In 1991, David Dinkins, the only African-American ever elected mayor of New York, drew a line at Columbus Circle. Early that June, his administration had cleared a homeless encampment out of Tompkins Square Park on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Five days later, a homeless man killed a former Radio City Rockette who was walking her dogs on Sixty-Ninth Street near Central Park, stabbing her repeatedly and leaving an eleven-inch butcher knife in her back as he fled into the park, where he was apprehended.
Twelve days after that, a public ceremony was held in Columbus Circle celebrating its restoration. Several foundations had raised funds to refurbish the statue of the explorer and the fences that surrounded him, but demonstrators wanted to know why money was being spent on a statue instead of the needy, some of whom were right nearby, watching, smoking, and selling frayed old books off the same blankets they slept beneath at night, tucked into the arches and doorways of the semiderelict buildings around the circle. Unfortunately for those homeless souls, the ceremony rededicating the ninety-eight-year-old monument cast a harsh light on their encampment, and over the next few nights, the occupants were encouraged to leave. Those who refused the carrot of housing in shelters finally met the stick of police in riot gear, who forcibly removed those who remained. “They were symbols of a city out of control,” a deputy mayor told reporters, echoing the sentiments of Robert Moses some forty years earlier.
World War II was still raging when Mutual Life, which had taken over William Randolph Hearst’s property on the north end of the circle seven months before Pearl Harbor, sold it to two investor-developers. In 1946, it changed hands again, and the new owner, head of a clothing-store chain, announced plans for a twenty-five-story tower. Like Hearst, though, he planned in vain, and the American Circle building, with its Coca-Cola weather sign (vintage 1938), remained in place. After the war, Columbus Circle mostly served as an outdoor advertising amphitheater until Madison Square Garden Corporation announced that it would move to the circle and erect a new arena spanning two full city blocks. The city’s coordinator of postwar planning, Moses, who’d come to see himself as a latter-day Roman emperor, decided to call it the Coliseum. But by 1951, the Garden was out, and the federal government was in, thanks to its new urban renewal legislation.
The Coliseum was to be the first act in Moses’s remaking of the West Side. To qualify for those federal funds, Moses added two rental apartment buildings on Columbus Avenue to his plans. To build it all, he would have to clear out the five hundred families in the tenements there, as well as neighboring stores, a gas station, a clubhouse, the NBC theater, and a twenty-four-story commercial building, and condemn and demolish them. Two-plus years later, a wrecking crew moved in to begin demolition.I By spring 1954, when a groundbreaking ceremony was held, four more buildings were coming down, and Moses had discarded the idea of a semicircular façade on the building, made it rectangular, and added a large office tower to his Coliseum, now a convention center.
Hyman Burt Mack, co-owner of Wreckers & Excavators, Inc., carried out the demolition of a bank building north of Fifty-Ninth Street and the theater to the south. As teenagers, his sons, Earle and Bill, both visited the demolition site, where Moses was in such a hurry to start building that Mack was offered a bonus of about $50,000 if he finished the job ahead of schedule, but worried he’d have to pay a penalty if he was late. Bill Mack recalls his father telling him, “Son, this will be a good neighborhood one day.” Looking around, Bill wasn’t so sure. But he was never allowed to forget the site after his father got the job done and collected his bonus. “He talked about beating Moses for the rest of his life,” says Mack. And almost fifty years later, the thirteen-year-old who’d watched his father clear the site would play a central role in making his father’s prediction come true.
The new twenty-story tower attached to the Coliseum opened in April 1956. A month later, the Coliseum itself opened with simultaneous philately, auto, and photo shows. It was said to be the largest and most technologically advanced exhibition hall in the world, but it was also one of the dullest, with a glazed tan-brick façade decorated only with a small marquee and four medallions by the sculptor Paul Manship representing the seals of the United States, New York State, New York City, and the building’s official owner, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which Moses ran and used as the vehicle for his civic-improvement schemes. Ground was broken that same week for the two apartment buildings that were the legal, if secondary, purpose of the urban renewal project.
