The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (21 page)

But the destruction of the theaters and the decision to approve the George Klein plan had mobilized community, civic, and theater groups as they had not been mobilized before. The public relations campaign had changed the balance of opinion; and in late 1984, the New York City Planning Commission agreed to reopen the design guidelines. Perhaps more important, the commission retained as consultants several experts who were committed to a very different vision of Times Square, and of New York City, than were the city’s chief developers. In order to advise it on issues of signage and lighting the city hired Paul Marantz, a specialist in theatrical lighting and a lifelong devotee of Times Square. Marantz considered the very idea of planning antithetical to Times Square, and said so when city officials first approached him. “My feeling was that it should happen as a force of nature, not as the result of some fiat,” Marantz says. But planning officials persuaded him that the Times Square he loved would cease to exist if nature had its way. His job, he was told, was just “to start the engine.”

Marantz and his colleagues at Jules Fisher and Paul Marantz, Inc., set about trying to understand the Times Square–ness of Times Square— what it was in the juxtaposition of light and signs and buildings and sight lines that gave Times Square its inimitable look. They spent hours wandering around the denuded Times Square of the mid-eighties, poring over old photographs, and studying the design of the neon precincts of Tokyo, Hong Kong, London. “We decided it had a lot to do with scale,” Marantz says; “what was on the first floor, what was on the second floor.” The Times Square look was, in effect, vertically tiered: regulations would have to distinguish among retail or marquee-type signs at the ground level, larger signs above, and then “super-signs” at the roofline or the setback. This was in effect Marantz’s recognition that the chaotic energy he loved about Times Square could be provoked, or at least ignited, “by fiat.” Marantz also made a list of the different types of signs in Times Square— billboards, neon, Plexiglas sheets over lightbulbs—and proposed that every new building wear a collage of such signs.

It was plain that not just signs but light would have to be mandated. If signs gave Times Square its look of gorgeous disarray, its epic higgledypiggledy, then electricity was what made the place magnificent. When you thought of Times Square, you thought first of a riot of light. But how much light was enough? And how could you possibly quantify that amount? Marantz wanted lighted signs at least as brilliant as the few, mostly Japanese ones, that remained in Times Square. “It’s very hard to stand on the street and measure the actual impact of a sign,” Marantz says. “You could measure the amount of light coming from the sign, but not the impact that one sign makes on the viewer.” That was what Marantz wanted to measure: the sign’s actual effect. He drilled a hole in the back of a 35-millimeter camera, mounted a light meter on the back, pointed it toward a sign, and took readings. In this way, Marantz invented a new unit, christened the LUTS: “light unit Times Square.” His team compiled a book of LUTS readings from current signs.

The new zoning rules, eight pages of extraordinarily specific and demanding requirements, were approved by the City Planning Commission in 1986 and finalized after a tumultuous, late-night session of the city’s Board of Estimate in February 1987. The regulations required new buildings along Seventh Avenue and Broadway to be sharply set back after sixty feet—a stricter version of the principle the city had set for 42nd Street in 1981, and that it had permitted George Klein to flout. And Marantz and Fisher’s proposed guidelines were adopted in the form of minimum LUTS readings, to be measured by the contraption Marantz and his team had devised. The guidelines required, as well, minimum numbers, sizes, and types of signs, as well as minimal levels of illumination. A block-long building would thus have to provide at least 16,800 square feet of lighted signage, or about as much as already existed on Times Square’s brightest blocks.

Here was something absolutely new in New York history: until this time, zoning rules had been used to prohibit, or sharply limit, lighting and signage, never to require it. Fifth Avenue couldn’t have lighted signs, and Times Square could; but now Times Square would become a kind of protected neon enclave. Here was preservationism designed to protect precisely the phenomenon that had, in years past, constituted the preservationists’ greatest target.

FORTY-SECOND STREET HAD to be drastically transformed, for the street had swallowed up all the piecemeal solutions that had been tried before. The rest of Times Square, for all its seediness, was a functioning entertainment district. And so whatever was lost of Times Square in the process of development did not have to be sacrificed for the good of the neighborhood. Indeed, the angriest critics of the new Times Square felt that the very act of “developing” such a place was a profanation, a blow against urbanness itself. Writing in
The New Yorker
in 1991, Brendan Gill described Times Square as the heart of a new urban Disneyland. In place of “a gaudy, tawdry medley of theatres, restaurants, rehearsal halls, hotels,” and so on, Gill wrote, public officials and private developers had fostered “a cold-blooded corporate simulacrum of an amusement park, designed to contain millions of square feet of offices filled with tens of thousands of office drones.”

The Municipal Art Society’s simulation had persuaded Paul Goldberger that Times Square’s spirit of “contained chaos” would evaporate amid the office towers. This might or might not prove to be true, but there could be no question that development had eliminated Times Square’s defining sense of scale. In
The Experience of Place,
published in 1990, the journalist Tony Hiss, who had worked closely with the MAS and contributed the image of the bowl of light, evoked the last moments of Times Square as a place of human scale. Standing in the afternoon sunlight, he wrote, “I took a good look at the low buildings along Broadway and realized that from the center of the Square, these small buildings seemed to be much farther away than just across the street. At this point, one part of what I was experiencing began to make better sense to me: Although Times Square isn’t as big or as open or as carefully planned an open space as, say, the Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, it used to have an unusual feeling of welcoming spaciousness that wasn’t to be found at the Brooklyn plaza or at any other New York intersection. It gave you the sense of being protected, because it gave the sense that there was room enough here for all.”

And so something irretrievable, something precious, was lost when the floodgates of development were opened in Times Square. Gill, in fact, prophesied that the resulting horror would become so manifest that it would undermine the very idea of the skyscraper—a prospect he heartily welcomed. That, of course, hasn’t happened. And it would be terrible if it had, for no truly modern city can accept the retrograde notion that office buildings, and the white-collar economy which they make possible, are inherently philistine. The argument may work in Florence, but not in New York. Does this require the remorseless destruction of the old? Perhaps it does. But that’s what cities do: they build the new right on top of the old.

12.

DISNEY EX MACHINA

THROUGHOUT THE 1980s, the 42nd Street Development Project had appeared to consist of a cluster of office towers dragging a tail of theaters and stores, and a giant wholesale mart glimmering in the remote distance. By the end of the decade, though, the office towers were locked in the doldrums of a sinking real estate market, the mart had become a tar baby from which one developer after another had extricated himself, and the planned hotel across the street was barely a hypothesis. The only noticeable effect of this immense public venture was on 42nd Street itself. In 1990, the lawsuits that had held up the development having finally been settled, the Urban Development Corporation formally condemned the eastern two-thirds of the block, which included all the theaters and most of the proposed retail space. Soon the storefronts were emptying out and the street was turning into a wasteland of shuttered shops. There were afternoons when it looked as if you could drive a golf ball down 42nd Street without hitting anyone, though porn continued to thrive at the uncondemned Eighth Avenue end. Here was a wholly unexpected situation: while the office towers languished, the condemnation process had taken a wrecking ball to 42nd Street’s perverse ecology.

The block had finally become the tabula rasa developers always wished it to be; the question was whether anyone would come along to write a new script. The premise of the 42nd Street Development Project had always been that everything had to happen at once; in fact, George Klein had originally bid for the entire package in order to protect himself from a situation in which he was trying to attract corporate tenants at one end of the street while the wrong sort of people streamed out of
Ginger’s
Wet Dream
at the other. But now the street was being held captive to the towers.

It was the condemnation process, oddly enough, that freed public officials to see the street anew. The 42nd Street DP now owned much of the block, and thus had to take responsibility for it. “The best thing that happened is when we took over the street,” says Rebecca Robertson, a former New York City planning official who became the DP’s executive director at the time of the condemnation. Robertson spent a good part of 1990 talking to the sex shops’ owners, and the theater owners, and the lighting and costume suppliers and rehearsal studio managers who worked in the buildings upstairs. She came to realize that 42nd Street was not simply a case history of urban pathology, as it seemed to George Klein or Philip Johnson, but a great mecca of entertainment in serious disrepair. She saw, or felt she saw, the vanished traces of Hubert’s and Nathan’s and the penny arcades. “If you spent time on the street,” Robertson says, “it spoke to you. Much of it was in ruins, but there’s something more powerful about ruins than any reality.”

The city-state plan had envisioned that the theaters on the block would be restored to operation as legitimate theaters, which of course they had not been for more than half a century; two, the Victory and the Liberty, were to open as nonprofit venues, while the others were to be self-supporting. Exactly where the audience for these new theaters would come from was hardly clear. And it was obvious to Robertson, and to everyone else in the theater world, that, with the exception of the New Amsterdam, the 42nd Street theaters were too small to turn a profit. Robertson concluded that the public planners had cynically dangled the prospect of theater preservation before the public in order to win approval for commercial development. But preservationism itself seemed like a specious response to 42nd Street’s crude, commercial, hectoring soul. “If they had more respect for what the street had been,” Robertson says, “they never would have fashioned a plan like that.” Her vision for 42nd Street was not so very different from Hugh Hardy’s for Times Square: flashing lights, big signs, popular entertainment. The new Times Square zoning rules offered a forward-looking program designed to preserve the area’s essential character—though they, too, conceded the inevitability of overscale office towers.

