Roberta Brandes Gratz - Its a helluva town : Joan K. Davidson, the J.M. Kaplan fund, and the fight for a better New York

Joan K. Davidson
C REDIT : T HE J.M. K APLAN F UND

O n a moonlit June night in 2017, more than five hundred New Yorkers gathered at the Cooper Hewitt Museum on Manhattans Upper East Side to salute Joan K. Davidson on her ninetieth birthday and celebrate seventy years of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, of which she was president for sixteen years, from 1977 to 1993. The lush garden of this Georgian mansionbuilt for the Gilded Age tycoon Andrew Carnegieand its elegant conservatory was a fitting site to honor a woman of great style and high civic impact. This was not meant to be five hundred of Joans nearest and dearest friends. It was, instead, a special gathering of what she always called the good people, those active citizens on the front lines of creative, often pathbreaking ventures that she had supported as a colleague, funder, or both.

She had joined the good people in fights to save the Hudson from the ravages of a Con Ed power plant at Storm King Mountain. She had helped create the first affordable housing for artists. She had joined and supported those who had fought against a proposed superhighway along the edge of Manhattan. She had worked to preserve the landmarks of the city without freezing progress, to create new organizations to protect and further civil liberties, and to provide legal help for communities threatened by overdevelopment. She had not won every fight: Broadway theaters had fallen despite her best efforts to protect them from the hostile, anti-urban designs of an out-of-scale hotel developer, and there were other losses as well. But overall, hers was a record of astonishing success in repairing and carrying New York forward after the madness called urban renewal.

Present that night were environmentalists, historic preservationists, urban farmers, parks restorers, civil liberties activists, authors, poets, artists, upstate activists, museum curators, community defenders, musicians, and trendsetters of every kindwhat one attendee called an only in New York crowd. No one gawked to see if any beautiful people might be in attendance. A number of them were indeed there, but this was not that kind of party.

Many attendees knew each otherthey had joined forces on some civic initiative or had started a new organizational effort together. All had, in one way or another, worked with and admired Joan as she and her familys foundation supportedand often directly enabledthis eclectic group in their efforts to repair and transform New York City, the Hudson Valley, and other areas of New York State over more than five decades. Margot Wellington, former executive director of the Municipal Art Society (MAS), observed: If a gas attack that night had wiped out the crowd, the city would move backward; these were all the people who moved the city forward. Joan, of course, couldnt have been more pleased with the turnout. All those smiling faces, she noted to me with a laugh.

Joan K. Davidson speaks at the Cooper Hewitt celebration of seventy years of the J.M. Kaplan Fund and her ninetieth birthday. C REDIT: T HE J.M. K APLAN F UND