The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (17 page)

The
Bright Light
study is generally quite sympathetic to the police, who appear to spend much of their time reviving wasted derelicts who have collapsed into the gutter, or dealing with the crazies who have come to live on the street. At one point a street character with no legs takes a bite out of a cop’s hand; handcuffed on the floor of the precinct house, he whacks passersby with his bloody stumps. An exhausted patrolman says to his partner, “This job’s like shoveling shit against the tide.” The problem is not even crime so much as rampant antisocial behavior; the drunks and the nuts and the bag ladies and the small-time hustlers have created a self-perpetuating street culture that seems beyond the reach of enforcement. One commanding officer says, “If we could go back to the old style of police work, when men on the beat could enforce standards of public decency and order, we could clean up West 42nd Street in no time.” But at that time neither the city’s judges nor many of its citizens—certainly not elites—would have tolerated such aggressive, and such moralistic, policing; nor was there any willingness to reverse the policy of “deinstitutionalization,” which had released thousands of mentally ill people to the streets with little supervision or care.

The Bright Light Zone
was a work of cultural anthropology; the authors were at pains to demonstrate that Times Square served the needs, and satisfied the appetites, of many constituencies. “The heterogeneity of people and their life-ways along West 42nd Street is astonishing even to social scientists who are used to the wonderful layering and stacking of Manhattan neighborhoods,” the authors write. Far from being the “Ghetto Street” imagined by terrified suburbanites, they noted, 42nd Street was filled with a great throng of tourists, office workers, and fun seekers, and at least at midday was among the most crowded blocks in New York City. The cheap movie theaters and restaurants and arcades were a tremendous draw for perfectly law-abiding young people and families, especially from neighborhoods like Harlem with few movie theaters of their own. Forty-second Street was not beyond help. While only 21 percent of respondents to a survey said “I would enjoy” going to West 42nd Street, and 38 percent said “I would avoid” the area, a sizable majority also said that they would come to the street if “legitimate theater and dance” returned there. In other words, if you could somehow end the cycle of pathology, you might be able to restore something of the old life of 42nd Street.

This in turn raised the question of exactly how that cycle had gotten started in the first place. One of the authors of the study, Stanley Bruder, argued in a discussion of the history of Times Square that the demise of theaters and restaurants, and the rise of penny arcades and shooting galleries and grinders, which “tended to cater to the lowest common denominator,” drove away “respectable elements.” That is, bad uses attracted bad people, rather than the other way around. And so the opposite must be true as well: “eliminating these businesses through changing the use of the street should cause the undesirable population to leave on its own,” Bruder concluded. While several of his colleagues were more inclined to sympathize with the “undesirable population” than with the “respectable elements,” William Kornblum, the director of the study project, adopted Bruder’s view and made it the central prescriptive device of
Bright Light Zone.
“A check on the vicious circle of demoralization and decay in the 42nd Street area does depend on increased police details and more forceful application of police action,” Kornblum wrote. “At the same time, all authorities agree that only the economic redevelopment of the area can significantly alter the present patterns of street traffic and vice.”

Here was not only an urban policy but an important act of moral recognition, especially coming from liberal academics: vagrants and hustlers and prostitutes could not be tolerated, or accepted as the price of “authentic” urban life, if the streets were to be made welcoming to “respectable” folk. At the same time, 42nd Street had a role as a low-cost entertainment center that ought not simply be discarded in its wished-for renaissance. And of course, it had a history to be respected, as well. The study raised a question to which there was no obvious answer: how could you eradicate whatever was pathological about 42nd Street and its environs without, at the same time, eliminating everything that made it worth caring about in the first place?

PART TWO

MAKING A NEW
FUN PLACE

10.

