importance in the renovation and vitality of the whole merchandising center of downtown. An office-building boom, welcome as it is, is not sufficient to insure the varied vitality which downtown should have. With the stadium at South Station at one end of the merchandising center and with the Hinge Block cultural complex at the other end, the prospects for Boston's downtown would be very good indeed." John D. Warner, Hale Champion's successor as BRA director, has also espoused the essential concept as one that would be "a decided financial and cultural asset to the city," and he has promised that if a feasible proposal is presented, he wiU actively support the development of the Hinge Block with the other tools (beside federal funds) available to the BRA, 124

Sheltering the Troupes Obviously this scheme is stiH in a formative stage. Many pieces still need to be put together. A key question at this point is whether it really would be a proposition that would be attractive to a private developer. The Boston Study Group Foundation has stated it will seek to have an economic feasibility study made to determine an informed answer to this question. I would like to go a step further and suggest that there should also be an exploration of the possibility of this project being developed not by a commercial developer but by a nonprofit, civic group—by the city itself, perhaps, or by a group like the Boston Study Group Foundation. The equity money could be borrowed, and repaid with interest from the profits of the commercial facilities. It should not be too difficult to borrow money for development of a prime site like the Hinge Block. The commercial facilities could be leased out, on satisfactory terms, to commercial operators. The revenues thus derived not only would repay the capital costs for buüding the arts facilities but also would provide money for their maintenance and possibly an annual arts endowment fund, which might constitute one of the prime sources of subsidy for arts institutions and arts activities in Boston. However, I must mention that Hale Champion was most skeptical of relying on a nonprofit group to play the prime development role. He doubted that any such group would have the necessary know-how and energy. As I said earlier, such a project as has been outlined here has never been built in the United States, but I suspect that within a decade there will be several along this order. An announcement in the New York Times for March 28,1969, indicates that something simüar in concept is now being contemplated for the site of the old Madison Square Garden. Boston mightfindsatisfaction in being thefirstcity to do it.

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7

Things That Money Can't Buy

One of New York's most notable cultural assets is the New York Shakespeare Festival company, which all summer long puts on splendid performances of Shakespeare's plays free of charge in Central Park and in the boroughs. Critics have described it as providing consistently the best theater to be found in New York. Since 1956, when this project was initiated, nearly three million people have attended the company's performances—over two million of them in Central Park, at the Belvedere Lake site where a handsome amphitheater has been built beside a crag that is topped by what looks like an ancient castle but is really an observation station belonging to the Weather Bureau; and about 750,000 in various parks in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, where the players perform on a demountable stage carried on a flatbed truck. In addition, an estimated 560,000 have seen the plays toured about the city schools by the company during the school year. In recognition of its value, the city of New York contributes $400,000 a year to the festival; the remaining $200,000 required for its operations is obtained from private contributions. Over the years the festival has been a source of delight both to visitors and New Yorkers—to people of all ages, races, classes, and degrees of education or ignorance, sophistication or innocence. In the audience are always many for whom the play is as new and astonishing as if it had just been written; they sit in suspense, not knowing what Othello is going to do in his jealousy over that white girl he married or what can possibly be thought up to tame that shrew Katherine or how the battle of Agincourt will come out. It may well be that the theater at Belvedere Lake and the demountable stage in the borough parks are the most effective English hterature classrooms in the country these days. My own children got their grounding in Shakespeare there. By the time they entered high school, they had seen a dozen or more of the

Things That Money Can't Buy plays, some of them many times. No English teacher will ever have to convince them of Shakespeare's merits, since they know from experience what joys and marvels his plays provide. The first play they saw in Central Park, the first play of Shakespeare's they ever saw—when one was eleven years old and the other seven—was Two Gentlemen of Verona. Surely no teacher, following any accepted system of rational pedagogy, would assign a play as obscure and reputedly as weak as Two Gentlemen of Verona as an introduction to Shakespeare. This merely demonstrates how irrelevant schemes of rational pedagogy may be, particularly in dealing with works of the imagination or the soul. For the play, stylized to just the right degree of earnest inconsequentiaUty by the director Stuart Vaughan, and beautifully performed by the entire ensemble, including Lance's dog, a consummate comic, proved as much of a delight to the children as to us. Years later, they still chuckle over scenes they recall. Nor has it been only the children of middle-class, bookish parents who have been thus affected by the festival performances. I remember talking during an intermission of Romeo and Juliet with three young girls who were seated near me, whom I had noticed because they appeared so engrossed. They were just about Juliet's age—fourteen, or maybe a few months younger. They lived, I learned, on one of the slum side streets in the West lOO's. They said they had been there every night since the play opened except for one night when it had been rained out. This was their seventh time. And I also recall walking out of the park behind two very small black boys who could not have been over ten years old and who were discussing the play they had just seen. "Man," one was saying appreciatively, "that King Lear could sure talkl" One achievement of the festival—and by no means its least significant—is that it spearheaded the recapture of the city parks by the general public. At the time when Joseph Papp, the shrewd, stubborn visionary who instigated the festival and has guided it through a myriad shoals since then, first broached the 127

Things That Money Can't Buy idea of free Shakespeare in the parks, the parks were shunned by much of the populace. To venture into Central Park was said to be worth one's life, even in daylight. Much of this fear was mere superstition; by attracting throngs of people having a good time into the parks on performance nights, along with the police patrols the city then felt impelled to provide, the festival not only helped dissipate the superstition but also made the parks safer in reality—an instance of Jane Jacobs' thesis that crime is less apt to occur where many eyes watch. Now, as is well known and widely advertised, the New York City parks swing, to the point where any day one may expect the bird-watchers to lodge a complaint. In addition to the Shakespeare Festival performances, there are to be enjoyed in the parks now free performances of the New York Philharmonic, free performances of the Metropolitan Opera, free festivals of modem dance and ballet, free rock concerts, poetry readings, happenings of one sort or another ( some unofficial, some under the aegis of the parks commissioner himself, the august August Heckscher), and a wide variety of "ins"—love-ins, be-ins, sleep-ins, smoke-ins, whatever the fancy of the young and emulators of the young can devise. For this happy change alone, much credit is due Joseph Papp. To get a ticket for a Shakespeare Festival performance, you usually arrive about 6:00 P.M. and take your place in a line which by that time may already stretch for a quarter of a mile beside the lake and around behind the softball fields, making a bend just before the statue of the fearsome two-sworded Polish King Jagiello. Reserved seat tickets are handed out along the line at 7:00 P.M. Then you may leave the park, if you wish, to return a few minutes before performance time. Some people, when they hear of this ticket arrangement, are put off by it. "What, wait around an hour—or even two hours—just to get into a play! That's too much of a waste of time!" But, as many who have tried it have found, the waiting can be very pleasant. The line is composed not of standees, but loungees. People lounge on the grass as they wait, eating picnic suppers they have brought or 128

Things That Money Can't Buy bought from a vendor. They watch the softball games and the kites and the frisbees. They chat or read or doze. Time passes— not fast, not slowly, but differently somehow from standard New York time. By the time you go in you may have come to think not that you have just wasted two hours but rather that you have just lived two hours, only in a different way than usual. That's quite another matter. The play begins at 8:30 P.M., often preceded by a half hour of music. The music may be Renaissance songs or modem or some other period or mixed. It does not matter. No more effort is made to avoid anachronism than Shakespeare himself made. The stage is open to the elements, and so are the seats. When the play begins, the sky is apt to be still light. Quickly twilight shades into night; the sky thickens with the plot. The bright stage and its doings command the attention. But every once in a while, during the course of the play, one may, at some momentary distraction, lift one's eyes briefly from the stage. In the distance, rimming the park, like another enormous stage set, loom the buildings along Fifth Avenue. Above, in the neon-tinted murk of the city sky, the lights of a plane wink. Somewhere an ambulance siren wails. One blinks in amazement a moment at the contemporary scene to which one has been recalled, strangest of all man's fantasies. Shakespeare, our contemporary—proclaims Jan Kott. We, his—retorts George P. EUiott. Gratefully one returns to the reality at hand—to Padua or Elsinore or Illyria. Sometimes the air is hot and muggy—the kind of New York City summer night when kids tum on hydrants in the streets and tenement dwellers take to the fire escapes. The peimants above the stage hang hmp. Sometimes the winds are strong. The tops of the trees in the park lash wildly; torches carried by the attendants flare and gutter. Sometimes it rains. Once it stormed so fiercely during the heath scene of King Lear that the play had to be called off. There's a limit to how much help art can stand from nature. Unless the downpour is too heavy and incessant, though, the play will usually continue and most of the audience wiU stay. After the play, on most nights, one is aware of a 129

