Before Lincoln Center, there was San Juan Hill: a diverse, working class neighborhood that New York City planner Robert Moses targeted for "urban renewal" in the 1950s. Despite residents' protests, San Juan Hill was destroyed, and thousands of families were displaced. The wreckage of those city blocks lives on in popular culture as the backdrop of Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise's West Side Story (1961). 

This is the bedrock of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts — home to the New York City Ballet, Metropolitan Opera, and New York Philharmonic — and of Fordham University's neighboring campus between West 60th and 62nd Streets, where I attend school. 

These institutions continue the artistic legacy that has long defined the neighborhood. However, they also represent an exogenous theory of "culture making" premised on forceful re definition. The resulting dissonance and the ways in which it manifests form the core of my project.

I am interested in how we perform and reiterate this particular history. That we remember San Juan Hill through West Side Story and dance deeply moves me. Motifs from the film emerge in the contemporary work of choreographer Anabelle Lopez Ochoa for Ballet Hispánico, which has been performed onstage at Lincoln Center (See: Tiburones (2019), House of Mad'moiselle (2024)). These layers of abstraction stirred the undercurrents of my film: art as a mode of memory, the mythology of place, and interpretive regeneration. 

My university's involvement with Moses' vision of New York is not widely recognized on campus. By screening my film for a Fordham audience, I hope to bring our past into focus, confront the transformations of urban identity, and ask questions of a Jesuit institution with the imperative to be a good neighbor.

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This short documentary fulfills my thesis requirement for the Fordham Lincoln Center Honors Program. Two courses were fundamental to the making of this project:

Trends in NYC with Steven Stoll. I first learned of San Juan Hill and Fordham's relationship to Robert Moses in this class. My peers and I made weekly trips to the New York Historical and worked closely with their reference librarians to write research papers.

The Art of the Interview with Catalina Alvarez. This class centered around (compensated) group interviews with residents of the Amsterdam Houses, the projects just west of Lincoln Center and Fordham. During our meetings, my classmates and I got to know the interviewees, heard their stories of the neighborhood, and learned how Fordham can partner with the community in meaningful ways. We incorporated recordings of these interviews into culminating multimedia projects.

Below is the opening sequence of that multimedia class project: