Lincoln Center has long known how to cultivate audiences, artists and donors. Now the country’s largest performing arts complex is learning how to cultivate grass.
Home to stone behemoths like the Metropolitan Opera House and Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center has grown itself a parabola of green that opened last year as part of a campus redevelopment project. And these days, like homeowners everywhere, Lincoln Center is engaged in the joys and headaches of that suburban rite of spring: lawn care.
“It’s not as straightforward as keeping a glass wall clean,” said Peter Flamm, Lincoln Center’s senior director of real estate, planning and logistics. “It requires attention and love and care.”
The 7,203-square-foot lawn — on top of the new restaurant Lincoln, on the north plaza, along West 65th Street — had a rough beginning. It was forced to close just two weeks after opening last June because of mysterious brown spots that turned out to be dehydration caused by irrigation problems. It reopened about a week later and stayed open until November.
“These are glitches you get on any project,” said Frank S. Rossi, a turf grass scientist and associate professor in Cornell University’s horticulture department, who was Lincoln Center’s lawn guru and has been a consultant for the New York Yankees’ ballfields. “Ninety-five percent of the lawn is not differently managed than any lawn in the Hamptons or Scarsdale.”
This season Lincoln Center is determined to get it right. It is reactivating improved watering systems; fertilizing, reseeding and mowing the lawns at a higher setting, to three inches, to minimize crab grass growth and grubs; and aerating the soil and adding more earth. The lawn is scheduled to reopen to the public on May 11.
For the rest of the article, click here.