Venue: Lincoln Center
Town: Manhattan, US

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (also simply known as Lincoln Center) is a 16.3-acre (6.6-hectare) complex of buildings in the Lincoln Square neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It has thirty indoor and outdoor facilities and is host to five million visitors annually. It houses performing arts organizations including the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and the Juilliard School. A consortium of civic leaders and others, led by and under the initiative of philanthropist John D. Rockefeller III, built Lincoln Center as part of the "Lincoln Square Renewal Project" during Robert Moses's program of New York's urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s. Respected architects were contracted to design the major buildings on the site. In the course of acquiring the land for the complex, more than 7,000 residents and 800 businesses from the San Juan Hill area of Lincoln Square were displaced. Rockefeller was appointed as the Lincoln Center's inaugural president in 1956, and once he resigned, became its chairman in 1961. He is credited with having raised more than half of the $184.5 million in private funds needed to build the complex, including drawing from his own funds; the Rockefeller Brothers Fund also contributed to the project. Numerous architects were hired to build different parts of the center (see § Architects). The center's first three buildings, David Geffen Hall (formerly Avery Fisher Hall, originally named Philharmonic Hall), David H. Koch Theater (formerly the New York State Theater), and the Metropolitan Opera House were opened in 1962, 1964, and 1966, respectively. It is unclear whether the center was named as a tribute to U.S. President Abraham Lincoln or for its location in the Lincoln Square neighborhood. The name was bestowed on the area in 1906 by the New York City Board of Aldermen, but records give no reason for choosing that name. There has long been sp