NYC’S MUSEUMS NEED NEW WAYS
Better tools to steward our masterpieces
As the work from home era continues apace, a quiet question reverberates among the economic development set: What keeps New Yorkers here in the long term, if not their work? One answer: our cultural life. The libraries, museums, performance venues, artists and creatives that make this city magic.
They care for New York. But who is caring for them?
Our city’s cultural institutions steward more than 300 city-owned buildings and green spaces — more than 11 million square feet of bricks and steel.
That’s a lot to maintain. It’s our sacred duty to maintain it, so that when New Yorkers and visitors walk into a public library or a theater, they feel that sense of inspiration and respect that makes them want to come here, to stay, to raise their families here.
As the physical plants of these institutions age, we’ve run up against antiquated state laws that significantly constrain the city’s ability to build and renovate our spaces.
In 2004, for example, we went in to save Staten Island’s historic St. George Theatre. It had fallen into complete disrepair — it had no electrical power, no plumbing, no orchestra seats, no stage lighting — but plenty of raccoons and birds. Working alongside government, we raised millions — but when the time came to begin the work in earnest, it was held up for years, the result of outdated regulations the Department of Design and Construction had to follow.
The theater business already runs on razor-thin margins, which have only gotten tighter post-pandemic: the delays jeopardized our ability to pay our staff.
It’s not just us — these delays affect the whole industry. We can’t host a summer camp when our science center is under construction. We can’t showcase art to our patrons when a gallery is being renovated.
For decades, private companies have been able to implement tools like design-build and construction manager build
— which allow sourcing a contractor at the same time as the project is being designed.
The benefits are plentiful: the project team can do outreach to minority- and women-owned business subcontractors pre-construction, meaningfully boosting M/WBE participation and bringing the input of the construction team into the design process to avoid costly and inefficient changes once the project moves from big idea to brick and rebar.
When the city bids out a project, for the most part it’s forced to separate these processes — meaning the design process goes without the benefit of construction expertise, the result of state rules aimed at stemming corruption. Construction work is awarded to the lowest responsible bidder.
The city has made some headway — it received initial design-build authority in 2019 and extended it in 2022, but that’s hardly the only tool in the toolbox. Progressive design-build brings the designer and builder on even earlier in the process to refine scope, using good advice and collaboration from Day 1. Construction manager as builder allows a construction manager to procure and manage construction, working alongside the design team on projects with unique site constraints like renovations and retrofits.
These tools save time, they save money, they result in higher M/WBE utilization, and they get stuff built in New York. It’s time to bring them to the public sector.
Luckily, last year, Mayor Adams convened a Capital Process Reform Task Force that spent the better part of a year listening to stakeholders like us and issuing recommendations for improvements. Now, these tools are in the pipeline for New York.
They are not risky. While the regulations were created to prevent cronyism, they’ve gone too far in the other direction, preventing good work instead.
Our cultural and civic institutions are at the core of who we are as New Yorkers, and at the very center of our economic revitalization; let’s not hamper them with bureaucracy.
The end of the St. George theater saga is a happy one: we partnered with the Economic Development Corp., which is able to use construction manager-build.
Using this tool, we were able to run important steps in parallel, sourcing our consultants and planning the project at the same time, creating a predictable schedule, and ultimately opening our shows on time and — and this one is important — staying in business, keeping our staff employed and artists paid and fed.
Especially in the post-pandemic landscape, where theaters and artistic organizations are still struggling, we must implement design-build. These tools were not in the governor’s budget, as we hoped they would be — now it’s time for the Legislature to act, to ensure that this is the year we supercharge our care for our city’s crucial civic and cultural infrastructure. Killingsworth, interim co-president of The Brooklyn Academy of Music, chairs the Cultural Institutions Group. Cugno is president and CEO of the St. George Theatre.