by James Traub
In June 1980, only weeks after Koch consigned the City at 42nd Street to the scrap heap, city and state officials signed a memorandum of understanding to work jointly on revitalizing the block. By February of the following year, officials had produced a “discussion document” to be circulated among developers, urban experts, and the press; and in June the group, now constituted as the 42nd Street Development Project, published the General Project Plan, which laid out the scheme’s rationale and goals: “The principal object of the project is to eliminate the blight and physical decay that prevails in the Project Area.” The city had, of course, been trying to eliminate blight along 42nd Street for years without success; the premise of the new plan, like that of the City at 42nd Street, was that piecemeal efforts at reform or enforcement were bound to disappear into the block’s thriving and dysfunctional economy. The project’s environmental impact statement (which was not issued until 1984) confirmed the view advanced in the Bright Light study: “The continuation of the existing uses in the project area will undoubtedly perpetuate the loitering and criminal activity on 42nd Street. . . . Unless and until this perception of ‘turf’ is changed through the introduction of new uses and new users, crime and illegal activities associated with loitering will continue.”
The elimination of blight was a means—but to what end? After an earlier public relations debacle in which the city had agreed to raze two historic theaters in order to make way for a new hotel in Times Square, theater preservation had become a nonnegotiable issue; and so city and state officials vowed to protect and revitalize the New Amsterdam, the Lyric, the Apollo, and the other great 42nd Street theaters, now being used to show pornographic or Grade Z movies. The city also promised to make improvements to subway stations and other public amenities in a way that would “preserve the unique ambience of Times Square.” But most of all, the plan provided for large new office buildings. The General Project Plan foresaw four office towers at the eastern end of the project, which was one more than the City at 42nd Street had proposed. (The plan also adopted from its predecessor the idea of building a merchandise mart, where wholesale goods are sold to retailers, and a hotel, at the western end of the block.) As in that proposal, air rights would be transferred from midblock to permit developers to construct extra-large—indeed, gigantic—towers. Current zoning laws permitted structures on the four parcels to rise as high as 280 to 370 feet; with the additional air rights, they could range from 365 to 705 feet. The tallest of the buildings, at the northeast corner of 42nd and Broadway, would be one of the most massive office buildings constructed in New York in many years. Why were such big buildings necessary? To make everything else possible. Developers would not build in Times Square without large-scale inducements; and without revenues from development, the planning documents explained, it would be impossible to finance improvements or to preserve the theaters. In effect, 42nd Street’s unique character had to be annihilated in order to be preserved.
Why would the construction of office buildings make it possible to improve the subways and preserve the theaters? Because it was the developer, not the city, who would pay for the renovation of 42nd Street. The developer who won the right to build the office towers would be expected to pay for improvements to subways and the street, for private property that public authorities would seize in the condemnation process, and to some extent for the preservation of the theaters. Had the city chosen to pay those costs itself—as it had in other projects, such as the recent Battery Park City in lower Manhattan—it could more readily have dictated terms to developers. But the Koch administration made the fateful decision to sacrifice a large measure of public control in exchange for private investment. In doing so, it also surrendered pieces of the sky, and of the urban landscape: intangible assets that seemed, at least to city planners, far easier to part with than money. And so the Koch administration preserved public control of the project by surrendering precious public assets.
Commercial development was not only a means to some other good on 42nd Street, but an end in itself. The city had been trying since the 1960s to shift development westward; by the late 1970s, the west side of midtown retained the low scale it had had for generations, while the east side was choking on office buildings. As Herbert Sturz, who was then the city’s planning commissioner, recalls, “You had the AT & T Building and the IBM Building going up on Madison Avenue; you had high-rises in midblock. It was bringing midtown to a halt. We very much wanted to shift development to the West Side.” And so, at virtually the same time that the 42nd Street project was announced, the city also began the process of developing new zoning regulations. The new rules, announced in 1982, eliminated many of the bonuses that had made it possible to build colossi like the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, though that by itself would not have accomplished the city’s goals; parts of the West Side were also “up-zoned,” which is to say that developers would be permitted to construct larger buildings, and would pay far lower taxes on them. The 42nd Street Development Project, like the new zoning rules, was designed to stimulate commercial construction.
So the new project was shaped by the political imperative of inducing private actors to pay for public goods, and by the real estate imperative of fostering the creation of a new business district. Whatever happened to “seltzer”? How, that is, could you “preserve the unique ambience of Times Square”—that precious essence which Mayor Koch had vowed to preserve—if you were erecting a forest of massive high-rises? The answer was that you couldn’t, since that ambience was plainly connected to Times Square’s scale. The city’s second-best answer was to establish design guidelines that would accommodate these conflicting goals as far as possible. Public officials assigned this task to the architectural firm of Cooper & Eckstut, which had created the specifications for the well-regarded Battery Park City development. The highly detailed guidelines required that the buildings in midblock retain their low scale and continue to be festooned with signs and light. But the key requirements applied to the office buildings, which constituted the great threat to Times Square’s traditional character. They were to have a highly reflective skin of glass or metal to distinguish themselves from the old masonry structures of 42nd Street; the skin would stop fifteen feet or so above ground level in order to create a sense of pedestrian scale for shops. Lower elevations would feature “prominent signage and dramatic lighting” to keep 42nd Street from looking like just another office district. Storefronts would be 75 to 85 percent glass. The buildings would be sharply set back at the fifth floor to preserve the area’s traditional cornice line, and then set back again at intervals, while “diversity and contrast in the use of materials, colors and finishes” would “prevent a monolithic appearance.” The Times Tower would be preserved as “a focal point for Times Square.” The entire street would be bathed in brilliant white light from 120-foot-high poles.