In 1956, George Huntington Hartford bought the old five-story building on the tiny, odd-shaped lot on the south end of the circle for $1 million. One of the heirs to the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (better known as A&P) supermarket fortune, Hartford had about $500 million. An odd, directionless duck, he would go on to produce plays and films, buy a theater, develop Paradise Island in the Bahamas, and open at various times a nightclub, a magazine, a parking garage, a modeling agency, and an institute to study handwriting before spending his last years and the remains of his fortune on a debilitating drug habit. But he is arguably best remembered for the building he constructed for another $1.5 million on that irregular parcel.
Hartford abhorred modern art and thought it “thoroughly degenerate,” but nonetheless called his building the Gallery of Modern Art and, in 1959, filed Edward Durell Stone’s design for it with the city. Columbus Circle had no architectural landmarks aside from its City Beautiful Movement monuments, the Columbus column, and Hearst’s Maine memorial. Hartford’s museum would become an antilandmark, an object of derision for the next half century.
Clad in white Vermont marble with few windows, Hartford’s building was made somewhat memorable by the lollipop-shaped colonnade at its base and arches forming loggia at the top of the sheath. In a memorable takedown in the New York Times, critic Ada Louise Huxtable dismissed it as a “little seraglio . . . suggestive of houris . . . a provocatively misplaced pleasure pavilion transplanted from some Shalimar garden to a Manhattan traffic island.” Hartford’s gallery would soon be shut down and the building taken over by Fairleigh Dickinson University, which used it for exhibits and lectures.
Despite its failure to fit in, Hartford’s building (and a dramatic new fountain surrounding Columbus on his column, donated to the city in 1965 by the publisher-philanthropist George Delacorte) contributed to the sense that, at last, something might be happening on Columbus Circle. With Lincoln Center’s buildings opening a few blocks to the north, it looked like a turning point for the entire district. Once again, speculation was that a skyscraper would finally rise at the north end of the circle, and indeed, a forty-four-story office building was announced in 1967. It would be named for its principal tenant, Gulf & Western, a conglomerate that owned Paramount Pictures, but also more prosaic zinc-mining, sugar-refining, tomato-growing, cigar-making, and auto-parts-distributing concerns. The white marble and aluminum Gulf & Western Building tried to blend in with the bland, boxy Coliseum and Durell Stone’s seraglio, but became the finishing touch on what would be remembered without fondness as an architectural bull’s-eye in the center of Manhattan.
Yet as it rose, the Gulf & Western tower was hailed as a symbol of the circle’s renaissance; it had inspired nearby property owners to upgrade buildings, such as 1860 Broadway, the seventeen-story office tower on the northeast corner of Sixty-First Street, with automobile showrooms in its base. It was then owned by Philip Lipton, who’d come to America from the Jewish ghetto of eastern Europe in 1897 at age fourteen. “He was the first off the boat,” his daughter Barbara Agar says of the eager, self-educated teenager, who went into the underwear and uniform business and began buying stock on margin after the 1929 stock market crash. He made a fortune and became a financier and philanthropist.
Twelve years after buying 1860 Broadway, Lipton invested $100,000 to renovate the building. A pleasure-boat company leased all three of its storefronts on Broadway and offices above as a showroom because the Coliseum, the site of an annual
boat show, made the location desirable. Other new tenants included a concert promoter; the local public television station, Channel 13; Arthur Penn, the film director; and Avis rent-a-car.
The Gulf & Western Building opened in April 1970, and for the second time in two years, a newspaper proclaimed a local renaissance, noting that land prices had risen from about $35 per square foot to $225 in the eight years since the first Lincoln Center theater had opened. Alas, both the Gulf & Western Building and the company that owned it were on shaky ground. Realty Equities, the owner, lost millions in the three years following the building’s opening; its stock was delisted and it pled guilty to second-degree grand larceny for diverting money from government-subsidized projects it controlled to pay its parent company’s debts. Around the same time, it became generally known that the tower, one of Realty’s best assets, had a serious issue itself: because its steel frame was flexible and its glass exterior lightweight, it would twist and sway noticeably in high winds, causing workers on its higher floors to complain and its walls to crack. Guests invited to watch films in Paramount’s sky-high screening room worried that they might find themselves stuck in a real, as opposed to a cinematic, disaster.
