at work on NJPAC’s Rotunda
Jane Alexander, then Chairwoman of the NEA, at the 1993 groundbreaking:
“NJPAC will be a place where the true spirit of the Newark community can take wing.”
Prudential Hall lobby under construction
sure that the subcontractors building NJPAC met their numbers on racial integration. And we got 46% minorities and women. Certainly I know that it was the best ever in New Jersey, possibly in the country. That success goes to Gus Heningburg. There are a lot of people who know how to put steel up, but there aren’t a lot of people who know how to successfully weave their way through the Newark community. He was brilliant. JS: How did you choose the architect? LG: We made a list of 12 top architects who had done theaters. We wanted deep theater experience, and a major architect, and we wanted to establish the principle really early that we were not limiting ourselves to New Jersey. Architects, acousticians, engineers, construction, anything—this was a national project. We narrowed the list from 12 to four finalists: Ben Thompson, who had been the dean at Harvard; Michael Graves, from Princeton; César Pelli, who was the former dean at Yale; and the dark-horse candidate really was Barton Myers. He was the least known of the four. But I walked into a hall he designed in Portland, Oregon and it was so beautiful. I said, “This guy is going to be our guy.” He never thought he had a chance. All the others showed up with seven or eight people at the interviews—he came alone. He had the right sensibility for Newark. He felt that arts centers should not be marble palaces, but should be part of the fabric of the community, should be contextual. But let me turn to you. What was the hardest thing for you as you took the reins and it became your arts center? JS: The hardest part was trying to figure out an economic model that enabled all the mission work to continue, and inch us back toward
16 njpac.org