SELTZER, NOT ORANGE JUICE

IN LATE DECEMBER 1976, Alexander Parker, real estate magnate, gazed down upon 42nd Street and saw a world made new. A reporter for a business magazine wrote, breathlessly: “Alex Parker stands in the large, high-ceiling board room with floor-to-ceiling arched windows looking out over Times Square. He doesn’t see the prostitutes, pimps, molesters, muggers. He says he sees a huge, shining complex where tourists will flock for excitement of another kind in a revitalized Times Square.” Parker was a Times Square arriviste, a developer who owned properties in the Garment District, in the West Thirties. The year before, he had purchased 1 Times Square, the old Times Tower, the fountainhead of Times Square, from the Allied Chemical Corporation; and it was from the old boardroom of the
Times
that he had launched his dream of a new 42nd Street. The “huge, shining complex” was a convention center, which would stretch from 40th to 43rd Street and from Seventh to Eighth Avenue. The rendering depicted in the article has the sterile beauty of a thing imagined ex nihilo: a plaza with gardens and fountains and walkways leading to a cluster of rectangular granite slabs, which would presumably house the conventioneers. Parker said that he planned to use “a large wrecking ball . . . to crush the decaying structures” of the old 42nd Street. And in fact not only the prostitutes and muggers, but the street itself, and even the street plan, have been eradicated from the picture. This new 42nd Street bears a strong resemblance to the United Nations Plaza.

Parker’s timing wasn’t very good. By 1976, the real estate market, and New York City’s economy, had collapsed; he never managed to raise the $500 million he said he needed for the convention center. He ultimately sold the oft-sold 1 Times Square, and then disappeared from the history of Times Square and 42nd Street. But the dream, as it were, lived on. By the mid-1970s, 42nd Street was understood to be a dead place. Once it had been the very heart of the greatest city in the world; now, like New York itself, it felt like a relic, a reminder of past glories. Yet 42nd Street could not simply be abandoned, like the polluted terrain of an old factory. At the level of symbolism, the block’s predatory environment was disastrous for a city that already had a well-deserved reputation as one of the seamiest and most dangerous places in the country. What’s more, it was located in the heart of Manhattan, at the convergence of subway lines and bus lines and at the intersection of major streets. Here was a wasting asset of colossal proportions. The authors of the
Bright Light
study noted that “commercial lenders who have business in midtown Manhattan regard the Times Square area as a prime location for investment,” but added: “This mood depends on continuous action on plans to renew the 42nd Street Bright Lights District.” It is worth noting the difference between “Times Square” and “42nd Street” in this calculus: while the entire area was degraded, and in need of rejuvenation, it was understood that the distinctive pathologies of 42nd Street were the chief problem to be addressed. In the process of redevelopment, the destinies of 42nd Street and Times Square came to be seen as linked, but nevertheless separate.

And so men like Alexander Parker stood high above 42nd Street and imagined it anew. Forty-second Street’s very centrality, its antique associations, made it a thrilling screen on which to project visions of an urban future. And yet what a strange tabula rasa! Here was a teeming block in the midst of a teeming city, a block whose glamorous buildings were very much intact, if terribly degraded. Could such a place actually be called dead? Could it be “rescued,” rather than obliterated? And if so, what was to be preserved? The buildings themselves? The “spirit” of the place? Which spirit? The lobster palace society of 1910 or the carny, flea-circus world of 1940? Was the underworld once again to meet the elite? Or was the whole idea of consciously and conscientiously designing a place that for generations had been a monument to the ungovernable appetites of urban man an absurdity, a self-contradiction? Starting in the 1960s, and then increasingly in the seventies and eighties, 42nd Street became a place to be saved, restored, reimagined. The process of redevelopment became a cockpit of competing ideas not only about 42nd Street and Times Square, but about urban life itself.

At the same time, since urban development is a quintessentially political process rather than an aesthetic exercise, these ideas and images were wielded by different individuals and groups with their own interests and their own sources and degrees of power: real estate developers, urban planners, government officials, theater owners, editorialists, urban flaneurs, and, not to put too fine a point upon it, real estate developers. The prize would not necessarily go to the best or most popular idea— Alexander Parker, after all, had no plans to ask anybody whether they wanted a convention center—so the debate over the redevelopment of 42nd Street was also a struggle over who had “the public interest” at heart, and who would be able to impose that vision.

