Walk This Way

New York transplants Alex Poots, founding artistic director of The Shed, and his wife, Islamic scholarKathryn Spellman, are lighting up the town with their energy and cultural dynamism.

- Dodie Kazanjian

On a sweltering afternoon in mid-July, I’m on West Thirtieth Street in Manhattan, looking for the entrance to The Shed. Scheduled to open this spring but still under construction, The Shed is New York’s keenly anticipated new year-round, all-purpose cultural emporium for music, dance, theater, and visual arts. There are no signs, though—this is Hudson Yards, where one of the biggest urban-renewal projects in New York City is in full swing, and the landmark I’d been given, a pizza parlor, refuses to reveal itself. But then, hooray, halfway down the block I see a blonde woman waving both arms, and I breathe a sigh of relief. It’s Kathryn Spellman, a sociologist and visting professor for Islamic Studies at Columbia University and the wife of Alex Poots, The Shed’s founding artistic director and CEO.

“Alex is inside with the graphics team, talking about signage and ‘way finding,’ ” Spellman says, laughing. She’s a vivid, effervescent beauty in a colorful sleeveless Missoni shift and sneakers without laces. We go in a side door, put on hard hats, and walk up to the second level—a vast, 12,500-square-foot, column-free gallery—moving gingerly to avoid electrical cables and other obstacles. At the far end, Poots is in conference with the “way finders.” The 17,000-square-foot adjoining hall (it’s called “The McCourt”) is usually exposed to the skies when its outer layer is nested into the fixed building, but at the moment, it’s covered by The Shed’s most distinguishing feature: a telescoping shell made of steel and a clear, lightweight polymer that moves out (and back) on gigantic rail tracks, turning it from an outside plaza to a large-scale performance space for 3,000-plus people.