Robertson’s ambition was to fashion a populist alternative to the backward-looking and in any case unachievable elitism of the original plan. And she had arrived at her job at what turned out to be an oddly propitious moment to forge a new 42nd Street. It was becoming fashionable to embrace the heady chaos and cheap thrills of Times Square, as it had not been a decade earlier, when Cityscape would have enclosed 42nd Street in glass. Pop culture, which is to say commercial culture, was lapping at the ramparts of high culture. The controversial “High and Low” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, held in 1990, questioned the hierarchical distinction between high and low art. Herbert Muschamp, who replaced Paul Goldberger as
The New York Times
’s architecture critic in 1992, brought a very new voice to the newspaper of record. In an article in the summer of 1992, Muschamp described Times Square as a pop icon where “the Popular and the Cultural converge, where crowds cross paths with icons: pop songs, pop drinks, chorus lines, headlines, hemlines, posters, cartoons, paperbacks, magazine covers, billboards, blue jeans, lipsticks, double features.”

Goldberger had, after some hesitation, taken the traditional preservationist view that tall buildings violated the historic scale of Times Square; but Muschamp embraced the office tower as the perfect symbol for a new Times Square devoted to the production of pop culture: “Why not,” he deadpanned, “an intersection where Sony, Disney, ABC and Spike Lee Enterprises square off against one another from King Kong towers?” Muschamp elicited suggestions for a new Times Square from four architects and designers, who proposed among other things a twenty-four-hour glass-walled health club where pedestrians could gape at hard and curving bodies, or a twenty-four-hour “News Café” set in the Times Tower in which passersby would be invited to “tell us your dream” by means of a video monitor connected to a screen mounted atop the building.

Here was a new, frankly celebratory urban aesthetic, reveling in the goofy contradictions of pop culture and, perhaps even more important, prepared to accept the giant corporations that pumped it out. The phrase “a corporate Times Square” was no longer an automatic term of opprobrium; what mattered was the difference between a vital and a moribund corporate Times Square. A new atmosphere had arrived; Rebecca Robertson was one of the few public officials who got it. “The idea of populism had changed,” she says. “You couldn’t bring back the carny populism of the thirties”—Hubert’s and Lindy’s and shooting galleries. “What populism means now is corporate culture, whether you like it or not. Our idea of populism was whatever it is people would choose for entertainment in their spare time; it required that we be nonjudgmental.” Once you choose to be nonjudgmental in matters of taste, you will eventually find common ground with the equally nonjudgmental purveyors of mass culture.

From a pragmatic point of view, the immediate question was how to uncouple the fate of 42nd Street from that of the office towers. Robertson and other officials reached an agreement with George Klein to develop an interim plan that would allow a new 42nd Street to rise even as the developer waited for the market to return. The idea had the virtue of mollifying the developer, and the development community in general, for whatever went up could always be dismantled when the time came. Robertson asked the architect Robert Stern to draw up the interim plan; he had the insight, or good fortune, to ask the designer Tibor Kalman to coauthor the plan. They made, to put it mildly, an odd pair. Stern was in many ways a backward-looking figure, a historian of architecture who was sometimes derided for designing charming homes that simulated a genteel past for the benefit of the newly rich—the Ralph Lauren of architecture. Kalman, on the other hand, was arguably the most brilliantly inventive and free-spirited designer of his generation—a prankster and a provocateur, a sixties radical and eighties entrepreneur who managed to alchemize his sense of the absurd into a thriving practice. Kalman’s designs featured self-referential jokes, incongruous objects, fractured lettering, and scrambled logic; he famously designed a watch face with the numbers out of sequence. The twenty-four-hour News Café and its dreamcast had also been his idea. Kalman (who died, aged fifty, in 1999) loved disorder as much as Stern loved order. The two men argued constantly. “He was always afraid I would turn it into mainstream Disneyland,” says Stern, “and I was afraid he would turn it into something in outer space.”

Stern did, in fact, sit on the board of Disney and had designed a house for its chairman, Michael Eisner. But he was also a former student of Robert Venturi’s at Yale, and he had absorbed Venturi’s reaction against the high modern aesthetic into his own form of postmodernism, more playful than Johnson’s. He was, as well, a New York kid who had fond memories of the era of carny populism in Times Square. Stern would resist what he called “the Rockefeller Center impulse.” Though he shared none of Kalman’s subversive impulses, Stern, like Robertson, felt that you could use pop culture and kitsch to trace a path back to the old 42nd Street without losing yourself in nostalgia.

