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

by James Traub

  The Municipal Art Society now began a crafty and relentless public relations campaign. In March 1984, the MAS staged a competition to design a replacement for the Times Tower—an event that proved architects were a great deal fonder of that misbegotten building, and thus of the degraded urban texture surrounding it, than were George Klein and Philip Johnson. And then it went to work dramatizing the idea that bright lights were indispensable in Times Square. On a Saturday evening in the fall of 1984, when the debate over 42nd Street was about to come to a head, the group arranged to have all the lights in Times Square turned off at 7:30, when the place would be jammed with theatergoers. The one sign that remained blared, “HEY, MR. MAYOR! IT’S DARK OUT HERE! HELP KEEP THE BRIGHT LIGHTS IN TIMES SQUARE!” This cheeky scare tactic garnered tremendous publicity.

  In 1985, the society commissioned a design firm to build a model of what Times Square would look like if every available parcel were built out to the maximum height and density permitted by the zoning rules. The model, which could be easily manipulated to demonstrate various hypothetical outcomes, became the centerpiece of a short film narrated by Jason Robards. This may have been the most effective gimmick of all, in part because it was not merely a gimmick. The film described Times Square, in rather oddly pastoral terms, as “a tremendous, well-proportioned outdoor room,” a neighborhood whose character was defined by its low scale. The new zoning law, it warned, would permit the addition of sixteen million square feet of space. The model, shot from above, showed the tiny slit of light that would reach the street level were the zoning law to be fully exploited. “Instead of a bowl of light,” Robards admonished, “we would be offered canyon walls.” The theaters would remain, but only as “curiosities of a bygone era.”

  The MAS had adroitly raised the stakes so that Times Square itself seemed to hang in the balance. And they succeeded in altering the consciousness of New Yorkers—or at least those few New Yorkers who actually played a role in the planning process. After seeing the MAS film, Paul Goldberger, who only a few years earlier had found something good to say about the George Klein project for 42nd Street and even about the Marriott Marquis, wrote that “the light, the energy, the sense of contained chaos that have long characterized Times Square are essentially incompatible with high-rise office buildings, or with stark and harsh modern hotel towers like the Marriott.” The MAS simulation, Goldberger wrote, proved that the effect of unchecked construction on Times Square would be “devastating.”

  The MAS and its allies on the local community board, and among architects and signage professionals and others, understood that the 1982 zoning law could not be abolished; development would have to be shaped rather than blocked. So the actual purpose of the relentless publicity campaign was to get the city to reopen the planning guidelines for Times Square in order to prevent developers from putting up the same glass slabs they would have built on Sixth Avenue. The developers themselves opposed this movement to a man (and virtually all of them were men). Among them, it was a matter beyond debate that the law firms and investment banks and even entertainment companies who were their most prized tenants do not like buildings with signs. Scarcely any of them currently occupied such buildings. Signs violated the modernist taboo against ornamentation; even the eclectic buildings being designed by Philip Johnson and the other postmodernists had an unblemished façade. More to the point, signs were tacky. As David Solomon, a developer who was counting on Morgan Stanley to occupy the new tower he was building on Broadway at 47th Street, put it, “Investment bankers and lawyers don’t want to work in an environment of flashing lights. They want trees and clean streets . . . museums and sidewalk cafes.” In short, they wanted Fifth Avenue, or perhaps the Faubourg St. Honoré—just as the MAS itself had three-quarters of a century earlier.

  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 th
e 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 intersect
ion 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.