Things That Money Can't Buy certain air of cameraderie, along with elation, among the crowd as they stream out of the park, east toward Fifth Avenue or west toward Central Park West. What this feeling stems from, I am not sure. I tìiink that many of the people may be sharing a sense of wonderment at finding themselves ambling through the park at dead of night without fear of being mugged. A. J. Liebling once wrote an unsigned "Notes and Comment" in the New Yorker magazine about television in which he took issue with an observation someone had made that television was producing a generation which will have seen everything and thus early become jaded. On the contrary, Liebling wrote, the unfortunate thing is that it will have produced a generation which will think it has seen everything but in actuality will have seen and experienced nothing. He took horse-racing as his example. Liebling loved the races, and he savored everything about them —the careful perusal of the racing form in the morning, the ride out to the track on the train, the characters he argued horses with en route, the touts at the gate, the inspection of the horses in the paddock, the bets considered and placed, the smells and the noises, and at last the races themselves. Compared to all that, what one got on TV was not even a Reader's Digest version of the experience. It was, he wrote, "a substitution of the gist for the substance." Similarly, the experience of attending a performance of the Shakespeare Festival is not simply that of seeing an excellent production of a great play—though that, in itself, would be quite a lot to get for free. It is that plus all the rest I have been trying to evoke in what I have written here. For me, as for many others I know, the Shakespeare Festival has been one of the few aspects of life in New York City in which, in recent years, one could take pride. That something Hke this should exist, in the midst of the shambles, frustration, and ugliness that city life has increasingly become, sometimes seems to me a kind of miracle —just as the continued existence of Central Park itself, worth umpteen trillion dollars as real estate if it could just be paved over and turned into office buildings, seems an everlasting miracle. 130

Things That Money Can't Buy And in fact the Shakespeare Festival had scarcely got started before it very nearly went out of existence. In 1959, after its second season, Robert Moses, viiho was then the New York City parks commissioner, banned it from the parks, declaring that it was causing erosion of the grass in the area. Also there were not enough toilets at the site. And furthermore, he added, the festival would probably attract "muggers, degenerates and pickpockets" who might prey on the audience. Something about the festival profoundly disturbed and irritated him. What this was, it became obvious, was the fact that admission was free. To Moses, there was apparently something un-American about the whole thing. Papp was given to understand that if the festival would just charge a dollar or two per person admission, the Parks Department would consider rescinding the ban. Papp replied that the whole idea was that the plays should be free and open to the public. A fifty-cent charge was then suggested, or even a quarter. Papp refused to yield on what was to him a fundamental principle of his conception. He contended that by putting any charge on admissions, no matter how small, the festival would draw only those who were already interested in Shakespeare and the theater rather than reaching out to new audiences. Even a quarter can seem hke a lot of money to a youngster from the slums. And if he did have a quarter, why should he spend it on something called Shakespeare, which he is not at all certain he's going to like, when he could spend it on candy bars or popsickles, which he knows for sure he enjoys? In that case, Moses made clear, the ban stood. There would be no permit, and that was that. A formidable poUtical figure, accustomed to exerting close to absolute power for decades, Moses was not used to being crossed. He undoubtedly put Papp down as an impractical idealist, a breed he was wont to scom. The next thing he knew he was being served with a smnmons. Papp had taken the unusual step of going to court to seek an injunction that would force the New York City parks commissioner to grant a permit for the festival to put on the plays of one 131

Thmgs That Money Can't Buy William Shakespeare in the New York City parks, free of charge to the populace. The matter came before the court, and the injunction was denied. It was the parks commissioner's proper prerogative, the judge ruled, to decide what activities should or should not be permitted in the parks. That looked like the end for the Shakespeare Festival. But Papp would not give up. He appealed the decision to a higher court. There he won the injunction he sought—the appellate judge ruling that, though granting permits was indeed a parks commissioner's prerogative, once having granted a permit the commissioner had no right to revoke it on so whimsical and arbitrary a basis. The Shakespeare Festival was saved. The point of this story—the point of this chapter—is this: the fate of the arts in our cities is not merely a financial question; there are things that money can't buy. Here, in the New York Shakespeare Festival, we have what has turned out to be one of the happiest cultural manifestations in this nation's history. Yet it came within a hair of being wiped out, not by budgetary difficulties, but by the unsympathetic actions of a public official, wielding his power in an obtuse and unimaginative manner. If the Shakespeare Festival had been headed by anyone less persistent and resourceful than Joseph Papp, it would undoubtedly have gone under right then. There is a lesson here that Boston should heed—that any city should heed. In the course of this book, I have dwelt at length on the financial needs of the arts in Boston. I have examined the budgets of the arts organizations; noted their sources of earned and unearned income; pondered the implications of the deficits many of them incur; proposed various means by which adequate funds might be collected to enable them to stabilize and improve their operations; considered how, without incurring crushing new burdens of debt, they might obtain the new premises many of them urgently need. On a national scale, such other studies as the Baumol and 132

Things That Money Can't Buy Bowen work and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund book The Performing Arts: Froblems and Prospects have also dealt with questions of that nature. Doubtless such investigations have merit. It is probably necessary to know what are the financial details and what are the financial scales of magnitude, so that one may proceed purposefully in recommending what has to be done to help the arts thrive. Yet it is time to be reminded that money is not the whole story, that there are many intangible ways in which the arts can be fostered (or thwarted)—in New York, in Boston, in San Francisco, in St. Louis, in Newark or Podunk or anywhere else. Money, of course, caimot buy taste—or enthusiasm, passion, wisdom. It cannot buy a sense of play or a sense of reverence, those opposites which, curiously enough, are both to be foundsometimes wondrously intertwined—where the arts flourish. It caimot buy a scheme of values which give the arts their due place in life. Obviously, it matters very much what the attitude of the city's leadership is toward the arts. Mayor John Lindsay's administration greatly stimulated the arts, not so much by bounties from the city's coffers, as by showing itself more interested and more responsive to the arts than most American city administrations have been. Artists who had fresh ideas they wanted to try out in some of the public spaces of the city discovered, rather to their amazement at first, that they could get a sympathetic reception from the mayor and, most especially, from the administration's first commissioner of parks, recreation, and cultural affairs, Thomas P. F. Hoving—now director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hoving would listen as some delegation of avant-garde artists outlined to him their latest fanciful scheme for a happening or unusual exhibit. When they were finished he was apt to throw his head back and roar with laughter. "That's tìie craziest thing I ever heard!" he would say. "Let's try it." In a way, Lindsay and Hoving opened up the whole city as a kind of public theater and public museum. No Boston mayor is likely to risk his political neck by showing 133