The interim plan, evocatively called
42nd Street Now!
and released in September 1993, was a Kalmanesque manifesto as much as it was a planning document. Probably it was the first document of any kind in the history of Times Square redevelopment that excited urbanists more than it did real estate developers. Stern and Kalman evoked the “thrillingly unpredictable daily drama” of the block’s street life in its age of glory, as well as its shameless commercialism: “42nd Street celebrated, as perhaps no other street or neighborhood did, the individual entrepreneur, whose brash confidence and on-the-money commercial instincts went such a long way towards defining the city’s energy and outlook, at once wildly optimistic and coolly bottom line.” The idea that there need be no contradiction between the drama of the streets and the ring of the cash register, between “authenticity” and the marketplace, was itself something of a revelation, at least in the debate over the future of 42nd Street. Indeed, the document pointedly, if hyperbolically, observed that “top quality office buildings have always been part of the 42nd Street Project Area, and will continue to be a major part of the long-term redevelopment.” Even office towers need not be incompatible with a vibrant street life. (And by this time, the original Johnson/Burgee design was history.)

A brief on behalf of a theory about a place,
42nd Street Now!
was more a rhetorical document than a planning one. “The new 42nd Street will be an enhanced version of itself,” Stern and Kalman wrote, “not a gentrified theme park or festival market.” But there was a problem. How can a plan foster a spirit whose essence is spontaneity? How can you intentionally recreate a thing never created by intention in the first place? Martin Gottlieb of the
Times
had asked the same question ten years earlier, without offering an answer. Stern and Kalman argued that the answer lay in 42nd Street’s peculiar archaeology. “New had been heaped on old,” they wrote, “so that the street now has a richly layered, collaged look almost unique in the world’s great entertainment places.” Forty-second Street was “a collage awaiting yet another layer.” They proposed to add, not subtract; and what they would add, essentially, was a gaudy layer of lights and signs and shiny new outer surfaces. They could not specify how these would be added without destroying the spontaneity they hoped to spark; indeed,
42nd Street Now!
presented itself as “an unplan”—a very Kalmanesque word—whose goal was to provoke wild diversity by prohibiting “any uniform or coordinated system.”

Stern and Kalman’s premise was that if you gave 42nd Street a new skin to wriggle into, the old spirit would eventually return on its own. The plan included three “conceptual drawings” of 42nd Street sites decked out in glowing signage, but these are only suggestions (though the northeast corner of 42nd and Eighth now looks very much as Kalman and Stern imagined it). Stripped to its essentials,
42nd Street Now!
was a mildly redacted version of the 1987 Times Square guidelines. The plan mandated minimal levels of signage and lighting up and down the street, transparent façades, long hours of operation, sidewalk amenities, and the like. Like the earlier guidelines, it largely left the question of usage—of what would actually happen on the street—up to the tenants themselves.

It was a bold idea, though the language may have been more brilliant than the idea. Absent the polemics, the design itself was just a little bit . . . Disneyesque. The conceptual drawing for the eastern end of 42nd Street, with a huge globe plastered with TV screens and a giant can of Diet Coke launched halfway out of a billboard and a wrapped gift box on a rooftop, looked like a delirious version of Disneyland. There was no Ferris wheel, but one wouldn’t have been out of place. Wasn’t this, then, old orange juice in new cartons? The answer was “Not quite.” The City at 42nd Street had offered a semisealed and altogether controlled environment, an unspontaneous monument to urban spontaneity. The
42nd Street
Now!
plan offered a design matrix, a set of materials and dimensions and aesthetic principles from which infinite possibilities could spring. And the plan was oriented to the street—to the pedestrian—rather than to the interior; it embraced the daily drama. Nevertheless, the new willingness to explore pop culture, with whatever level of irony or camp, meant that “Disneyesque” was not the epithet it had been in 1980. The Technicolor world of the urban theme park no longer inspired the horror it had before.

A public that had long since given up hope for the block greeted
42nd
Street Now!
excitedly. (Muschamp called it a “wonderful plan,” which would “encourage the dormant genius of the place to shine.”) But the Cooper & Eckstut guidelines had been admirable, too, and they had been brushed aside when they proved inconvenient (though the design principles for Times Square had been strictly applied). George Klein was just as eager as Rebecca Robertson to see glimmers of life on 42nd Street, and Prudential Insurance, which was financing the office development, had agreed to pay $20 million to bring the interim plan to life. But the plan applied to Klein’s five sites as well as to the rest of the block; and Klein was still dreaming of Rockefeller Center. “If you’re tearing an area down because of tawdriness,” he asks plaintively, “why are you putting the tawdriness back in?” Klein argued, correctly, that the welter of signs and the flashing lights were native to Times Square, but not to 42nd Street; Stern and Kalman had, at the very least, stretched a point. But Klein was in a much weaker position than he had been in 1984: Prudential had already paid out well over $200 million for condemnation and improvements. “We had so much money in this already that we really didn’t have much of a choice,” as he says. And Robertson would not back down. So this time, when the real estate dynamic came up against public values—or at least against a publicly determined sense of the common good—it was the latter that won.