It is quite possible that there were no good answers to the problem of re-creating 42nd Street. There were only answers that would disappoint different people, in different ways.

ALEXANDER PARKER’S BULLDOZER approach was already becoming passé by the mid-1970s, for the excesses of “urban renewal” had convinced even the most pragmatic that cities could not survive the wholesale destruction of their history and texture. Now 42nd Street began to attract reformers who recognized that the block still had a life of its own, and who thus wanted to rejuvenate rather than flatten it. In 1976, just as Parker was wowing the business press with his grandiose plans, an advertising executive and urban gadfly named Fred Papert was establishing the 42nd Street Development Corporation in hopes of revitalizing the western end of the street. Papert was able to draw on funding from major foundations to create a string of small theaters, now known collectively as Theater Row, west of Ninth Avenue. Papert also had the ingenious idea— or at least is among the half dozen or so people who claim to have had the idea—of offering subsidized apartments in a federally funded project on Tenth Avenue to artists and performers. Papert imagined West 42nd Street as a burgeoning cultural zone. He began to look east, toward the notoriously incorrigible block between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, and he turned for support to his principal patron, the Ford Foundation.

Ford was then, and is now, not only one of the largest foundations in the country but one of the most prestigious institutions in the city, a charter member of New York’s cultural elite. The foundation’s headquarters, a glittering glass box, was located on the east side of 42nd Street, and the foundation had in no way sought to identify itself with the tawdry block to the west, or for that matter with the world of popular and commercial culture embodied by 42nd Street. But Ford had a large stake in high culture; and, at about the same time as Fred Papert approached the foundation, Roger Kennedy, the Ford official who oversaw arts programs, was looking to buy a theater for the dance companies the foundation subsidized. He had asked Richard Weinstein, an architect, and Donald Elliot, an urban planner, to take a look at the fabled, and long abandoned, New Amsterdam Theatre just west of Seventh Avenue. The two reported back that the block was such a shambles that no one would come to the New Amsterdam, even if it was restored to its original glory. Kennedy gave them a small grant to think about what, if anything, could be done with 42nd Street. This is how the Ford Foundation backed into a peculiar role as the patron and prime mover of 42nd Street redevelopment.

The project began modestly; Weinstein says that the initial goal was to “look for ways to bring commercial development to the block, with the idea that we skim some of the benefits to redevelop the theaters, and in the process get rid of the pornography.” But developers told Weinstein and Elliott that their plans wouldn’t generate sufficient capital to restore the theaters, so they began thinking in far more ambitious terms. By the time the new group, including Papert, met at the Ford Foundation in February 1978, Weinstein had devised a plan as grandiose as Parker’s. “The plan,” he explained, according to notes of the meeting,

includes converting the ten existing second-floor auditoria in the theater buildings into a consumer-oriented exposition center with people moving across 42nd Street by means of pedestrian bridges. The expositions would be sponsored by major corporations for promotional purposes and would create an audio-visual experience similar in technique to that utilized by the Smithsonian’s National Space Museum. The ground floor would be developed for retail and restaurant business designed for the middle-class population (estimated to be between 200,000–300,000 people a day) going through the Port of Authority [
sic
] Terminal.

Thus was born Cityscape, a theme park in the heart of Manhattan. Customers would buy tickets and circulate among the rides and exhibits. Like any theme park, Cityscape was designed as a self-contained world, two city blocks encased in glass and communicating with each other not principally by way of the street but through aerial walkways. Unlike Alexander Parker’s pastoralized plaza, Cityscape offered an extremely inventive and even playful rendition of 42nd Street’s character, adapting its identity as a rialto of popular entertainment to a new culture and new technology. Weinstein hired the artists and designers who had created the celebrated Czech pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, including Milos For-man, as well as the design firm of Chermayeff & Geismar, which was responsible for the American pavilion—the one with Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome—and the accompanying exhibit at Osaka in 1970. Cityscape was not a preservation project: its premise was that 42nd Street needed to be projected forward rather than backward.