Things That Money Can't Buy

himself so openly an art lover; it would be too likely to help bring on his last hurrah. Still, under Mayor White, stirrings of interest in the arts have been discerned at City HaU—the first such signs ever. The sponsorship of the neighborhood arts festival, Summerthing, was one such manifestation. Yet another was the establishment of the city's first Office of Cultural AfFairs, headed by Katherine Kane. John Warner, during his tenure as parks commissioner, also showed himself to have at least some awareness of beauty as a public good. But probably the greatest influence at City HaU has been City Hall itself—the magnificent new building by the architects Kallmann and McKinnell, which was dedicated in February 1969. The building, which has won numerous awards, is one of the great works of art of our time. It is, as Lewis Mumford said, "at once a salute to an ancient past, a defiant consummation of the present; and a promise for the long future: the promise that art will remain alive and continue to sustain the human spirit." It is working, I suspect, an incalculable effect on the ofiice-holders and functionaries who occupy the building and on the public who use and visit it. Not every mayor can be expected to go as far as Lindsay in his public enthusiasm for the arts and give poetry readings, sharing a platform with Marianne Moore; but at the very least a mayor can see to it that the city bureaucracy—the police, the building department, the fire department inspectors, the licensing bureau, and the rest-refrain from placing unnecessary obstacles in the paths of the artists. There should be no repetition of such an episode as Moses' effort to suppress the Shakespeare Festival. There should be no such petty harassments as Ellen Stewart, tìie impoverished but bounteous impresario of New York's Café LaMama, has suffered time after time from the city's inspectors. Once, in 1966, she and some of the actors in the company were trying to get a set ready so that they could put on the premiere of a play by a new young playwright—the kind of venture for which Café LaMama has justly earned international recognition. As usual. Miss Stewart was putting on

134

Things That Money Can't Buy the production on a shoestring. Her standard budget for mounting a two-week production of a new play is $100; none of the staff, crew, or performers takes any pay. The actors worked all night long building the set. Toward morning some of them, exhausted, stretched out on the stage and went to sleep. They were stiH sleeping when, in mid-moming, an inspector for the Building Department came along. He promptly served Miss Stewart with a siunmons for using a commercial buüding for residential purposes. All this is very much a matter of a city deciding and making it clear throughout its echelons that it places some value on beauty. A city that did so would not do as New York City did dvu-ing the Wagner administration—punish the owners of a building for having made it beautiful. The building is the Seagram Building. The punishment took the form of increasing the taxes by over $300,000 a year, on the ground that the Seagram company had enhanced the prestige and value of the building by making it so beautiful. Something is very much awry when a city agency is permitted to reason like that. In respect to fostering the arts, it is in just this area that a city government may be able to play its most meaningful role. It could set high standards of amenity, beauty, and delight in matters pertaining to the public environment. Here the city possesses real authority. It has the power of eminent domain and uses it; it should increasingly assert the power of aesthetic domain. Actually, in recent years, Boston has begun to do just this —with promising results. The person most responsible for recognizing the importance of the aesthetic consideration—the value to the city of visual urban delight—was Edward J. Logue, the director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority during Mayor Collins' administration. The boldest and most decisive assertion of that priority was the decision to have the design of the new City Hall chosen by public competition, and to abide by the results of the competition even though the wiimers were two unknown and inexperienced young New York architects without any pohtical connections in Boston who, at the time 135

Things That Money Can't Buy they entered the competition, did not have a single other building to their credit. What else can be done for the arts in our society that is not principally a matter of spending more money? The most important one, to my mind, is the need to reorient radically our approach to education. What we now subject most of our children to is, in the words of Paul Goodman, "compulsory mis-education." On this baleful, deadening, and inefficient effort, vast sums are expended in this country. And yet there is never enough, because what the schools are trying to do is false to human nature. Most of the subject matter taught in most city schools is, as Theodore R. Sizer, dean of Harvard University's School of Education, has noted, strikingly irrelevant to the lives of the pupils. Schools have focused almost entirely on the transmission of facts and knowledge. It is worth considering that these facts, which are earnestly and often, alas, punitively crammed into the heads of the young, are apt to have become outdated, if they were ever correct to start with, by the time the students grow up. Whereas myths—the stuff of art—though patently false in their facts, remain abiding verities for mankind. It is beginning to be recognized by some educators—though this recognition has not yet made much impact on school curricula throughout the country—that the arts are not just a peripheral friH but an important way of educating, one that is at least as important as the rational mode, though virtually ignored in the schools hitherto. It is a mode tìiat has been underrated not just in the grim Boston city schools but even in the muchpraised schools of Newton, Lexington, and the other subiurbs. True, one finds more arts electives in the suburban schools, but —as students and teachers both know—these are tangential to the main business of the schools, which is to cram the youngsters with whatever it takes to get them into a "desirable" college. To me, these suburban young people are almost as educationally deprived as the inner city children. The suburban students end up having quite a lot of knowledge in their heads, but there is aU the difference in the world between 'Tcnowing" and "imder136

Things That Money Can't Buy standing." The pathway to understanding is not through the mind alone. In an address at an education convocation at Lincoln Center in July 1968, James E. Allen, Jr.—the U.S. commissioner of education, who was then the New York State commissioner of education—urged a reassessment of the concept of literacy in education, broadening the term from the narrow definition of the written and printed word. "Increasingly, it is apparent," he said, "that true literacy encompasses a great variety of modes of perception and communication." The arts. Dr. Allen declared, are an essential component of this broader concept of literacy. He went on to say: We have recognized that traditional education has been too circumscribed in scope—and we have moved into some neglected regions, with surprising results. But we have only begun. The children we seek to educate—to reach, to motivate and inspire—are increasingly the products of a society that is witnessing the confrontation of established traditions by those individuals, both black and white, who seek a place where they can be visible and unafraid; a voice which will be heard when basic decisions are made; a deep and secure sense of self-respect; and a feeling of harmonious and welcome belonging to the world around them. This quest is basically simple, natural and real. But it symbolizestìiemost urgent crisis of our time. And the choices we now make in our schools to translate this quest into reality will prescribe the mental, psychological, sociological and functional health of the educational program, and to a significant extent, of society at large. The managerial revolution we must now effect must be planned with sufficient wisdom and foresight to insme policies and programs that concentrate on creating fully educated students . . . students who need not defect from school, either physically or psychologically, because the programs they are offered bear little or no relevance to their daily Hves and needs. We must realize that the arts are central to such efforts and we must seek a new balance of power in the classroom—one in which the arts are fundamental in the program of every fuUy educated student, one in which the 137

Thmgs That Money Can't Buy concept of trae and complete literacy includes the arts as an indispensable element. These are welcome words. However, I am not optimistic that a fimdamental reorientation of the nation's school systems is on the verge of talcing place. The change required is too basic to be brought about readily, even by stractural reformation of the curricula. What is needed for the change to be meaningful is a quite different view of education, of society and of man himself, than has prevailed in our school systems. The approach to pedagogy which I have found comes closest to satisfactorily resolving the issues discussed here is that of the Rudolf Steiner schools, sometimes known as the Waldorf schools. About half a dozen such schools are to be found in the United States, and several hundred in Europe. It may be the most vñdespread system of private school pedagogy in existence. In the Sterner pedagogy, to simplify, the arts are not confined to separate special courses. Art permeates all the subjects—whether history or mathematics or science or any other. As much effort is made to inculcate wonder as to disseminate information, or rather I should say, more. In the early grades, the child is profoundly steeped in the great myths of many peoples. What is sought in this education, and what I advocate, is a way of looking at the world such as I once heard Buckminster Fuller express. It was at the end of a lecture he gave in 1967 at Kresge Auditorium at M.I.T. Several of us who had been in the audience were standing around the stage talking with him. One asked Mr. Fuller whether he consciously considered aesthetic factors when he was solving an engineering or other technical problem. Mr. Fuller replied, "No. When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only of how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."

138

8

Epilogue Etonne-Moi!

