The Shape of Things to Come

At New York City's new Perelman Performing Arts Center a creative capstone of the World Trade Center's decades-long rebuilding architecture and optimism find form.

- Chloe Schama

If you work or live near the World Trade Center, you are regularly confronted with impermanence. A pathway that has been blocked for months (years?) by plywood partitions and concrete barricades is suddenly accessible as a corridor for authorized vehicles and swarms of tourists. Corrugated tin walls, a shield for large-scale HVAC equipment resembling steampunk vents, become a cheery Instagram backdrop when splashed with colorful murals. A Biergarten sprouts on a concrete patio; a subway entrance improbably opens where the sidewalk seemed impermeable. Men in suits have been supplanted by nannies pushing strollers into the Wall Street–adjacent Whole Foods. This corner of New York grows in unpredictable ways.

So those of us who watched the construction of the giant marble cube next to the memorial might be forgiven for a little nonchalance: another set of steel foundations, dug deep then stretching high. But the opening of the Perelman Performing Arts Center—or PAC NYC—marks a historic moment: The last public building erected as part of the original master redevelopment plan for the World Trade Center site created by Daniel Libeskind, it has been two decades in the making, hamstrung not only by bureaucratic complexities but by stalled design plans and a rotation of artistic organizations—the Joyce Theater, the Drawing Center, the Signature Theatre, New York City Opera—that each had, at one point, been proposed as potential tenants. (The man after whom the center is named, Ronald O. Perelman—he declined to speak for this story—while credited with providing the initial funding, is no longer the biggest donor. That honor belongs to Michael Bloomberg.)