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fifteen or sixteen properties in the area owned by the real estate arm of Lazard Frères. It is hard to imagine, today, just how unprepossessing most of these parcels were; the Goldman property, especially, consisted mostly of empty storefronts, junk shops, rundown hotels, and the like. One of the properties, on 47th Street, was the Luxor Baths, a decrepit local landmark where Jack Dempsey and Walter Winchell used to soak their carcasses. By 1975, it was being used as a whorehouse. Seymour first tried to evict the operators, but then, when he failed, inexplicably decided to sell them the place instead. The new owners began chopping up the old baths into cubicles; the Luxor was well on its way to becoming the largest, and perhaps best-appointed, brothel in the city, if not the country. At the time, Seymour was serving, with no particular distinction, on a clean-up-Times-Square body called the Mayor’s Office of Midtown Enforcement. Mayor Abraham Beame was so outraged at Seymour’s laissez-faire attitude toward Times Square’s image that he had him kicked off the committee.

And yet Seymour had a vision for Times Square—and not just a Third Avenue–type vision but a great and sweeping plan worthy of the great dreamers of the past. He planned to amass all the land from 42nd to 47th Streets, and from Sixth to Broadway, and then build a single complex, just as the Rockefellers had, half a century before, in the area between Fifth and Sixth Avenues a few blocks farther north. Seymour even called his proposal “Rockefeller Center South.” But for once, he was too far ahead of his time: when the real estate market collapsed in the mid-1970s, Seymour lost several of his properties to the banks and was forced to abandon his plans. One of the parcels he had to surrender was the site of the decrepit New Criterion Theatre, which then made its way back to the Moss family. Seymour did, however, hold on to most of his properties, and the Durst organization later built a headquarters for U.S. Trust on West 47th Street, not far from the site of the Luxor Baths.

The model for Rockefeller Center South now sits on top of filing cabinets in an office in the Durst Organization: eight or nine black glass skyscrapers in two columns. Seymour never had much interest in fine architecture, and plainly he was thinking along the same lines that George Klein would pursue a few years later, though the Luxor Baths episode suggests that he lacked something of Klein’s high seriousness. If he had had his way, Seymour would have turned Times Square into a western annex of the city’s expanding corporate culture. “Maybe,” says Douglas Durst, who has a parched version of his father’s famously dry wit, “it’s just as well it never happened.”

Seymour was a character, a gaunt and gray-haired figure who walked everywhere, cut his own hair, wore his clothes until they were threadbare, and generally lived like an anchorite. He was a kind of homespun philosopher who kept his pockets stuffed with folded-up papers upon which he had scribbled his thoughts on the great issues of the day, and which he would withdraw with a flourish as the conversation turned to the relevant topic. He sent an endless stream of letters to The New York Times, often on the subject of rent control, which he considered the root of all housing evils. Seymour often purchased tiny advertisements at the bottom of the front page—“bottom lines,” the family called them—in order to ensure that his views got the airing they deserved. Seymour could be extraordinarily creative in finding venues in which to ride his various hobbyhorses: in 1989 he mounted what he called the Debt Clock, on a building he owned just east of Times Square, in order to tick off the growing federal debt. He churned out immense “studies” and “reports” on housing problems that never saw the light of day, but toward the end of his life, in the mid-nineties, he found editorial fulfillment as the housing columnist of Street News, a newspaper distributed by the homeless.

Seymour knew the city, and perhaps even understood the city, as few men