I am well aware that there are limits as to what can be achieved by a study of this sort. In its arts, I wrote earlier, Boston tends to be oriented toward the past—to favor the custodial, or curatorial, rather than the creative. New work of high caliber needs to be fostered, I said. True—all true. Yet it is one thing to recognize that Boston needs a Mozart and quite another to figure out how one would set about materializing such a marvel. Then, even if a new Mozart did appear on the scene, he might have difficulty getting his music performed under present conditions. A dialogue between a reincarnated Mozart and the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra might resemble the discussion in the Grand Inquisitor scene of The Brothers Karamazov: Conductor: Yes, Master, I recognized you immediately but I cannot risk acknowledging you. Don't you see how dangerous you are to everyûiing we have carefuUy built up in the century and a half since you were on earth—our union contracts, our fifty-two-week season, our Friday afternoon series, our recording arrangements, our— Mozart: But what's the purpose of all this organization, if you don't play new music? Conductor: You don't rmderstand the world. Master. There's been enough music created. No more is needed. We can't afford that kind of turmoil. Mozart: Could you not at least play some of my new music on your program? Conductor: You've scored them for only thirty instruments. What shall we do—keep seventy men idle while we're playing your pieces? That would not be efficient. Efficiency is the key word in our technological age. Or would you have us dismiss these seventy men? Would you want to bear responsibility for the loss of their livelihood? No, Master, don't you see—there's no place for you here. You must go back. Mozart: (sadly) Yes, I see—

Epilogue To make recommendations regarding the arts as I have done throughout this work, is, in effect, to make predictions as to what the arts are going to be like—next year, ten years from now. That is a risky business. Predictions regarding even ordinary aspects of human behavior and society have more often than not proved unreHable in recent years. A scientific prediction is really little more than a statement about the past extrapolated into the future. The introduction of one novel element may radically alter the whole pattern. How much more difficult, then, is it to predict—or even guess—what the arts will be like. For the arts, indeed, work in mysterious ways their wonders to perform. When Pound advised T. S. EHot, "Make it newl" he was not just proposing diat Eliot come up with some gimmicks but was addressing himself to one of art's fundamental requirements. It was the same thiog as Diaghilev told Cocteau when Cocteau asked what he should do. "Etoime-moi!" commanded Diaghñev. Of that we can be sure—the arts, when they are vital, will astonish us. That is, perhaps, the one prediction that can be made.

140

Appendix A Corporate Contributions

The "Boston Area Study of Business and the Arts" was carried out with the advice and assistance of the Survey Research Program of the Joint Center for Urban Studies. The principal aim was to provide useful data pertaining to the actuahties of corporate giving to the arts, in comparison to other causes, and to provide insights into relevant corporate policies and attitudes. It was decided to concentrate on the largest companies in the Greater Boston area, since their actions could be assumed to have the greatest impact. Size may be measured in a variety of ways —total assets, gross receipts, net income, number of employees, and so forth. We chose to use number of employees as the criterion—in part because figures for this were more readily obtainable than for the other criteria. In general, companies with a large number of employees tend also to be the companies with high income, but it should be recognized that the sampling procedure chosen did, of necessity, exclude certain types of business (brokerage firms, for example) that may have a high income but a comparatively small number of employees. The survey's universe was thus established as all companies having branches or offices in the Boston area with 500 or more employees.* A further criterion for ehgibüity was that local management of the company take part in or make decisions with regard to company contributions to philanthropies. The sample was compiled from two Hsts—one provided by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and the other by the Massachusetts Bay United Fund. The number of companies thus derived was 175. The Chamber's hst was about one year old at the time, and the United Fund list was four months old. Neither the Chamber nor ' In actuality, when tlie questionnaires were returned, it was found that some companies on these lists did employ somewhat less than 500 employees. It was decided to include them in the survey if they were otherwise eligible.

Appendix A

the United Fund was able to standardize the procedures used by companies in reporting employment totals; some error, therefore, has been introduced by this lack of standardization. Of the 175 companies in the sample, 34 were found to be ineligible—2 by virtue of being subsidiaries of larger companies included in the sample, and 32 by virtue of the company's main office being located outside the Boston area, with local management having no decision-making role in company philanthropy. The first follow-up was made by telephone two weeks after the initial mailing. A second follow-up was made by mail one week after the first follow-up. Six companies refused to answer the questioimaire; 97 eHgible companies did answer it. The response rate for eligible companies was 73 percent. Of the 97 companies in the sample, 35 indicated that they do all or part of their giving through a company foundation. A somewhat shorter form of the questionnaire was sent to eligible foundations. The criteria for ehgibihty was that ( 1 ) the foundation had to be supported solely by company funds, and ( 2 ) the foundation had to be located in the Boston area. Of the foundations, 21 did not meet the criteria for eligibiUty. All except 1 of tìie remaining companies filled out the questionnaire; therefore the study includes data on 13 eligible company foundations.

142

Corporate Contributions Table Α. T y p e of Business Type of

Business

Percent of

Manufacturing

Companies

46

Services mainly to business (researcfi and development, engineering, etc.)

9

Transportation, communication, utilities

9

Retail

9

Finance, insurance, real estate

11

Publishing, printing

5

Food processing and distribution

6

Construction

3

Hotels and restaurants

1

Wholesale

1

Total

100

Number of companies

(97)

Table B. Ownership Ownership

Percent

of

Stock publicly held and traded

61

Stock closely held

29

Other

2

Not ascertainable

8

Total

100

Number of companies

(97)

Companies

143

Appendix A Table С. Number of Employees Number of

Employees

Percent of

Under 500

14

500-1000

33

1000-5000

41

5000+

10

Companies

2

Not ascertainable Total

100

Number of companies

(97)

Table D. Taxable Income of Companies In 1967 Taxable Income

Percent of Companies

Under $1 million

27

Percent of Companies Reporting Income

35

$ 1 - 2 . 5 million

14

18

$2.5-10 million

11

15

$ 1 0 - 5 0 million

13

17

$50 million or more Not ascertainable

11 24

—

Total

100

Number of companies

(97)

15 100 (74)

Table E. Location of Company's Principal Office Location of Office

Percent

of

In Boston area

74

Outside Boston area

25

Not ascertainable

144

1

Total

100

Number of companies

(97)

Companies

Corporate Contributions Table F. Percent of Taxable Income Given to All Charities (excludes foundations) Percent of Income Given to all Charities

Percent of

Less than 0.1

13

0.1-0.4

17

0.5-0.9

17

1-1.9

6

2-2.9

7

3-3.9

6

4-4.9

4

5

2

Not ascertainable

28

Total

100

Number of Companies

(83)

Companies

Table G. Total Amount Given to Charitable Causes in 1967 Amount Given

Percent of

Less than $1,000

12

$1,000 to $10,000

18

$10,000 to $20,000

14

$20,000 to $50,000

17

$50,000 to $100,000

Companies

9

$100,000 or more

18

Not ascertainable

12

Total

100

Number of companies

(97)

145

Appendix A Table H. Amounts Given by Companies to Various Types of Causes in Greater Boston in 1967

Amount

Given

Arts

Percent of Companies Giving to Health and Welfare Education

Other

None

52

9

30

44

Less than $500

13

10

8

19

$500-$1000

3

4

3

5

$1000-$5000

9

18

18

9

$5000-$10,000

7

8

10

8

$10,000-$20,000

9

13

6

12

$20,000-$50,000

7

16

12

3

$50,000 or more

0

22

13

0

Totals

100

100

100

100

Number of companies

(90)

(96)

(90)

(90)

Table I. Proportion of Total Company Gift Given to Various Types of Causes in Greater Boston in 1967

Proportion of Total Gift

Arts

Percent of Health and Welfare

Companies Education

Other

78

28

54

71

40%-60%

9

25

28

7

iVIore than 60%

5

37

7

8

Not ascertainable

8

10

11

14

Totals

100

100

100

100

Number of companies

(47)

(87)

(70)

(58)

Less than 40%

146

Corporate Contributions Table J. Percent of Total Company Gift That Went to the Arts in 1967 Percent of Gift Less than 10 10-24 25-39 40^9 50-59 60-74 75 or more Not ascertainable Total Number of Companies

Percent of

Companies

49 23 6 3 6 5 0 8 100 (47)

Table K. Amount Given to the Arts by Companies in 1967 Amount

Given

Less than $1,000

Percent of

Companies

32

$1,000-$5,000

17

$5,000-$10,000

13

$10,000-$20,000

17

$20,000-$50,000

13

$50,000 or more

0

Not ascertainable

8

Total

100

Number of Companies Median $4,300

(47)

147

Appendix В Proposed Layout of the Hinge Blocic Complex

These drawings were prepared by Cambridge Seven Associates for tlie Boston Study Group Foundation. They illustrate the arts center complex described in Chapter 6.

