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

by James Traub

  To the critics, the 42nd Street plan was an urban nightmare they thought had long since been put to rest—“a back-from-the-dead example of the thoroughly discredited bulldozer urban renewal of the 1960s,” in the words of the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable. Thomas Bender, an urban historian at New York University, wrote in The Times that Philip Johnson’s “gargantuan office towers” would turn 42nd Street into the equivalent of downtown Washington—“and everyone knows what kind of frightening urban space that becomes after 5 o’clock.” Brendan Gill, a writer of suave and lapidary essays on architecture at The New Yorker, the president of the Landmarks Conservancy, and one of the city’s great boulevardiers, fought the project at every turn, arguing at a UDC hearing that the “four million square feet of conventionally dreary office space” would kill Times Square, not revitalize it. Martin Gottlieb of the Times raised a series of disturbing questions: “Can a buoyant street life be designed without seeming contrived and lifeless? . . . Would the sense of place of Times Square be ruined by the demolition of the curved Rialto Building at 43rd Street and Broadway, which houses Nathan’s, or of 1 Times Square Plaza?” The answer to the first question was no, and to the second, yes.

  The critics did not, on the other hand, have a convincing answer to the question of how one could eliminate the predatory street culture of 42nd Street without making the large-scale changes that would alter the character of the place beyond recognition. Some of them, like Gill, seemed perfectly happy to accept the predatory street life as the price to be paid for preserving 42nd Street’s roguish charms, whatever they were. There was a much more plausible argument for smaller buildings, or for less grimly uniform ones, than there was for no office buildings at all.

  But it scarcely mattered. This was a public process, but not a plebiscitary one. And the plan had too much political momentum to be stopped in its tracks; both Mayor Koch and the new governor, Mario Cuomo, were committed to it, as was much of the city’s corporate and media elite. The New York Times, which considered 42nd Street its front yard and which had become increasingly disturbed over the years about the deterioration of the neighborhood, strongly backed the project, even going so far as to accept the proposed demolition of the Times Tower. The Board of Estimate hearings, in late October and early November 1984, were an elaborate formality. Public officials praised the project, while local politicians, community board members, scholars, and gadflies grandiloquently denounced it. The Board of Estimate heard one and all, and then voted unanimously to approve the project.

  The argument over 42nd Street redevelopment, like virtually all issues involving planning, was largely a debate among elites. And it was the pro-growth elite, not the preservationist elite, that held the balance of power. But there could be changes at the margin. Neither George Klein nor Philip Johnson wanted to put up buildings the public hated, and the outcry forced them back to the drawing board. Johnson, in particular, seems to have had immediate second thoughts. He told an interviewer in 1994 that he had “never liked the big towers.” Asked why, then, he had designed them, he said, “Because I wanted a reminiscent thing that would look like the Pierre Hotel. I thought it would look natural. You have to have a top on these things. I was totally post-modern at the time, and I wanted to get that going.” This offhanded self-dismissal is vintage Johnson; he is a profoundly ironic character who has long protected himself from his own absurd cultural authority with a bulletproof irreverence. In a recent conversation, Johnson, age ninety-five, raised an amused eyebrow at pictures of his design and murmured, “I must have been out of my mind.”

  Back at the drawing board once again, Johnson produced a new set of buildings—sleeker, more abstract, and less referential. The towers were now made almost wholly of glass, as the guidelines foresaw, and they no longer formed a wholly matched set; but they still lacked setbacks as well as signage. In a final design, executed in 1989, John Burgee, by then separated from Johnson, produced far gaudier buildings, with busy surfaces and with extensive electronic signage incorporated into the structure; these came closest to satisfying critics’ wishes, though the setbacks that had been so integral to the guidelines were now a mere memory. None of these designs, in any case, were destined to be executed.

