The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [113]
Aaron felt that Richie Basciano intuitively understood him because they were both dreamers. Aaron had been nurturing the same dream since the early nineties: to unify the scattered energies of Alternative Broadway and to fully realize the cultural and economic power of the fringe—under his own tutelage, of course. He had been tinkering for years with a document that laid out his vision. Now he had relocated that vision from the Lower East Side to 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue. In June 2001, he had prepared a new draft of his grand plan and sent it to Basciano. Aaron’s ulterior motive was to save his skin: rumors were flying around that Basciano was preparing to sell his real estate for some astronomical sum—$300 million, says Aaron, whose sense of money is extremely approximate—and Aaron was trying to make a case that his patron could make more money by staying. Aaron was, in effect, laying out another version of the argument that Rebecca Robertson and others had been making for almost a decade: that culture was what would drive economic development on 42nd Street and in Times Square. But Aaron was making a case for a different branch of the culture—more demanding, more ambitious, more homemade, more “real.” He was proposing, he wrote, “a true alternative to the ‘new’ Times Square that recaptures the spirit of the ‘old’ Times Square.” Aaron would offer authentic entertainment, rather than the synthetic product being peddled on the new 42nd Street.
Todo Con Nada @ Show World @ the Times Square Theater and Entertainment Center Plan 2002 is one of the truly odd documents of the Times Square redevelopment process. The plan is suffused with a sense of breathless anticipation, of a “historic collaboration” between business and the arts and a giant windfall for both. Show World would become a “scene,” a “neighborhood,” the new center of Bohemia; it would be the home of an all-new arts complex that would attract a minimum of 250,000 visitors a year, and a maximum of two million, which Aaron figured as one-quarter of the total annual attendance of Off-Broadway, though he appears to have confused this figure with the total attendance of Broadway. The implicit theory was “Build it, and they will come.” Aaron proposed ten new ventures, meant to work synergistically with one another and with the more traditional attraction downstairs. The big moneymaker was No Live Girls, a nonpornographic video peep show using forty-one booths that had just been packed up at Basciano’s defunct Peepland, on 42nd Street. Aaron’s ingenious inspiration was to offer 128 channels of video material and to charge a quarter for ninety seconds, just like they did downstairs. And No Live Girls wouldn’t need a mop.
Aaron also proposed a late-night club, a gift shop—“think museum gift shop”—an art gallery, and the Show World Bar and Restaurant, where a spruced-up version of Show World’s “original décor” would provide “that 1970s feel.” In a hardheaded touch, Aaron suggested that Todo Con Nada’s plays and festivals be scheduled only when the four theaters could not be rented. At the same time, Aaron’s surreal sense of numbers led him to calculate that, at optimum capacity, the new Show World Center would have a potential annual revenue of $47,123,100. It was a beautiful vision, a vision that promised to transform Times Square, Show World, and Aaron Beall, in that order. Todo Con Nada would receive 10 percent of gross rentals, 12 percent of gross receipts from the bar/restaurants, and 25 percent of the proceeds from the sale of art.
By the spring of 2002, Aaron saw the new Show World Center beginning to emerge. The art gallery was up and running, he was outfitting the Big Top Cabaret with video monitors, and Basciano had built new offices up on the third floor.