View of Hinge Block inner plaza

Appendix В

A-A

SECTION

B-B

SECTION

150

Hinge Block Complex

c-c

SECTION

151

Appendix В

P1

PA^NG

152

Hinge Block Complex

G CA

^ г г

L Ν/

153

3

CONCOR —

DO

SO 25

О

5

REPBiTORYTH^

2S

Hinge Block Complex

7 «о

so

и

155

HOUSING

19

Notes Index

Notes

1. Introduction

Page 1 John Adams, Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams, During the Revolution, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1876), p. 381. 2 John B. Wood, "Roxbury Sizzles While MDC-BRA Quibble Over Swim Pool Art," Boston Globe, August 4, 1967. 4 Herbert Read, Art and Society, 3rd ed. (London, Faber and Faber, 1956), p. 113. 5 Boston After Dark, October 15, 1969, p. 16. 7 E. E. Cummings, 1: Six Nonlectures (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 68. 7 Opera house information is from Carol L. Eron, "La Forza del Destino—or The Apathy of the Establishment," Boston, June 1969, p. 72.

3. Walking the Tightrope

Page 48 McLaren Harris, "National Opera Bankrupt: Boston Stays in Business," Boston Herald Traveler, May 17, 1968, p. 21. 50 Interview with Laszlo Bonis, November 2, 1967. 51 William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma (New York, Twentieth Century Fund, 1966). 51 "Serious and persistent operational deficit": The Museum Year: 1966—The Ninety-First Annual Report of the Museum of Fine Arts, p. 5. 51 Admission fee revenues from The Museum Year: 1968—The Ninety-third Annual Report of the Museum of Fine Arts, p. 75. 55 For historical information on the Boston Symphony Orchestra see Perry Bliss, Life and Letters of Henry Lee Higginson (Boston, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1921), pp. 241-324; and Mark Anthony DeWolfe Howe, The Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1881-1931, semicentennial edition revised and extended in collaboration with John N. Burk (Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1931). 56 Ell Coldston, "Cultural Explosion Exploded," Boston, February 1967, p. 73. 56 Baumol and Bowen, Performing Arts, pp. 151-153. 60 Committee of the Permanent Charity Fund, Inc., The Fifty-First Annual Report, July 1, 1967-June 30, 1968, p. 11.

Notes to Pages 60-75 Page 60 62 64 64

67

68

Baumol and Bowen, Performing Arts, p. 10. Ibid., p. 10. Information on twenty cities is from "United Fund Raising," unpublished report prepared by Associated Councils of the Arts, New York, September 1969. George A. Brakeley, Jr., and James V. Lavin, "Trends in Cultural Support," a paper delivered at the 1968 East-West Conference in Philanthropy, sponsored by the American Association of Fund Raising Counsel, Inc., New York, May 8, 1968. Michael Newton, "Communities: St. Louis, For Example," Cultural Affairs, 2 (1968), 47-48. See also the chapter on United Arts funds in Ralph Burgard, Arts in the City (New York, Associated Councils of the Arts, 1968). The Metropolitan Cultural Alliance statement of plans was dated December 13, 1967. Information on the organization's membership and mailing piece is from a letter to the author dated October 8, 1969, from Sidney B. Smith, president of the Metropolitan Cultural Alliance.

4. Hold Fast!

Page 69 Theodore Strongin, "Eastern Air Lines Is Giving Met $500,000 to Stage 'Ring' Cycle," New York Times, May 18, 1967. 70 Quotation on founcúng of the BCA is from "C. Douglas Dillon Elected Chairman of BCA," BCA News (a publication of the Business Committee for the Arts, Inc.), no 1 (April 1968), 1. 70 Rockefeller quote is from John J. O'Connor, "New Business of Business: The Arts," Wall Street Journal, April 5, 1968. 71 Richard Eells, The Corporation and the Arts (New York, Macmillan, 1967). 72 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Liberal Hour (Boston, Massachusetts, Houghton Mifflin, 1960), pp. 44-62. 72 John J. O'Connor, "New Business of Business: The Arts," Wall Street Journal, April 5, 1968. 74 Alvin H. Reiss, "Business and the Arts: Toward a Working Partnership," an unpublished report written at the completion of a seminar series on business and the arts, sponsored by the Center for New York City Affairs of the New School for Social Research, New York, 1967. 75 C. Douglas Dillon, "Business and the Arts," an address given to the Friends of City Center of Music and Drama at the New York State Theatre December 9, 1968, and published as

160

Notes to Pages 75-93 Page

75 75 76 79 79 81 85 86 87

88 88

a brochure by the Business Committee for the Arts, New York, p. 7. William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma (New York, Twentieth Century Fund, 1966), p. 151. Dillon, "Business and the Arts," pp. 7-8. Catlin is quoted in Jean Dietz, "United Fund Names 3 To Raise $45 Million," Boston Globe, January 4, 1968, p. 11. Interview with James V. Lavin, October 4, 1968. Symphony information furnished by James V. Lavin, fund-raiser for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, October 4, 1968. Information on corporate gifts to Boston arts organizations is from the budget survey of Boston's major arts organizations conducted by the author. Eli Goldston, "Cultural Explosion Exploded," Boston, February 1967, p. 73. Abrams is quoted in Bernard Taper, "A Lover of Cities," New Yorker, Februaiy 4, 1967, p. 42. Alvin H. Reiss, "The Corporation as Arts Patron," unpublished manuscript prepared for Lincoln Center Journal in 1968 shortly before that publication went out of existence as a consequence of a financial crisis in which Lincoln Center, Inc., found itself. Andrew Hacker, "When Big Business Makes Gifts (TaxDeductible)," New York Times Magazine, November 12, 1967, pp. 34-90. Galbraith, The Liberal Hour, p. 59.

5. The View from City Hall

Page 91 Information on Summerthing is from Katherine D. Kane, director of the mayor's Office of Cultural Affairs. 91 Information on arts expenditures of various municipalities is derived from the files of the Associated Councik of the Arts, New York. 92 Walter H. Waggoner, "Council Spares Newark Museum," New York Times, March 12, 1969, p. 96; and telephone conversation with the assistant director of the Newark Museum, March 26, 1969. 93 San Francisco arts subsidy information is from an interview with Thomas Miller, assistant to the chief administrative officer of San Francisco, April 29, 1968; and from an unpublished, untitled report prepared by Joseph Paul of the

161

Notes to Pages 95-106 Page

95 95 97 98

98

99

100

101

101 103

103

104

105 106

162

San Francisco Arts Resources Development Committee's administrative staff, March 31, 1967. Interview with Joseph Alioto, April 29, 1968. Interview with Kevin White, October 22, 1968. Bernard Taper, ed., Mark Twains San Francisco (New York, McGraw-HiU, 1963), p. 43. Martin Meyerson and Edward C. Banfield, Boston: The Job Ahead (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 25. Ibid., p. 11. For a general analysis of Boston's relationship to the state legislature see Martin Shefter, "City Hall and State House: State Legislative Involvement in the Politics of New York City and Boston" (unpub. diss.. Harvard University, 1969). Mayor Alioto's assertion is contained in a message (unpublished) to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors dated October 7, 1968, pp. 6-7. Information on the economics of tourism was derived from "Inventory and Analysis of Recreation, Tourism and Vacationing in Eastern Massachusetts" (mimeographed, no date) prepared by Northeastern University for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Department of Commerce and Development. The quotation concerning "aesthetic infra-structure" is on p. 124. Information on tax-exempt properties in Boston is from City of Boston, Annual Report of the Assessing Department for the Year 1967, (City Document 3-1968), p. 16. White's views from Alan Lupo, "White Wants College 'Taxes' ", Boston Globe, May 30,1969, p. 12. Unpublished printout of an audience survey made at Symphony Hall, Boston, March 9,1964, by Baumol and Bowen for their Twentieth Century Fund study of the economics of the performing arts. "A Study of the Population of Greater Boston," mimeographed report prepared by the Community Research Project of Metropolitan Boston, 1967. Report of the Special Committee to Investigate the Administration of the Metropolitan District Commission, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, October 10, 1960, pp. 49-77. "Text of President's Message on the Arts," New York Times, December 11, 1969, p. 66. Göteborg information is from John M. Lee, "Swedish Theater Beset by Politícs," New York Times, November 2, 1969, p. 39.

