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Dragon spring phoenix rise the shed4/29/2023 ![]() ![]() But Doctoroff insists this is something he went out of his way to avoid. It can be argued that every board member the Shed gains is one another arts organization loses. In the fundraising rat race of New York City nonprofits, a $550 million inaugural campaign has the potential to raise people’s hackles. ![]() Tisch, Alex Poots, Darla Moore, Jed Walentas. Ross, Deborah Winshel, Gale Brewer, Christina Miller, Christina Weiss Lurie, Dasha Zhukova, Lew Frankfort, Debbie August, Jonathan M. From left: Andres Santo Domingo, Diane von Furstenberg, Benjamin F. It also includes representatives of the businesses that plan to make the Hudson Yards area their home, such as Related Companies CEO Stephen Ross and real estate developer Frank McCourt Jr., owner of a lot across 10th Avenue and namesake of the performance hall. “He’s the reason I’m there,” says Diane von Furstenberg, one of a group of powerful New Yorkers who make up the board, including Jon Tisch, Andrés Santo Domingo, and Dasha Zhukova. The Shed’s board of directors is as imposing as the building itself, and largely the result of relationships Doctoroff has fostered over a 40-year career in business and politics. Finding the photo, he says, with a paternal gleam in his eye, “It actually looks better than the renderings.” ![]() “The idea was, ‘Let’s create the world’s most flexible cultural institution, both programmatically and physically,’ ” he tells me, likening the venue to a German kunsthalle. “We are obsessed about New York’s competitive position in the world,” Doctoroff says, toggling through his iPad to find a photo of the McCourt at sunset. Sitting in his office at 10 Hudson Yards, with its bird’s-eye view of the Bloomberg Building, Doctoroff says, “Mike always would say that capital follows culture in New York.” So they picked what they believed to be the best site in the mixed-use development and reserved it for a cultural institution. “And the other one is Doctoroff, as our chairman.” “I don’t know if there are patron saints in the Jewish faith, but he is one of those,” Poots says of Bloomberg, who, in addition to allocating $75 million of city funds to the Shed while in office, has donated $75 million through his Bloomberg Philanthropies. When that hope was quashed, the site was reconceived as a new neighborhood, which Bloomberg would sign off on only if it included a cultural nonprofit on city-owned land.Ī rendering of the McCourt Courtesy The Shed ![]() Plans for a stadium on the 28-acre tract were put forth in the early 2000s by then-mayor Bloomberg and Dan Doctoroff, his deputy for economic development, as a way to win the 2012 Summer Olympics for New York. Hudson Yards, which stretches from 30th to 34th streets and from 10th Avenue to the West Side Highway, is the most expensive development in U.S. Looking through the hull of the McCourt, the neighboring Hudson Yards development rises like SimCity built of glass Legos. In a city with 1,200 existing cultural institutions, and with a budget that ballooned from $350 million to $475 million, it has taken enormous capital-political, social, and financial-to get a project of this scale and ambition off the ground. While the mission may be simple, the erection of the building, a hulking, dimpled rhombus that hovers over the north end of the High Line, was not. Alex Poots, Founding Artistic Director and CEO of The Shed Craig Barritt // Getty Images ![]()
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