The design firm produced a cutaway aerial view of the project which today has about it a Flash Gordon sense of the fantastical. A monorail runs all around the perimeter on an upper floor—the orientation ride. Then, moving from east to west along the southern side of 42nd Street, the plan shows a theater containing “the world’s largest movie screen,” utilizing the then novel IMAX technology to offer a bird’s-eye view of the city’s five boroughs; the restored New Amsterdam Theatre and two other legitimate theaters; a kind of fashion theater in which a narrator, according to Weinstein, explains “the relationship between fashion and the social-cultural-political moment the fashion was created from,” while lights pick out mannequins lined up in niches along the walls (after which viewers would be treated to an actual fashion show); and sound stages and studios where visitors could watch commercials or television shows being made. The northern side of the block included the project’s two most ingenious inventions: a conical theater in which patrons seated around a spiraling rim would look straight down at a movie screen showing a balloon’s-eye view of the world’s great cities, and a Ferris wheel, “The Slice of Life,” in which viewers would appear to rise from the cables and tunnels far beneath the streets all the way to the rooftops of the highest skyscrapers—“to make people understand the city as a sectional reality,” as Weinstein said.

For all its imaginative richness, Cityscape was steeped in self-contradiction. Here, after all, was a theme park whose theme was “the city,” which is to say that it would function as a simulacrum of urban life while urban life in all its messy actuality tumbled along the street on the other side of the walls. Here was a controlled environment designed to illustrate the urban creativity that springs from uncontrol. Underlying the Cityscape plan was something of that horror of the streets, and of their culture, which had made Alexander Parker brag about large wrecking balls. And the figures behind Cityscape, unlike Parker, were not moved by calculations of self-interest; they were reacting to what was a virtually con-sensual view of 42nd Street, and perhaps more broadly of the urban street itself. The
Bright Light
study, which Ford had commissioned, seemed only to confirm the sense of 42nd Street as irretrievably lost, though the authors themselves scarcely took this view. “At the time,” says Fred Papert, “all you had to say was ‘Forty-second Street’ or ‘Times Square,’ and it evoked a groan. So part of the appeal was that you were protected or isolated from the street.” Roger Kennedy, especially, did not view the idea of enclosure as inimical to urban life. Before coming to Ford, he had worked as a banker in St. Paul and had funded a downtown redevelopment that had connected buildings with aerial bridges. Just as St. Paul had arctic blasts, so the streets of New York had obstacles of their own. “If you want to go to dinner or theater without putting your coat on, that’s pretty nice in New York,” says Kennedy. “It’s not a bad thing not to have your pants splashed walking past an ugly puddle. And if someone’s going to put their hand in your pocket, that’s an additional reason.”

The project required the approval of city officials, who would have had to condemn the private property along the block and turn it over to Cityscape. The designers built an elaborate model of the project, and in late 1978 and early 1979 invited journalists, civic figures, potential investors, and officials from the administration of Mayor Ed Koch to come to the Ford Foundation’s splendid headquarters for a viewing. Both the model and the project itself were generally well-received, save by one all-important figure: Mayor Koch himself. The mayor had apparently taken a visceral dislike to the model. In an interview with Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic of
The New York Times,
Koch said, “New York cannot and should not compete with Disneyland—that’s for Florida. People do not come to midtown Manhattan to take a ride on some machine. This is a nice plan and we want to be supportive—but we have to be sure that it is fleshed out in a way appropriate to New York.” And then came the killing, very Kochian bon mot: “We’ve got to make sure that they have seltzer instead of orange juice.” It was an unforgettable kiss-off. “The Disneyland image was so powerful,” Weinstein says, “that no matter how we advanced the substance of what we were trying to do, it was nevertheless perceived as an urban theme park.”