The Wall Street financier Stephen A. Schwarzman has fond memories of Commons, the 114-year-old limestone building at Yale where he first took meals as a shy freshman from a public school in suburban Philadelphia.
“Commons always had a big emotional impact on me,” he said in a recent interview. “I did not know one person when I went and I was very lonely. I’ve always been interested in that building and what goes on there.”
Now with a gift of $150 million, one of the largest ever made to a cultural center, Mr. Schwarzman plans to transform Commons and its attached buildings into a performing arts center and hub along the lines of the Kennedy Center in Washington — on whose board he served for six years.
The plan, announced on Monday, will be drawn up in part by Michael M. Kaiser, the former Kennedy Center president. It will incorporate existing performance spaces, namely Woolsey Hall, the 2,650-seat auditorium built alongside Commons and Memorial Hall as part of a complex designed by Carrère and Hastings to celebrate Yale’s bicentennial in 1901.
But the complex, to be called the Schwarzman Center, will also have new halls for theater, music, lectures and readings, to be built beneath and on the upper floors of the existing buildings, and new programming featuring major performing artists and groups whose events will be open to the public.
Continue reading the main storyWith the transformation, Yale would be among the best equipped universities in the Northeast for arts programming while the expansion would help New Haven, a struggling city where the university is a major employer as well as tourist draw, with its two art galleries and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
Before the center’s opening, scheduled for 2020, Yale plans to hire a full-time director to run it.
“You’re going to need someone who thinks big and who can program across genres,” said Peter Salovey, the university’s president, in an interview.
As an act of philanthropy, Mr. Schwarzman’s gift trumps the $100 million he gave to the New York Public Library in 2008 (the Fifth Avenue flagship building that now bears his name). David H. Koch, the oil-and-gas billionaire, and David Geffen, the entertainment mogul, have also made recent $100 million naming donations to upgrade performing arts spaces at Lincoln Center — Mr. Koch to finance a renovation of the New York State Theater in 2008 and Mr. Geffen this year to underwrite an overhaul of Avery Fisher Hall.
“It will be the hub of the campus, it will evolve after I’m not around, it will touch almost everyone,” Mr. Schwarzman said of the center, whose completion is expected to be underwritten by his donation alone.
A portion of the gift — $20 million — will be used for the center’s presentations and operations. Yale will contribute an additional $2 million a year for 10 years, starting in 2019, for programming and staff.
Yale was thinking mainly of sprucing up the Commons complex when it approached Mr. Schwarzman for help. The three buildings need an upgrade — including Memorial Hall, where the names of Yale graduates who died in military conflicts from the Revolution to Vietnam are inscribed.
But Mr. Schwarzman, the chairman, chief executive and a co-founder of the Blackstone Group, the asset management company, said he did not want to just put his name on a renovated building.
“I like creating new things,” he said, citing as an example the scholarship master’s degree program modeled partly on the Rhodes scholarships that he recently started at Tsinghua University in Beijing — called Schwarzman Scholars — to which he has contributed $100 million. “In the charitable world, I find myself giving to large projects that I think can make a large-scale impact.”
Mr. Schwarzman had several discussions with Mr. Salovey, in which they found themselves re-envisioning Commons as a place to unite the various constituencies on campus — undergraduates, graduate and professional students, faculty, staff and alumni, as well as members of the public — even as it raised Yale’s profile.
“It’s largely an immense dining hall that reminds students of Hogwarts,” Mr. Salovey said of Commons, referring to the school in the Harry Potter stories. “He’s pushed us to think beyond the boundaries of what student centers on campus can do.”
The appeal of a central communal hub is particularly ripe at Yale. The university’s undergraduates tend to be dispersed because of Yale’s setup of 12 residential colleges (two more are under construction), where most students live and eat after freshman year. These colleges host prominent guests at small gatherings and present performances in modest underground theaters.
“We do a great job of small events in residential colleges or hidden away in professional schools that give students an intimate experience with a person of note,” Mr. Salovey said. “What we don’t have are activities where they can all come together as a community.”
Under the plan, Commons will remain a freshman dining hall, though it will also be used for cultural purposes. The renovation — to be handled by an architect yet to be selected — will also turn the large space beneath Commons, now used for food storage, into a pub with coffee and hanging out by day and beer and wine (for those of age) along with events at night.
In a written proposal for the center, Mr. Kaiser discussed harnessing technology to help Yale “become the campus of the future.” His ideas include enabling students to interact with important alumni at the center by teleconferencing via video screens during meals.
“You could have lunch with Sonia Sotomayor one day and Meryl Streep the next,” Mr. Kaiser said in a phone interview. “This is an opportunity to do something on a grander scale.”
The center represents a direct response to the explicit request of its student government representatives, as expressed in a 2013 joint report that called for the creation of a “campuswide center that bridges the boundaries between undergraduate, graduate and professional school students” and that “encourages vibrant, significant and inclusive social interaction at Yale.”
Mr. Salovey said: “They want to mix it up — where a student studying drama can sit with an undergraduate who is just starting to have an interest in theater and a Ph.D. student who is writing about a playwright to not be so carved up.”
By the time the center opens, there will also be more people on campus, because Yale’s undergraduate population is expected to grow by 15 percent — bringing the total student body to more than 12,000 — after construction of the two residential colleges. Final determination of the configuration and use of the center will be made in consultation with a committee comprising students, faculty and staff.
With the addition of the center, Mr. Salovey said, he imagines that students walking around campus at night looking for something to do will almost always find it.
“You should be able to say, ‘I bet there’s something going on at the Schwarzman Center,’ ” Mr. Salovey said, “even if you have no idea what it is.”
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