Our History
Humanizing the World Trade Center
Flory Barnett, a savvy fundraiser with a penchant for the arts wanted to humanize the Financial District. Shortly after the completion of 1 World Trade Center in 1972, she started an arts council, giving workers in the area reasons to leave the office for lunch. In 1973, with generous support from her “guardian angel,” David Rockefeller, then Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council was born into the non-profit world.
LMCC grew with the Financial District, cultivating art and culture in and around the World Trade Center. From lunch time concerts and evening performances on the plaza, to installations in the lobby windows of banks (the Art Lobby project), to outdoor sculpture exhibitions, the Council transformed Lower Manhattan into a cultural destination more important than the sum of its parts.
We expanded our reach boroughwide with our Manhattan arts grants: Manhattan Community Arts Fund began in 1984; The Fund for Creative Communities began in 1998; and Creative Curricula began in 2003.
By the end of the 1990s, we had not only moved our offices into the World Trade Center, we had transformed it into a cultural anchor: World Views offered studio space to artists in the upper floors of the North Tower; Evening Stars brought free dance to the WTC Plaza; and exhibition spaces throughout the complex showcased the work of artists of all disciplines.
September 11, 2001
On September 11, we lost our home, performance venue, studio and exhibition spaces, and nearly 30 years of archives when the World Trade Center was destroyed.
Most significantly, we lost an artist-in-residence, Michael Richards, who perished along with thousands of others. The World Views residents were nearing the end of their session, and had been working feverishly towards the culminating open studio event. Michael had spent the night working his 92nd floor studio, where he was creating a sculpture inspired by the Tuskegee Airmen, which bore an eerie resemblance to that day's tragedy.
What Comes After
Without a permanent office, LMCC moved nomadically for the next several years before finally finding a new home at our current address on Maiden Lane.
With our residency studios destroyed, we were fortunate to receive an outpouring of generosity following the attacks. Donations from real estate owners allowed us to create New Views, a site-specific residency in DUMBO, Brooklyn and at the World Financial Center. The City of Paris helped establish a special six-month residency in Paris, France for New York City-based visual artists, a program that continues today.
The losses directly affected the focus of other new programs. The Michael Richards Fund provided support for emerging visual artists from the Caribbean or of Caribbean descent. Cities, Art, & Recovery considered how people remember and rebuild after tragedy and how the arts have been crucial to such recovery. Our Gulf Coast Residency offered a temporary residency in Lower Manhattan for 15 artists displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
In 2005, we received a $5 million grant over 3 years from The September 11th Fund to support and sustain the arts community in Lower Manhattan. With this support, we launched the Downtown Cultural Grants initiative, comprising six new programs that provided grants to support arts and culture south of Canal Street and in Chinatown. These programs proved critical to the ongoing recovery and growth of the Lower Manhattan cultural community.
Through all of this change, our mission remains consistent: we believe the arts and artists play a vital role in maintaining the spirit of downtown. Our Workspace and Swing Space programs carry on the spirit of World Views; we distribute more than $550,000 to artists and organizations through our Manhattan arts grants; our public programming continues to stoke the cultural life of the city; and our Training, Networking, and Talks offer professional development programs to artists and arts groups.
We remain committed to being the leading voice for arts and culture Downtown and throughout the borough.