In truth, there was discomfort but no immediate danger in the tower’s movement, and Gulf & Western’s management was unconcerned. Indeed, in 1976, it bought Hartford’s museum building, which Fairleigh Dickinson had turned over to its mortgage lender. Afraid it would be demolished or otherwise defaced, Gulf & Western gave it to New York City as a gift (along with a promise of $900,000 over four years to maintain it) to ensure it remained part of the view out its tower. Office-space lessees apparently liked it far more than contemporary architecture critics. The city eventually installed its Department of Cultural Affairs in the building. At almost the same time, the Gulf & Western tower itself was sold to an investment company owned by an insurance billionaire, John D. MacArthur, a cousin of the World War II general Douglas B. MacArthur’s. The building remained the property of one of his companies until it was sold to a Boston-based real estate group five years later.
Why buy a building considered ugly and unsafe? Likely, the purchasers suspected that the Coliseum’s days were numbered. Downtown, the Jacob Javits Convention Center was under construction, and once it opened it would, it was assumed, take much of the trade-show business away from the Coliseum. So it was that in 1984, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which had since subsumed Moses’s Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, began to actively consider the future of its aging and ugly Columbus Circle exhibition hall—and whether funds from its sale might finance desperately needed improvements to mass transit in the city, including the chaotic subway station under the circle, where three lines converged to form one of the busiest transfer points in the system.
A contest to gain control of the site attracted bids from fifteen developers. Boston Properties, headed by Mortimer B. Zuckerman and Edward H. Linde, won. One bidder offered $22 million more than they did, but Zuckerman had a winning card up his sleeve: a partnership with Salomon Brothers, the Wall Street investment bank, which had committed to be the anchor tenant and agreed to give up any tax benefits from the deal. So Boston’s bid of $455 million for the four acres—on which it proposed to build two towers with offices, condominium apartments, a hotel, and stores—prevailed.
Zuckerman made it clear that he hoped to sell his apartments for high prices—and at the announcement, New York’s mayor then, Ed Koch, had his back. “Hundreds of millions of dollars ultimately will come to the city of New York,” Koch said, not just through the sale of the land, but also from taxes and the further development of the neighborhood, which was sure to follow. An immediate rise in property values after the Coliseum deal was announced seemed to portend a windfall for all concerned.
Many quickly voiced opposition to Zuckerman and Linde’s plan and focused on the design by Moshe Safdie, who’d gained prominence as the master planner of the Montreal World’s Fair Expo 67. Zuckerman, a naturalized American, had been born in Canada, attended Wharton and Harvard Law School, and taught urban planning for nine years before joining the Boston development company where he met Linde. In the years immediately preceding their bid for the Coliseum site, Zuckerman had expanded into journalism, buying first the Boston-based magazine Atlantic, then U.S.News & World Report.
Safdie’s plan was fleshed out in mid-1986. He proposed two knifelike pink-granite towers, one sixty-nine stories tall (making it the sixth-tallest building in Manhattan), the other fifty-nine, with slanted roofs, chevronlike structural beams, and multiple diagonal setbacks, rising from a curving shopping arcade at the base, echoing the curve of Columbus Circle. It was too big, too tall, too dense, critics immediately howled. Despite a notch between the towers that would allow a sliver view of the western sky from Fifty-Ninth Street, they charged that the project’s bulk—2.7 million square feet—would reduce the circle to insignificance, cast long afternoon shadows across Central Park, and add to traffic and pollution. And it was all the Koch administration’s and the MTA’s fault, since their stated priority, getting the highest-possible price for the land, had made it financially necessary to erect something gargantuan there. Not only that, one of Koch’s chief deputies had intimate ties to Salomon Brothers, and Boston Properties had hired a former director of planning at the MTA as the project manager and liaison with the agency and the city. To the project’s opponents, the concern was clear: Was the fix in?