Most important, the guidelines offered a guarantee of public control. The city was turning over 42nd Street to private owners—or rather, by means of condemnation, transferring it from one set of private owners to another—but doing so only under stringent conditions. The guidelines, in effect, precluded the kind of privatized decision-making represented by the City at 42nd Street. And they stood for the values that the city’s unofficial stewards held dear. William Taylor, a prominent urban scholar and essayist, described the Cooper & Eckstut plan as an homage to the city’s traditions and “a strong statement for public values” rather than those of the marketplace. Paul Goldberger wrote that the design “emerges out of a strong understanding of the nature of the existing city, with strong architectural ties to what is best in what is already there.”
The detailed guidelines meant, at least in theory, that many of the architectural decisions had been made in advance. The city would not be choosing an architect; it would be choosing a developer, who in turn would supply an architect. In September 1981, developers submitted proposals to the 42nd Street Development Project. The following April, planners off
ered “conditional designations” for the twelve sites. The most important, by far, involved the four parcels set aside for office towers, which went to a developer named George Klein. This was a surprising choice, for Klein had far less experience, and cut a far smaller profile in the world of real estate, than virtually all of his competitors. Heir to the Bar-ton candy fortune, Klein had started building just eight years earlier, in Brooklyn; he had erected only two office buildings in Manhattan. He was an outsider in the intensely clannish world of New York real estate, politically conservative and religiously Orthodox in a liberal, Reform culture. Klein was a circumspect, solemn, and eminently respectable character who had decided to make that respectability his calling card. “The best way to break into this world,” he had concluded, “was to get the finest architects and put up the kind of buildings that would attract the best tenant.” In his brief career as a developer he had already worked with I. M. Pei, Edward Larrabee Barnes, and Philip Johnson.
Klein was, in his quiet way, a man of very large aspirations, much larger than those of the old-line families whose status he hoped to share. Klein wanted to change the face of the city—for the better, of course. His very first real estate venture had been an urban renewal project which he felt had spurred the revival of downtown Brooklyn. And in the redevelopment of 42nd Street he had been granted, he felt, “the opportunity to do something on a grand scale.” Klein would never have accepted the distinction between the real estate dynamic and “public values”; he saw Times Square as a blighted area which, like downtown Brooklyn, could be restored to life through development. “Times Square was a real mess,” he recalls. “Children were falling into this den of drugs and crime. It was not a place that was correct for New York to have.” Like Alexander Parker, Klein aspired to erase the old 42nd Street and put a new one in its place. What Times Square should be, and could be, he felt, was something like Rockefeller Center—a tasteful home for large corporations and elegant shops. He even dubbed the project “Times Square Center.”
Klein offered the architectural commission to Philip Johnson, who he felt had “the prestigious image that was important to attract corporate tenants.” At the time, in fact, Johnson had a reputation among corporate clients that very few American architects, if any, have ever enjoyed. The headquarters he had designed for AT&T, half-affectionately known as the Chippendale Building, had become the emblematic postmodern structure and had landed him on the cover of Time magazine. And like Klein, Johnson was unambiguous about the virtues of erasure. As a young man in prewar New York, he had loved the Astor Hotel. But the Astor was gone, and now Johnson, like Klein, thought of Times Square as a place to avoid. He thought of it, really, as no place at all; he and his partner, John Burgee, felt that their role was to impart a sense of place to an urban wilderness. Times Square Center would be not merely an array of buildings but, like Rockefeller Center, a place in and of itself, an urban settlement made of office towers.
In late 1983, Johnson and Burgee unveiled their design for a suite of four buildings, varying in height and bulk but identically designed in glass with a sheath or screen of light pink granite. The buildings were topped by glass mansard roofs with iron finials—like the nearby Knickerbocker Building, Johnson pointed out, though they also bore a strong resemblance to a building he had just finished in San Francisco. The complex was a true center not only aesthetically but physically, with individual buildings linked to one another and the subway by underground passageways. Corporate tenants, like theatergoers in the City at 42nd Street plan, could be spared the indignity of the street. And there was no sign of the Times Tower, which for eighty years had been the pivot around which Times Square rotated. Bedizened with signs, the Times Tower had become an embarrassment, a ludicrous street person of a building. As Klein says, “Rockefeller Center had a skating rink with a tree as the center. Here was a building with signs all over it. What statement did that make?” Johnson planned to substitute a fountain with a laser light show. He had, all in all, created precisely the image for Times Square that George Klein had craved.
In recent years Johnson had enjoyed, at worst, an equivocal reputation among architecture critics; the Chippendale Building had been praised as lavishly as it had been mocked. But when the critics saw Times Square Center, they came down on him like a ton of bricks. The Times’s Ada Louise Huxtable, a qualified fan in years past, derided the proposal as “enormous pop-up buildings with fancy hats.” The New Yorker’s Brendan Gill described the structures as “great gray ghosts of buildings, shutting out the sun and turning Times Square into the bottom of a well.” Critics in both the popular and the professional media lamented the massiveness, dullness, homogeneity, and overwhelming corporateness of the proposed buildings; only Paul Goldberger suggested that “they could cut a sharp and lively profile on the skyline,” though he added that “it is difficult not to be concerned” by their bulk. And the idea of demolishing the Times Tower provoked an additional bout of horror.
What had happened? Had public tastes changed while Philip Johnson was sketching out his granite cliffs? This is the view of Paul Travis, who as vice president of the city’s Public Development Corporation played a major role in implementing the project. “Johnson’s view,” Travis explains, “was that historically Times Square had these sober buildings, like the Paramount Building, along the avenues, and that’s what he was trying to create. What he missed was that everyone’s view about what Times Square was was beginning to change. We decided which Times Square we wanted to create. And the mythical moment we wanted was V-E Day, with the honky-tonk and the crowds.” But it is also true that Johnson and Burgee themselves crystallized this new view of Times Square. Though many New Yorkers had spent years thinking of 42nd Street as George Klein did, as a nightmare to be banished, the idea of four colossal slabs towering over the street reminded them of what that street was, or rather, meant. You could put up anything you wanted on Sixth Avenue, or Third Avenue, and the worst it could be was ugly, because these corporate thoroughfares had no past to violate and no soul to corrupt. Even on Broadway and 45th Street, where a hideous new Marriott Marquis was rising, the imperative of development outweighed matters of aesthetics and preservation. But 42nd Street was different; it was a tangible repository of the vivid, racy culture that had been blotted out by the abstract world of the office tower. The Johnson/Burgee buildings felt like an act of profanation, and a terrible challenge.
The Johnson/Burgee plan not only contradicted a collective sense of Times Square but also flagrantly ignored the guidelines. The buildings rose straight up from the ground, with no setbacks at the fifth-floor level to provide an illusion of low scale; they included neither signs nor lights, save for formal lanterns to play across their own grandiose surfaces; and their skin consisted principally of granite, rather than metal or glass. The guidelines were meant to be binding, but Klein understood that they were, in fact, negotiable. Richard Kahan, then head of the Urban Development Corporation, a state body that had the lead role in the redevelopment process, recalls, “George Klein came to me and said, ‘What am I supposed to do with these guidelines?’ And I said, ‘You know exactly what you’ll do. As soon as I’m gone, you and Herb Sturz will throw them in the garbage.’” Though self-serving, this explanation seems to be more or less true. Klein argued that setbacks would create upper floors too small to rent to the kind of corporate tenants the project was designed to attract; and the city officials who were managing the project accepted his claim. They also agreed to waive the requirements for signage and lighting, which Klein insisted prospective tenants would consider vulgar.
Of course, it was the guidelines that had reassured architecture critics and civic groups that the project would be carried out according to public values rather than the dictates of the marketplace. But it was now plain that if public authorities had to choose between the real estate imperative of fostering orderly growth by shifting development to the West Side, and the civic imperative of creating a Times Square with
which New Yorkers could identify, growth would trump aesthetics and culture. At the press conference where the Johnson/Burgee plans were unveiled, a reporter asked Mayor Koch why the buildings so blatantly violated the guidelines his own administration had established, and he snapped, “I, for one, have never felt it necessary to explain why we improve something.” What was there to explain? The buildings were the answer. As Vincent Tese, who succeeded Kahan as head of the UDC, later put it, “The buildings may be big and ugly, but the numbers work.”
As the plan moved closer to approval by the Board of Estimate, a body that consisted of the presidents of the five boroughs and three other leading officials and that governed all land-use decisions, journalists, academics, urban experts, and lovers of the city began to leap to the defense of this embattled piece of turf. Was the Deuce really so very blighted that it needed so drastic an overhaul? Was it dead, or just somewhat ill? New York Times reporter Martin Gottlieb wandered around the block and found no shortage of families, most of them black or Hispanic, enjoying themselves at inexpensive restaurants and movies. “If you come here looking for trouble, most likely you’ll find it,” said one young man. “But if you look for a good time, you’ll find that, too.” Gottlieb quoted William Kornblum, the City University professor who had headed the Bright Light study as saying, “People go there for the same reason they did when we were kids. You come in from another borough or from uptown looking for some fun. You grab a burger and you go to a movie.” This was, of course, the same street where, according to The Times, bored teenagers had chased a man to his death on the subway tracks a few years earlier; but now it was seen in a different light.