  It turned out that in the new, post-Moses world of planning, the political process had become vulnerable to outsiders in all sorts of ways. Opponents had learned that even if you couldn’t outvote the party of growth, you could peck it to death through a combination of bad publicity and litigation. And the pecking process over 42nd Street began right away. Indeed, the first lawsuit came even before the project was approved; and then came the deluge—forty-seven suits in all. This was an astounding number even by New York standards. And though they alleged violations of free speech or due process rights, or of antitrust or eminent domain statutes, all but two of them, according to one tabulation, were filed by those with vested interests, principally developers who hadn’t been awarded—or hadn’t even sought—a piece of the action, or property owners who hoped to force public officials to pay them more in exchange for their property. These included such families as the Milsteins and the Dursts, who had been playing the game of real estate for generations, and who understood very well how to get things done, or blocked, in New York.

  The biggest potential loser in the development process was the Brandt family, which operated a near monopoly of the movie theater mini-district on and around 42nd Street. Running eighteen hours a day, the fourteen theaters in the project area controlled by the Brandts and a partner generated enormous amounts of revenue even if most of their seats were empty at the average showing. The Brandts also owned two office buildings on Broadway between 42nd and 43rd Streets, and another on 43rd between Seventh and Eighth. If it was an empire of sleaze, it was an empire nonetheless, and the Brandts were not about to surrender it without a fight. The Brandts had bid for the rights to develop the five theaters that were to be restored to use as private legitimate theaters, but the real game always had to do with compensation. “They were using the development designation as a carrot to try to get us to agree to the low values,” says Robert Brandt, who directed the family’s real estate operations. “The numbers they were putting on the table for our properties were grossly inadequate.” The Brandts fought back in letters to the editor and op-ed articles; they hired a prominent social scientist to trumpet the evils of urban renewal; and they ended with a fusillade of litigation.

  The implacable opposition of the Brandts and other powerful real estate forces demonstrates why it was so difficult to use urban renewal laws to revitalize Times Square: the state was seizing property with great current economic value and even greater potential value. If the state had to pay what the owners considered fair value, the project would never happen. But the battle also proved why forceful state action was necessary. The businesses that catered to Times Square’s population did very well; they had no more incentive to enter a more respectable line of work that would draw different customers than opium farmers have to grow wheat. As long as 42nd Street was dominated by porno theaters and sex shops and liquor stores, good restaurants and retailers weren’t about to lease space there. Current uses would continue drawing current users. “The perception of turf,” as the environmental-impact statement put it, could only be changed by force majeure: the urban renewal laws.

  The lawsuits dragged on for years, just as the complainants had hoped. And while Klein might have been able to build in the mid- to late eighties, when the real estate market was strong, by 1990, when the last lawsuit was dismissed, the market had gone into a tailspin. The banks and white-shoe law firms that Klein had carefully cultivated as anchor tenants had long since given up, and the entire project went into the deep freeze. Litigation offered a force majeure of its own. The aesthetic and intellectual critique of the project had hit home, but produced only modest changes, whereas the lawsuits had been shaky, even frivolous; yet the suits had succeeded where criticism had failed.

 
11.

  SAVING BILLBOARD HELL

  THE REDEVELOPMENT OF 42nd STREET, whatever its flaws, was an act of urban planning, a conscious re-creation of a bounded urban space almost from the ground up; but the rest of Times Square, seedy but not pathological, was for many years permitted to develop, or not, according to the fluctuations of the marketplace. No large structure had gone up along the great spillways of Broadway and Seventh Avenue since the 1930s. But the real estate boom of the sixties, which had filled the East Side of midtown Manhattan with big buildings, had made the West Side, with its traditionally low scale, look increasingly appealing as a development site. In 1966, the Astor Hotel, a remnant of Times Square’s age of opulence that occupied the block immediately to the north of the Paramount, was closed, and then demolished, to make way for a fifty-four-story building to be designated 1 Astor Plaza, a fabricated address designed to link a new and thoroughly unloved building to the past represented by the building it had replaced. But 1515 Broadway, as the building was universally known, remained a solitary, and largely empty, foray into Times Square for many years.

  A developer named Peter Sharp had been patiently assembling parcels on the block immediately to the north of the Astor throughout the 1960s. By 1970, Sharp was ready to commission a design. He turned to Robert Venturi, the provocative architect who wrote Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Venturi proposed something radically different from 1 Astor Plaza: rather than replace the hodgepodge of buildings with a tower, he proposed to wrap the entire assemblage in huge signs. Venturi described his thinking in a subsequent book, Learning from Las Vegas (written with Steven Izenour and Denise Scott Brown). “Times Square is not dramatic space,” he wrote, “but dramatic decoration. It is two-dimensional, decorated by symbols, lights and movement.” Thus he concluded that “a decorated shed” would be a more apt homage to its traditions than “megastructural bridges, balconies and spaces.” Venturi was the first architect to propose a new idiom faithful to Times Square’s helter-skelter, mongrelized past; but since he had done so with an almost perverse indifference to the site’s economic value, the developer rejected the idea.

  Sharp was, on the other hand, dazzled by the work of John Portman, the architect-developer who had built the Peachtree Center in Atlanta, and who was becoming known for his glass hotels with soaring interior spaces. Portman was one of the iconic figures of the age of urban renewal, for he built immense structures which spanned, or simply abolished, the traditional street grid; many of them turned a great, blank concrete wall to the street. Portman was a very busy man; he was then working on the Renaissance Center, in Detroit, and Embarcadero Center, in San Francisco. He proposed to build a two-thousand-room hotel where Venturi had hoped to raise a decorated shed. The plan envisioned two great concrete slabs rising fifty-six stories connected by five-story-high bridges like the rungs of a great ladder.

  As the planning went forward, it became plain that two cherished and irreplaceable theaters—the Morosco and the Helen Hayes—would have to be destroyed, as would several less important theaters. City and state officials tried to persuade Portman to take an alternative site farther north on Broadway, or to cantilever the hotel above the theaters; but he refused. By 1980, theater groups had begun to mobilize to stop the project. A group of prominent actors, including Jason Robards, Lauren Bacall, and James Earl Jones, tried to dramatize the impending disaster through performances at the two theaters and with public protests. The debate over the Portman project turned out to be a kind of dry run for the 42nd Street renovation, for here, too, the preservationists took arms against the forces of development. The threatened destruction of the theaters had placed Times Square in an entirely new light, as an endangered neighborhood harboring beloved cultural artifacts. Robards, with a theatrical flair for the apocalyptic, described the Portman project as “the end of everything.” When the city refused to budge, opponents turned to the courts, and lawsuits went all the way to the Supreme Court before failing. The Morosco and the Helen Hayes were demolished on March 23, 1982.

  The Marriott Marquis rapidly became the most hated building in Times Square, indeed, one of the most hated buildings in New York. When the hotel opened, in 1985, Paul Goldberger described it as “an upended concrete bunker,” “a sealed environment,” and “a hulking, joyless presence.” While Robert Venturi proposed to celebrate Times Square as it was, or had been, John Portman designed his building to keep the street at bay. “People are still hung up on the goddamn corny image of what’s in Times Square,” Portman was quoted as saying. “There’s not one great thing about it.” The Marriott Marquis, like so many of Portman’s other projects, ostentatiously turns its giant concrete back on the street. The lobby is on the eighth floor, a remote perch that no casual pedestrian is likely to reach; the floors below are low, gloomy, red-carpeted spaces pierced by thick concrete pillars. Even when, after riding up many an elevator, you reach the lobby, a great overhang still blocks the view; only by walking out to the bar can you look up and see the vast atrium that is the building’s central architectural feature.

