The Arts and Transit Neighborhood will be the home of the new Lewis Center for the Arts. According to President Shirley M. Tilghman, the center will enable the University "not only to expand its programs in the creative and performing arts, but to establish itself as a global leader in the quality of its offerings and in their integration into a broader liberal arts education."

The neighborhood will support academic programs in theater, dance and music (which also will maintain its presence in Woolworth Hall) with new teaching, rehearsal and administrative spaces.

Performance venues will include a black box theater, an experimental media studio, a dance studio, a large music rehearsal room and a performance hall with a fly loft and orchestra pit. A new building for the Princeton University Art Museum will complement the existing museum with galleries for contemporary and rotating exhibits, teaching spaces, and a museum lounge/café and shop.

Audiences already drawn to the area by the McCarter and Berlind theaters will find themselves on familiar yet expansive new ground. The arts will be much more apparent in the surroundings, from students on their way to classes, faculty leading sessions outdoors and patrons on their way to many different kinds of performances.

“... I don’t believe there is another university in the country which has committed itself so concretely to the view of intellectual life as deficient without serious attention to the arts. Not just for the aspiring professional artist: not limited to an amiable pastime available in separate enclaves; but an assumption that art is an intellectual pursuit — struck, perhaps, by lightning bolts of inspiration; inoperable without the power of the imagination, but a pursuit deeper and much more profound than even the talent and genius of its purveyors. Princeton University is a natural habitat for such a pursuit.”
— Toni Morrison, the Goheen Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus