Living Near Lincoln Center: A Guide for Arts Students and Professionals

There is a particular kind of New York stay that organizes itself around Lincoln Center. A Juilliard semester. A summer at the Met's young artist program. A teaching residency at the School of American Ballet. A guest run at Jazz at Lincoln Center. A research fellowship at the Library for the Performing Arts. A run as a swing in a Broadway production that happens to rehearse at the New 42nd Street studios, which are a short ride south, but where the company members all somehow end up living up here.

For these stays the math of where to live is unusually clear. Time between home and rehearsal becomes a budget line. A ten-minute walk versus a thirty-minute commute, four times a day, six days a week, is the difference between sleeping eight hours and sleeping six.

The five-minute walk

The campus that most people call Lincoln Center is actually a complex of buildings spread across the blocks between Columbus and Amsterdam from 60th to about 66th Street. Juilliard is at 60 Lincoln Center Plaza. The Met is at 30. The Philharmonic plays at David Geffen Hall at 10. The Vivian Beaumont and Mitzi Newhouse theaters are in the same complex. The Walter Reade Theater is across the plaza. The School of American Ballet shares Juilliard's building.

From a residence at 117 West 70th Street, every one of those is between four and seven blocks. Walking south on Columbus Avenue from 70th, you cross 68th and 67th and you are at Juilliard's stage entrance. Walking south on Broadway, you cross 66th and you are at the plaza fountain. Door to dressing room is, conservatively, eight minutes. In practice, it is faster, because you do not need to wait for an elevator and you do not need to take a train.

The practical pieces

Practice rooms are not a problem you can solve at home. Most coliving and most NYC apartments will not let you practice an instrument late at night, and even if they would, the acoustics are not designed for it. Juilliard, Mannes, the Manhattan School of Music, and several private studios in the immediate area rent practice rooms by the hour. The 24-hour buildings closest to Lincoln Center fill up early in the term; the ones a few blocks north have more availability.

Costume and instrument storage is the second piece. A neighborhood within a five-minute walk of campus means you can leave instruments in lockers and bring them home, instead of carrying them on the subway. It also means you can change in your own room before and after a rehearsal, which matters for ballet residencies and any rotation that requires multiple wardrobe changes in a day.

The third piece is timing. Performance schedules end late, often after the last subway is comfortable to take. A neighborhood you can walk home from at 11:30 PM along well-lit streets is meaningfully different from one that requires the 1 train. Walking north up Broadway from Lincoln Center to 70th Street at any hour is one of the safer urban walks in New York.

The community

The Upper West Side has been the residential neighborhood for the performing arts community in New York for at least sixty years. The history of why is partially accidental, but the result is that you will find, in any given block of Lincoln Square, retired members of the Philharmonic, current Met chorus singers, ballet faculty, voice teachers, language coaches, and the staff of half a dozen agencies and conservatories. The cafes know who is on what schedule. The grocers know what time the rehearsals end.

For students and emerging professionals, the practical version of this is that your neighbors include people two or three career steps ahead of you. Networking is not a separate activity here, it is the consequence of taking the same bus.

Stratford as a base

We designed Stratford Residences with stays of one to twelve months in mind, which is the range of most arts residencies, programs, and visiting positions. Rooms are furnished and ready, billing is per four-week block, no US guarantor is required, and we routinely invoice programs and sponsors directly. The Jack and Jill room is particularly useful for pairs from the same program who want to live next door without sharing a bedroom.

If you are coming to Lincoln Center for a season, the cleanest first step is a reservation request with your dates. We will hold a room while program confirmation happens, and we can set up a video tour from wherever you are auditioning from this week. The full address is 117 West 70th Street; the closest campus building is about five blocks south.

For most of our performing-arts residents, the deciding factor is not the building, it is the walk. It is hard to overstate how much shorter the season feels when you do not lose an hour a day to a train.