  The Marriott Marquis came to pass not only because protest failed and public officials took Portman’s side, but because at the time questions of design, as well as the loss of cherished theaters, seemed niggling compared to the imperative of building. As the editors of Architectural Forum noted in 1973, “Any Portman in a storm (especially that of Times Square) will do just fine.” Prominent figures on Broadway and in the preservation world supported the project. A New York Times editorial observed that “lovers of Broadway should concentrate on what they can gain, not on what they can stop.” And indeed, the Marquis has been one of the most successful hotels in the Marriott chain, bringing tens of thousands of modestly heeled tourists to a secure, exciting environment in the middle of tumultuous Times Square. As the architect Hugh Hardy wryly notes, “The Marriott Marquis is just about the grossest building ever, but you walk in there and there’s forty-three cheerleaders coming out of the elevator. It’s some sort of Middle American refuge where people feel comfortable.”

  The fight over the Marriott Marquis implied a choice between a dreadful building that quickened the pulse of Times Square while laying siege to its traditions, and an aesthetically and culturally satisfying one that served no development objective and so could not be built. It implied, in other words, that Times Square would have to be destroyed in order to be saved, just as the General Project Plan implied that 42nd Street would have to be destroyed in order to be saved. That’s no choice at all; and over the next few years, a struggle would be waged to save Times Square in a way that made it worth saving.

  NEW YORK CITY DOES not have much of an unfettered market in real estate, or any other commodity. And so it would be a mistake to say that “the market” was transforming Times Square. A combination of state and local incentives had made the Marriott Marquis worth building. The 1982 zoning rules, which conferred tax breaks on new development and permitted extra density in the area, made building in Times Square far more attractive than it ever had been before. What’s more, the rules included a sunset provision: builders had to break ground by May 1988 in order to qualify for the benefits. So a race quickly developed to build along Broadway and Seventh Avenue. By 1984, when the Board of Estimate approved the 42nd Street Development Project, thus making Times Square Center an apparent fait accompli, a few buildings had already begun to rise at the edge of the zoning area, and it was plain that there would be many more to come. Philip Johnson’s colossal suite of gray flannel towers offered an image—a nightmarish image, to many of New York’s urbanists—of how the new Times Square was to be colonized. And so, in the mid-eighties, as the 42nd Street Development Project began to recede into a mist of litigation, the question of Times Square came to the fore.

  The widely shared sense of urgency about conditions on 42nd Street, and the prestige both of George Klein and of Philip Johnson, had combined to sway or at least neutralize elite opinion on the redevelopment proje
ct. But this would not be so in Times Square. Lawyers and architects and editorial writers still went to plays and restaurants there; the words “Times Square” conjured up much warmer associations than the words “42nd Street.” “Times Square was a place you went to celebrate,” says Hugh Hardy, who had grown up watching musicals from the balcony of practically every theater in Times Square and could still bang out a show tune on the piano. “And here you had the developer talking about turning Times Square into Rockefeller Center.” Klein’s decision to demolish the Times Tower seemed like the worst sort of proof of his earnestness. Hardy was a leading member of the Municipal Art Society, the most venerable of New York’s civic groups and a bastion of preservationist sentiment—the very same elite body that had tried to abolish signs in Times Square back in the day of O. J. Gude. The group had endorsed the Johnson plan, if tepidly; but now it recognized that the northward march of corporate towers could annihilate something precious in the life of the city.

  The MAS formed a committee to study the problem, and its members quickly realized that Times Square was not, in fact, 42nd Street—that the movie theaters up and down Broadway sold more tickets for first-run films than the rest of the city’s theaters combined, that the hotels and the restaurants were full of life. The obvious campaign for the MAS was to call for the preservation of theaters, and in this it had the passionate support of a theater community still outraged over the destruction of the Hayes and Morosco. But that would not be enough. The question arose, as it had on 42nd Street, as to what exactly it was, beyond or perhaps besides physical structures, that needed to be preserved; and the answer Hardy and others came up with was that it was the scale of Times Square, the raffish atmosphere, and above all, in a great historical irony, the lights and signs. These were the tangible elements that produced the intangible phenomenon that went by the name “Times Square.” Hardy told the group’s board that the committee’s goal was “to counter the argument that you have to abolish Times Square in order to clean it up.” The group would accept neither preservationist absolutism nor annihilating gentrification.