The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square

by James Traub

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 Str
eet 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.”

  Nor was that all. It had become plain that the cost of buying the condemned property and of building the attraction would greatly exceed the revenues from corporate sponsorships and paying customers. So Cityscape underwent another transformation. What had begun as a modest attempt to revitalize a block had expanded into a theme park; now the theme park expanded yet again, into a giant real estate venture. The organization’s financial advisers concluded that Cityscape, now known by the more corporate-sounding title “The City at 42nd Street,” would have to include substantial office development and then plug the revenue gap with rental payments. Paul Reichmann, head of the Canadian development firm Olympia & York, agreed to build office towers on three parcels at the crossroads of Seventh Avenue and Broadway; in order to make the deal more attractive, the City at 42nd Street agreed to transfer the unused “air rights” available in the middle of the block to the three parcels, thus allowing the developer to build a much larger structure than zoning regulations would otherwise have permitted. Rockefeller Center, Inc., and Harry Helmsley, one of the city’s biggest real estate operators, also agreed to construct a “fashion mart,” which would run from 40th Street to 42nd and would take up an additional 2.3 million square feet. Since the attraction itself amounted to slightly over 500,000 square feet (and the restaurants and retail downstairs occupied an approximately equal space), the enormous tail of real estate would now be wagging the rather modest dog of entertainment. The City at 42nd Street was now a blockbuster project that would transform the street almost as drastically as Parker’s convention center would have done.

  Mayor Koch had never actually pronounced a death sentence on the City at 42nd Street; and as the project grew into a juggernaut involving many of New York’s leading foundations, financial institutions, and real estate developers, it seemed that the resurrection of 42nd Street was finally at hand. But it wasn’t. In May 1980, the Koch administration finally rejected the plan. At the press conference at which he administered the coup de grâce, Koch dispensed with orange juice and seltzer in order to discuss the city’s role in development. “We aren’t going to let one group get the inside track,” he said, “no matter how good they are.” For all its avowals of public-spiritedness, the City at 42nd Street was a private project; in New York, with its tradition of strong government, accepting private control over so symbolically fraught a piece of property would have been an abdication of municipal authorit
y.

  And yet the Disneyland factor was never far from Koch’s mind. These many years later, the former mayor vividly recalls his trip to the Ford Foundation to see the model. Koch was seventy-seven years old at the time of this recent conversation, perfectly bald, potbellied and suspendered, but he was every bit as vociferous, as theatrically hyperbolic, as he had been as mayor. “Their exhibit included a Ferris wheel on Forty-second Street!” he cried—freshly amazed, across the gulf of decades, at the sheer gall. “It was shit, to put it bluntly. I don’t pretend to be a city planner, but I know dross from gold. So I said, ‘We’re not going to do this.’” Unlike the Establishment figures who sponsored the City at 42nd Street, Koch viewed himself, and was widely accepted as, a son of the sidewalks, the First Cabdriver of a garrulous, wisecracking town. He was the steward not only of the city’s interest but of its zeitgeist. To him, the Ferris wheel symbolized the intrusion of an alien sensibility. Koch would not, on the other hand, find the corporate identity that was about to descend on 42nd Street out of keeping with the street’s turbulent traditions.

  MAYOR KOCH’S DECISION to scotch the City at 42nd Street placed his administration under an obligation it could not afford to ignore. The defunct project, whatever its flaws, had given force to the idea that 42nd Street’s degraded state was not an inevitable evolutionary outcome but a condition that could be changed; city officials could no longer satisfy themselves with the usual halfhearted efforts to improve police tactics. A new stage arrived in the process of redevelopment: now it would be public actors, rather than private ones, who devised a destiny for 42nd Street. But they would be reluctant actors. The city was only just emerging from a frightening brush with bankruptcy. And the very idea of heroic, large-scale development had been virtually discredited with the demise of Robert Moses, a legendary figure who, as commissioner of the city’s parks and head of various development agencies, had destroyed neighborhoods in order to build highways and commercial developments, though he was also very much responsible for the city’s system of parks and public beaches. The only major development project the city had promoted in recent years was an underground highway along the Hudson River, known as Westway, which had been locked in bitter debate and litigation since 1972.