Notes to Pages 107-124

6. Sheltering the Troupes

Page 107 See Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Council on the Arts and Humanities, First Annual Report 1966-1967, pp. 28 and 56, for quotations concerning inadequate housing for the arts. 107 Arthur D. Little, Inc., A Performing Arts Center For Boston, a report to the Metropolitan Boston Arts Center, Inc., September 19,1960, p. 3. 109 Quoted from an interview with E. Virginia Williams, October 3,1968. 110 Information on the number of cultural centers built since 1962 and the total building cost is from Alvin H. Reiss, "Who Builds Theatres and Why?" Drama Review, vol 12, no. 3 (Spring 1968), 79. See also Arts in Society, vol. 4, no. 3 (Fall-Winter 1967)—an issue devoted principally to "the geography and psychology of urban cultural centers"; and Walter McQuade, "A New Generation of Cultural Centers," Fortune, September 1968, pp. 110-116. 113 Memorandum to the author from Francis W. Sidlauskas, executive director of the Cultural Foundation of Boston, January 17, 1968. 114 Tax estimate was provided to the author by Charles Hilgenhurst, administrator for planning, urban design and advance projects for the Boston Redevelopment Authority, dimng an interview on November 26, 1968. 115 "The Hinge Block: An Opportunity for the Arts in Boston," pamphlet published by the Central Business District and the Boston Redevelopment Authority, 1966. 116 Boston Redevelopment Authority, "Urban Renewal Plan for Central Busmess District Urban Renewal Area" (mimeographed), May 18,1967, p. 14. 120 The quoted material concerning the Hinge Block proposal is in a brochure entitled "Hinge Block: A Proposed Cultural Complex for Greater Boston," issued in 1969 by the Boston Study Group Foundation. My argument in this chapter is derived from this proposal, supplemented by numerous conversations vñth Peter Chermayeff, Francis E. Park III and other members of the foundation, as well as with officials of the Boston Redevelopment Authority. 124 Letter to the author from John D. Warner, director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, November 5, 1969, and conversation with Hale Champion, former Director, May 9, 1969.

163

Notes to Pages 125-138 Page 125 Howard Taubman, "Center Plans 4 Theaters on 8th Ave.," New York Times, March 28,1969. 7. Things That Money Can't Buy Page 126 Attendance and subsidy figures were furnished to the author by the staff of the New York Shakespeare Festival, June 1969. 130 A. J. Liebling, unsigned "Notes and Comments," New Yorker, August 16, 1958, p. 15. 131 Louis Calta, "Park Troupe Told to End Free Plays," New York Times, April 16, 1959, p. 35. See also Henry Machirella, "Moses Says Bard Can't Park; He Blames Hoods in Woods," New York Daily News, May 2, 1959, and Judith Crist, "Shakespeare-in-Park Feud Waxes," New York Herald Tribune, May 5, 1959. 132 Peter Kihss, "Court Bids Moses Retreat on Bard," New York Times, June 18, 1959, p. 33. 133 Rockefeller Panel Report, The Performing Arts: Problems and Prospects (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1965). 134 Lewis Mumford, unpublished, untitled paper prepared for Joint Center for Urban Studies seminar on the arts at the Harvard Club, Boston, December 7, 1968, p. 7. 135 Incident related by Ellen Stewart in conversation with the author, October 28, 1967. 135 Seagram Building information from Martin Meyerson and Edward C. Banfield, Boston: The Job Ahead (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 112, and John Burchard, "Design and Urban Beauty in the Central City," in James Q. Wilson, ed.. The Metropolitan Enigma: Inquiries into the Nature and Dimensions of America's "Urban Crisis" (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 234. 136 Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education (New York, Horizon Pres, 1964). 136 Theodore R. Sizer, "The Schools in the City," in James Q. Wilson, ed., The Metropolitan Enigma: Inquiries into the Nature and Dimensions of America's "Urban Crisis" (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 311-333. 138 James E. AUen, Jr., "The Arts and Literacy," Lincoln Center Journal, September 1968, p. 16.

164

Index

Abrams, Challes, 86 ACT Workshop, 44 Adams, Henry, 1 Adams, John, 1, 97 Agassiz Theater, 40, 57 Akerson, George, 69 Aldrich, Neben W., 89 Alioto, Joseph, 93-95, 96 Allen, James E., Jr., 137-138 Alvin Alley Company, 23 American Conservatory Theatre, 38 American National Opera Company, 47 American Place Theatre, 39 Arden, John, 35, 38, 42 Aristophanes, 40 Atlanta, 64n, 91, 112 Babe, Thomas, 57 Back Bay Theater, 8, 107, 108 Balanchine, George, 17-18 Ballet, condition of in Boston, 1719. See also Boston Ballet Company Baltimore, 91 Banfield, Edward C., 98 Banb, Talcott M., 54 Battle Creek, 64 Вашпо1, William J.: coauthor of The Fe^orming Arts, 51, 55, 56, 60, 62, 75, 85, 100, 132-133; survey of Boston Symphony audience by, 102 Blasberg, Arthur J., 116 Blough, Roger M., 69 Bonis, Laszlo, 47-50 Boston, city of: contribution to the arts, 89-92; contrasted with San Francisco, 92-97; cultural tradition of, 97-98; financial situation of, 98-100, 112; attractions preferred by visitors to, 100; diversification of tax structure in, 101102; vital statistics for population of, 103; problem of metropohtanism in, 102-103; support of arts in the inner city, 103-104;

government support of the arts in, 104-106; need for cultural center in, 111-112; possible sites for center in, 113-114; Hinge Block project in, 114-125 Boston After Dark, 5 Boston Arts Festival, 31-32, 33, 89 Boston Ballet Company, 6-7, 32; interview with director of, 17-19; financing of, 52, 59, 60; corporate gifts to, 81; wider use of, 103104; lack of housing for, 107, 108-109. See also Wühams, E. Virginia Boston Center for Adult Education, 67 Boston Children's Theatre, 58, 67, 81 Boston City HaU: art exhibits in, 43; as work of art, 134; competition for design of, 135-136 Boston Common, 120 Boston Globe, 20, 21,108 Boston Neighborhood Festival of the Arts, see Summerthing Boston Opera House, 7. See also Opera Company of Boston; Opera house Boston Philharmonia, 60; financing of, 52, 59 Boston Redevelopment Authority, 2, 44, 114; and Hinge Block concept, 114, 123, 124-125 Boston Study Group Foundation, 116, 149; brochure on Hinge Block by, 117-120; further study by, 125 Boston Symphony Orchestra, 5; attendance by government officiak at, 33; financing of, 52, 53-55, 58, 59; Fund for the Boston Symphony, 79-80; statistical analysis of audience of, 102-103; housing of, 107 Boston University, theater at, 41, 42

