The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [100]
Of course, it’s impossible to imagine New Yorkers sitting still nowadays as an ancient neighborhood is demolished. After all, New York City once had an omnipotent haut fonctionnaire of its own; his name was Robert Moses. And Moses’s very name is now synonymous with the discredited vision of bulldozer development. Much of the messy and time-consuming panoply of the 42nd Street development process—the hearings, the guidelines, the environmental impact statement—is a reaction to that autocratic form of development. New Yorkers have decided, in effect, that they would rather risk getting nothing built at all than to have a vision of the city simply imposed on them. And the process does not inevitably lead either to paralysis or to mediocrity: it was another city-state entity that chose the acclaimed architect Daniel Libeskind to design a new complex on the site of the World Trade Center in 2003.
The competition over the rebuilding of the World Trade Center offers a model for urban planning that does not submit to the whim either of the developer or of the government functionary, and that allows the public will to express itself without descending into chaos. Of course, the city-state body overseeing the development process at the World Trade Center site agreed to stage a worldwide architectural competition only after an impassioned public rejected the unimaginative choices that were initially offered. That was an unprecedented moment in the history of urban development; the rebuilding of 42nd Street took place under more normal conditions of public disengagement. And in the early 1980s architects had nothing like the kind of prestige they have today; the idea that an architect’s vision might transform a neighborhood, or even an entire city, was something quite foreign. In New York, architecture has, until very recently, functioned almost entirely as the handmaiden of development.
And so perhaps it is vain to wish that Mayor Koch and Governor Cuomo had invited the half-dozen greatest architects in the world to reimagine 42nd Street, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor George Pataki ultimately did in the case of the World Trade Center. It wasn’t in the cards. And yet it would have been one of the most thrilling and illuminating architectural competitions ever staged. Great architects love great cities. Who among them wouldn’t have viewed the opportunity to reinvent the greatest urban space in the greatest city in the world as the achievement of a lifetime? Who would have sneered at “the goddamn corny image of what’s in Times Square,” or fantasized about giant wrecking balls crushing decaying structures? It’s true that the horror of urban life so widespread a quarter century ago might have made the prospect of erasure appealing, as it was to Philip Johnson. But others might have designed a 42nd Street Futurama, like the architects of Cityscape; or a 42nd Street of the decorated shed in the manner of Robert Venturi; or something else nobody ever thought of. What 42nd Street needed, as Robert Stern and Tibor Kalman understood, was not an architectural straitjacket, but a master plan—a plan that could pay homage to all that the street and Times Square had been, while launching it into an unknowable future.
It’s too late for regrets, or even for blame. One can only imagine what might have been and take comfort in the fact that the public seems more aroused on matters of architecture and design than it has ever been before. Perhaps the next time, whenever the next time is, the process will work because it worked, and not because it failed.
PART THREE
CORPORATE FUN
13.
A MIRROR OF AMERICA
TAKE THE SUBWAY to the Times Square station. It only costs two dollars, you can get there from practically anywhere, and it’s been working perfectly well, more or less, for one hundred years. Emerging onto the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway, you will be much impressed by the sheer scale of