NJPAC breaks ground on project designed to transform arts campus
- Author: Ron Croudy
- Date:
By
Steve Strunsky, NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
Billionaire philanthropist Leon Cooperman spent a lot on the hat he was wearing with the NJPAC logo.
“I’m at a stage in my life where I’m swapping money for apparel,” Cooperman, 81, a former Goldman Sachs partner and Omega Advisors founder, said Wednesday at a groundbreaking for what New Jersey Performing Arts Center officials called a “transformative” project in Newark that will include an arts education center with his name on it. “This hat cost me twenty million.”
Cooperman joined fellow Goldman Sachs alumnus Gov. Phil Murphy, Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka, NJPAC CEO John Schreiber, and other public officials and business leaders in scooping a shovel full of ceremonial dirt piled in a parking lot where the Cooperman Family Arts Education and Community Center is to be built.