165

Index Boston University Celebrity Series, 109 Bowen, William G.: coauthor of The Performing Arts, 51, 55, 56, 60, 62, 75, 85, 100, 132-133; smrey of Boston Symphony audience by, 102 Brakely, George Α., Jr., 64 Branch museums, for neighborhoods, 103 Buffalo, 91 Brandéis University: collection of contemporary art by, 30; theater at, 40-41 Business: new relation of to the arts, 70-75; in Boston, 75-77, 79-81; and philanthropy, 77-79; survey of gifts to arts by, 81-84; view of the arts, 84-87. See also Corporations Business Committee for the Arts, 69-70, 87; Wall Street Journal on, 72 Cabot, Louis W., 69 Cabot, Cabot, and Forbes, 2 Cabot Corporation, 20 Café La Mama, 134 Caldwell, Sarah, 9, 85; legends concerning, 46-50 Cambridge Center for Adult Education, 67 Cambridge Common, 57 Cambridge Seven Associates, 116; drawings of Hinge Block complex by, 149-156 Cassidy, Frank, interview with, 3542 Catlin, Ephron, Jr., 76 Cato, Roy, 45 Center for Advanced Visual Studies (M.I.T.),5 Central Park (New York City), 126-130 Champion, Hale, 124,125 Chandler, Dana, 45 Charles Playhouse, 32, 42; financing of, 52, 56, 59; m MeCA, 67; lack of hoTising for, 107 Charlotte, 64n Chase Manhattan Bank, 78 Chermayeff, Peter, 116

166

Cherokee, Iowa, cultural center in, 110 Chicago, 29, 91; renovation of theater for opera house in, 113 Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 54 Children's Museum: financing of, 52, 59; in MeCA, 67 Chorus Pro Musica, 67 Cincinnati, 64 Civic Symphony of Boston, 57; interview with conductor of, 34-35 Claflin, Lola, 57 Claffin, William, 57 Clemens, Samuel L. [pseud. Mark Twain], 97 Cleveland, 29; philanthropy in, 76 Cleveland Museum, 9 Cocteau, Jean, 140 CoUins, John F., 11,135 Columbia, 64n Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, 20 Committee on the Central Business District, 115 Community Music Center of Boston, 58; interview with director of, 34-35; in MeCA, 67 Community Research Project of Metropolitan Boston, 103 Contas, Arthur P., 116 Contemporary art, attitude toward in Boston, 29-34 Conventions: theater-type housing for, 109-110; facilities for included in Hinge Block, 119 Corporations: financial support to the arts from, 12, 49-50, 58; categories of gifts from, 61; changes in, 72; contributions from analyzed, 73, 141-147; philanthropic policies of, 77-79; art contributions from in Boston, 79-81. See also Business Cultural centers, boom in building of, 110-111 Cultural Foundation of Boston, 113 Cummings, E. E., 7; Him by, 3839 Cummings, Mrs. E. E., 38 DaUas, 64, 91 Dane, Ernest В., 54-55

Index DeCordova Museum, 34; interview with director of, 29-34; financb g of, 52, 59, 81; in MeCA, 67 Deficit, of total arts expenditure in Boston, 61 Detroit, 91 Diaghilev, Sergei Pavlovich, 140 Dillon, C. Douglas, 69, 74-75 Eastern Airlines, 69 Eastern Gas and Fuel Associates,

20

Education, reorientation of, 136138 EeUs, Richard, 70-71, 87 Eliot, T. S., 140 Elliott, George P., 129 Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts, 22, 58, 103 Erie, Pa., 64n Ethnic groups, support for the arts by, 33 Fenway Theatre, 58 Films, 7 Financial support: of the arts in Boston, 6-7, 50-68; interview with Perry Rathbone on, 9-16; of theater in Boston, 35-38; of the Opera Company of Boston, 46-50; share of business in, 6 9 75; share of government in, 104106; of cultural center for Boston, 111-114. See also Business; Corporations; Government Florence, Italy, 3 Ford Foundation, 17, 21, 54, 60, 79 Fort Wayne, 64n Fort Worth, 64n, 91 Foundations, as source of support for the arts, 49, 58, 60 Franldin Park, 25-26, 58 Fuller, Buckminster, 138 Fund-raising: organization of, 6 2 63; example of St. Louis, 65-67; situation in Boston, 67-68 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 71-72; on economics and art, 88 Gardner Museum: financing of, 52, 59; housing of, 107 Goldston, Eli, 26-27; on financing of the arts, 55-56,85

Goodman, Paul, 136 Gordon, Robert, 57 Göteborg, Sweden, 106 Government, support of the arts by, 13, 50, 58, 60; in Boston, 104106 Government Center, 2 - 3 Graham, Katharine, 69 Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, 141 Greensboro, 64n Hacker, Andrew, 87 Handel and Haydn Society, financing of, 52, 59 Hartford, 64n Harvard University, 61, 136; artistic activity at, 5-θ; theater at, 40 Heckscher, August, 128 Heinz, Henry J. II, 69 Higginson, Henry L., 6, 54-55 Hinge Block, 114-125; origmal concept of, 115-116; Boston Study Group formulation of, 116-120; administration of arts section in, 122-123; financing and development of, 123—124; Drospects for, 124-125; proposed ayout of, 149-156 Hitchings, Sinclair, interview with, 19 Hood, Charles H., 116 Hotel-motel tax, 99,103,112 Houston, 29 Hoving, Thomas P. F., 133 Hughes, Richard, 92n Hunter, Sam, 30 Hyde, Andrew, interview with, 4 3 45 Income gap: defined, 53; for U.S. performing arts, 56; persistence of, 60 Individuals, contributions from, 49, 58, 59 Institute of Contemporary Art, 30, 32; interview with director of, 43-45; financing of, 52, 53, 58, 59; in MeCA, 67; neighborhood arte program of, 103; housing of, 113

167

Index Jacobs, Jane, 128 Johnson, Richard Α., 116 John F. Kennedy Center, Washington, 110 Joint Center for Urban Studies, 141 Jordan Hall, 10 Kaiser, Edgar F., 69 Kallmann, Gerhard, 134 Kane, Katherine, 44,134 Kane, Louis I., 116 KazanoflE, Ted, 41 Kepes, Gyorgy, 4 Kim, Earl, 6 Kirchner, Leon, 6 Kott, Jan, 129 Lavin, James V., 64, 78-79 Lehrer, Tom, interview with, 16 Lewis, Elma, 8, 103; interview with, 19-27. See also Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts Library Creative Drama Program, 58 Liebhng, A. J., 130 Lincob Center, 22, 110 Lindsay, John, 133, 134 Little, Arthur D., 107 Loeb Theater, 40, 41; art exhibit at, 43 Logue, Edward J., 135 Los Angeles, cultural center in, 29, 64, 110, 112 Lowry, W. McNeil, 17 Lynch, Warren, interview with, 16 MacBam, Gavin, 69 McKinneU, Noel, 134 Madison Square Garden, 125 Massachusetts, commonwealth of, support for Museum of Fine Arts from, 60 Massachusetts Bay United Fund, 141 Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities, 104-105, 107 Massachusetts Institute of Technology: artistic activity at, 5; theater at, 40 Mayer, Timothy, 57 Memphis, 64n Metropolitan Boston Arts Center (MeBAC), 104

168

Metropolitan Cultural AUiance (MeCA), 31, 67-68 Metropolitan District Commission, 2, 104 Metropolitan Museum, 133; city support of, 11 Metropolitan Opera, 69, 128; Boston performances by, 107-108; photographed for television, 122 Metropolitanism, problem of for Boston, 102-103 Meyerson, Martin, 98 Milwaukee, 64, 91; cultural center in, 110,112 Minneapolis, 91 Mobile, 64n Moore, Henry, 2 Moore, Marianne, 134 Moses, Robert, 131,134 Mostel, Zero, 24 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 139 Mumford, Lewis, 134 Murals, in public buildings, 44r^5 Museum of Fine Arts, 5, 34; iuterview with director of, 9-16; attitude of toward contemporary art, 29; paid admissions to, 51; financing of, 52, 53, 58, 59; Centennial Development Fimd Drive by, 79-80 Music HaU, 8; rentals for, 108-109; possible renovation of, 113; planned destruction of, 114 National Center of Afro-American Artists, 8, 20, 103; financing of, 52, 59; in MeCA, 67 National Endowment for the Arts, 46, 60 National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities, 90; extension of, 105 Neighborhood facilities for arts, 8, 103 New England Conservatory of Music, 58 New England Hebrew Academy, 26-27 New England Medical Center, 114 New England Merchants National Bank Building, 2 New England Talent Associates, 57