Nonetheless, as long as interest rates stayed low and apartment sales chugged along, as they did early in 1987, the wind was at Zuckerman and Linde’s back. Indeed, demand for the larger apartments that the Zeckendorfs had pioneered kept rising, increasing the chance that Boston Properties would make back its bet of nearly a half billion dollars on the site. Concerned nonetheless, Salomon Brothers threatened to withdraw from the project unless it was approved essentially as it was (Boston had made a half dozen design changes during the approval process) by the city’s then-all-powerful Board of Estimate. And so it was.
In summer 1987, the Municipal Art Society, the city’s Parks Council, and several community groups sued the MTA and the city to block the project and began recruiting celebrity opponents—an influential mélange ranging from Jacqueline Onassis (who called the building monstrous) and Norman Lear to Henry Kissinger, and even I. M. Pei—in an effort to influence public opinion. City officials derided them as wealthy, clueless elitists unconcerned about the mass transit system, which was to benefit from what had been named Columbus Centre. Zuckerman, who’d already contracted to buy granite for the building, tried to be diplomatic, praising the protesters’ values. “But there is another value called the democratic process,” he told the Wall Street Journal. And to New York magazine, he added the blunt reminder that his Columbus Centre would “replace dead space.”
In that same story, New York’s John Taylor pointed out that the southwest corner of the park “lacks the features, such as the zoo and the skating rink—not to mention the handsomely designed Grand Army Plaza—that draw people to the southeast corner. And Columbus Circle is a frantic, intimidating place. . . . Prostitutes have loitered at the corner of Broadway and 60th Street. Purse and chain snatchings are commonplace. And drug dealers lounge insolently in front of the Maine Monument.” In other words, it was a typical public space in late-eighties Manhattan. The Koch administration’s stance was also unsurprising. “Like most of its predecessors,” Taylor wrote, the administration “likes big construction projects. They mean lasting memorials to the public servants that bring them to life. They also mean jobs for union members, patronage power, and campaign contributions from builders immeasurably enriched by the projects.”
Taylor also revealed that Salomon Brothers had an out, the right to withdraw if it couldn’t occupy its new quarters by 1990, and a reason to take it: even before the 1987 stock market crash (which was just a few weeks away), empty space around Wall Street was renting for a third less than Salomon had agreed to pay uptow
n. Zuckerman, still determined, said he intended to start demolition by the end of the year. But he kept taking punches. On October 12, Salomon announced it was cutting its workforce by 12 percent and reassessing its need for office space. So on the fourteenth, as stocks began a vertiginous fall, Zuckerman announced a sudden willingness to compromise and reduce the bulk of the buildings. Then, on the eighteenth, Goldberger of the Times chimed in to declare Safdie’s design “ghastly” on the same morning a protest against it was set for Central Park. More than eight hundred people came, lining up from Columbus Circle to Fifth Avenue, and at 1:30 p.m., all opened umbrellas to symbolize the building’s shadow. The next day the stock market crashed. The situation on Columbus Circle changed overnight.
Less than two months later, Salomon Brothers withdrew from its partnership with Boston Properties. Zuckerman remained unbowed. “It isn’t over till it’s over,” he told the Wall Street Journal. In a sense he was right. There would be seven more years of redesigns, political arguments and lawsuits, and three mayors of New York before he left the field to others. But in retrospect it’s clear that Boston’s Columbus Centre was already a goner.
The luxury-condominium market was still alive and humming, though many builders were forced to the sidelines or out of business entirely in the years after the market crash. A much ballyhooed condo glut never materialized, thanks in large part to the same foreigners who’d kicked off the condo binge in the first place. Bill Zeckendorf never made it back into business, but while Zuckerman and his project twisted in the wind, rather like the Gulf & Western Building, the latter became the unexpected vehicle for Donald Trump’s comeback, and the second high-profile condominium on Central Park West’s Gold Coast. Irwin Chanin’s Century had been converted to condos in 1989 after a seven-year battle between renters and its latest owners.
House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World’s Most Powerful Address Page 13