New York, NY —
Fearing that New York may lose its pre-eminence as a cultural capitol, leaders of government and cultural institutions gathered yesterday for a conference on Creative New York.
REPORTER: Sipping coffee and eating mini-croissants under the grand Miro painting in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art, artistic directors, museum heads, and leaders from fashion, entertainment and publishing gathered in their charcoal grey suits to ponder the future of New York’s “creative sector.” It wasn’t exactly a pretty picture.
LOWRY: How many here believe that New York is still the cultural capital of the nation if not the world?
REPORTER: That’s Glenn Lowry MOMA’s director.
LOWRY: Well I’ve got news for you Los Angeles, Chicago, believe it or not, Philadelphia, Berlin, Paris shanghai, Tokyo all think you’re nuts.
REPORTER: Philadelphia came up a lot. The Rockefeller Foundation’s Judith Rodin, was until recently the head of the University of Pennsylvania.
The affordable housing is luring artists from New York it’s an easy train ride young and there was a real view among the leadership in Philadelphia if we could be the first wireless city.
Entertainment mogul Barry Diller, said New York needs to sit up and take note.
DILLER: The first thing that you would do is absolutely make this entire city hot. So that wherever you were, you had wireless, you could get it, it was big band width.
REPORTER: But Diller was still bullish on New York. “Ambition is in the air here” he maintained. Choreographer Bill T. Jones, the only working artist who spoke, wasn’t so sure. Not long ago, he polled his dancers.
JONES: And I was shocked at the way they answered this question, how are things different from Arnie Zane and myself starting in the early 1980's and they are really depressed, I daresay they are despairing.
REPORTER: Many solutions were thrown out in the course of the morning – keeping manufacturing zoning for artists work space, more assistance from the private sector. Mayor Bloomberg tossed out a bone, announcing that the city economic development agency now has a “not for profit” desk to assist non-profits the way it helps for-profit enterprises. But not everyone was impressed. Sarah Horowitz heads the freelancers union.
HOROWITZ: And I think it’s appalling, all these industries are talking about freelancers who work in them and if they want to keep creative sector in ny they should talk about health insurance and housing not just the institution and funding.
REPORTER: In fact, at the very end of the discussion – the issue of housing did come up. It was raised by Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff, who noted that in the first four years of this century, nearly a million people left New York, in search of cheaper housing and better schools. For Doctoroff, housing construction in places like the South Bronx is a big part of the solution.
DOCTOROFF: That means the opportunity for people to live here more inexpensively are multiplying, they’re multiplying in places with great access to Manhattan, parts of Manhattan that people wouldn’t have lived in before.
REPORTER: But the city isn’t leaving it all to the free market. City housing commissioner Sean Donovan said the city is putting together a $100 million fund to help artists buy homes.
DONOVAN: And then instead of having them squeezed out by value they create, the increase in values, to actually benefit form it by being able to own their space
REPORTER: That won’t help people who’ve already been displaced. But conference organize Jonathan Bowles of the Center for an Urban Future said today’s meeting was more about defining the creative sector and an economic force to be nurtured than about any particular agenda.
BOWLES: It’s no longer a given that New York is going to be in perpetuity the economic capital of the world so many other cities are creating economic development strategies around creative people creative capital create companies. New York has got to work at it now.
For WNYC, I’m Andrea Bernstein.