Index New Orleans, 64, 91 New York City, 91; contrasted with Boston as residence for artists, 27-29; difficulties of theatrical production in, 38-39; Shakespeare Festival in, 126-132 New York City Ballet Company, 18 New York Philharmonic, 128 New York State, support of the arts in, 105 New York Times, 125 New Yorker, 130 Newark, city support to museum in, 91-92 Newton, Michael, quoted, 65-67 Nixon, Richard M., 105-106 Northeastern University, 7; study by management institute of, 99100 Novak, Kaiman, interview with, 34-35 Opera Company of Boston, 6; financing of, 46-50, 52, 59; corporate gifts to, 81; lack of housing for, 107, 108 Opera house: need for in Boston, 107-109; possible cost of, 111112; renovation of old theater for, 113-114; included in Hinge Block project, 114-121 Paine, Stephen, 30 Papp, Joseph, 127-128, 131-132 Park, Francis E. Ill, 116 Permanent Charity Fund, 58, 90 Philadelphia, 91 Philanthropy: by business in general, 70-75; in Boston, 75-77; corporate policy on, 77-79; and Boston arts, 79-81 Pierce, Walter, 109 Pineda, Marianna, 28 Pinter, Harold, 35, 39 Playhouse in the Park, 25 Pound, Ezra, 140 Private collections in Boston, lacking in contemporary art, 29-30 Providence, 64n Public parks, new use of, 127-130 Rabb, Sidney, 47

Rathbone, Perry, interview with, 9-16 Read, Herbert, 4 Reiss, Alvin H., 73-74, 87 Rickson, Gary, 45 Rivers, Larry, 2 Rochester, 91 RockefeUer, David, 69, 70, 78 Rockefeller, Nelson, 105n Rockefeller Brothers Fund, 133 RockefeUer Foundatíon, 22, 36, 37 Rosenblatt, Max, 2 St. Louis, 15, 29, 64, 91; Arts and Education Council of, 65-67; renovation of theater for opera house in, 112-113 St. Paul, 64 Salaries, of orchestra members, 55 Saltonstall, Nathaniel, 30, 43 San Diego, 91 San Francisco: financial support to museums in, 11; city support of the arts in, 92-95, 112; contrasted with Boston, 96-97 San Francisco Opera Company, 6 Sarnoff, Robert W., 69 Savoy Theater, 108 Schoenberg, Arnold, 46 Schubert, Franz, 3 Seagram Building, 135 Seattle, 91 Shakespeare Festival, New York City, 126-132 Shubert brothers, 7 Shubert Theater, 108, 113 Sidlauskas, Francis W., 113 Sizer, Theodore R., 136 Stanton, Frank, 69 Steiner, Rudolf, 138 Stevens, Roger, 46, 47 Stewart, Ellen, 42, 134-135 Sulhvan, Louis H., 113 Summerthing, 35, 134; baUet in, 18-19; financing of, 58; Boston's contribution to, 90-91, 103 Talley Beatty Company, 24 Tax-exempt property, 101 Television, opera on, 122 Temple Mishkin Tefila, 20 Theaters in Boston, 8; financial support of, 35-38

169

Index Theatre Company of Boston: interview wiüi director and producer of, 35-42; financing of, 52, 58, 59; in MeCA, 67; corporate gifts to, 81 Tovish, Harold, interview with, 2729 Tremont Street, as site of arts center, 113 Tufts University, 113-114 Twain, Mark, see Clemens, Samuel L. Uffizi Gallery, 3 Unearned income: sources of, 5859; necessity for additional, 6162 United funds for the arts, 64-67 Updike, John, 108 Vaughan, Stuart, 127 Vienna, 3 Virginia, branch museums in, 1314 Wagner, Robert, 135

170

Waldorf schools, 138 Walkey, Frederick P., interview with, 29-34 Wall Street Journal, 72 War Memorial Auditorium, 31, 107 Warner, John D., 134; on Hinge Block concept, 124 Wasserman, Max, 30 Watson, Thomas J., Jr., 69 Watts, John, 104 Wheeler, David, interview with, 35-42 White, KeviQ, 95, 101, 134; on the Hinge Block concept, 124 Wilbur Theater, 8, 42,113 Wilhams, E. Virginia, 23; interview with, 17-19; on rental costs, 109 Winston-Salem, 64n Winterfest, 31, 89 Wolfe, Tom, 89 Yale University, 41, 42 Zuckerman, Mortimer В., 116

Publications of the Joint Center for Urban Studies The Joint Center for Urban Studies, a cooperative venture of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, was founded in 1959 to organize and encourage research on urban and regional problems. Participants have included scholars from the fields of anthropology, architecture, business, city planning, economics, education, engineering, history, lavi', philosophy, political science, and sociology. The findings and conclusions of this book are, as wdth all Joint Center publications, solely the responsibility of the author. Published by Harvard University Press The Intellectual versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright, by Morton and Lucia White, 1962 Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900, by Sam B. Warner, Jr., 1962 City Politics, by Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson, 1963 Law and Land: Anglo-American Planning Practice, edited by Charles M. Haar, 1964 Location and Land Use: Toward a General Theory of Land Rent, by William Alonso, 1964 Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City, by Stephan Thernstrom, 1964 Boston: The Job Ahead, by Martin Meyerson and Edward C. Banfield, 1966 The Myth and Reality of Our Urban Problems, by Raymond Vemon, 1966 Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages, by Ira Marvin Lapidus, 1967 The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930, by Robert M. Fogelson, 1967 Law and Equal Opportunity: A Study of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, by Leon H. Mayhew, 1968 Varieties of Police Behavior: The Management of Law and Order in Eight Communities, by James Q. Wilson, 1968 The Metropolitan Enigma: Inquiries into the Nature and Dimensions of America's "Urban Crisis," edited by James Q. Wilson, revised edition, 1968 Traffic and the Police: Variations in Law-Enforcement Policy, by John A. Gardiner, 1969 The Influence of Federal Grants: Public Assistance in Massachusetts, by Martha Derthick, 1970 The Arts in Boston, by Bernard Taper, 1970 Families against the City: Middle Class Homes of Industrial Chicago, 1872-1890, by Richard Sennett, 1970 Published by The M.I.T. Press The Image of the City, by Kevin Lynch, 1960 Housing and Economic Progress: A Study of the Housing Experiences of Bostons Middle-Income Families, by Lloyd Rodwin, 1961 Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 1963 The Historian and the City, edited by Oscar Handlin and John Burchard, 1963

The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1949-1962, by Martin Anderson, 1964 The Future of Old Neighborhoods: Rebuilding for a Changing Population, by Bernard J. Frieden, 1964 Man's Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanizing World, by Charles Abrams, 1964 The View from the Road, by Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John R. Myer, 1964 The Public Library and the City, edited by Ralph W. Conant, 1965 Regional Development Policy: A Case Study of Venezuela, by John Friedmann, 1966 Urban Renewal: The Record and the Controversy, edited by James Q. Wilson, 1966 Transport Technology for Developing Regions, by Richard M. Soberman, 1966 Computer Methods in the Analysis of Large-Scale Social Systems, edited by James M. Beshers, 1968 Planning Urban Growth and Regional Development: The Experience of the Guayana Program of Venezuela, by Lloyd Rodwin and Associates, 1969 Build a Mill, Build a City, Build a School: Industrialization, Urbanization, and Education in Ciudad Guayana, by Noel F. McGinn and Russell G. Davis, 1969 Land-Use Controls in the United States, by John Delafons, second edition, 1969 The Joint Center also publishes monographs and reports.