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By Root 670 0

embarked on a conscious policy of delaying the project to death. In a furious 1990 op-ed article in The New York Times, Carl Weisbrod, the public official in charge of the project, alleged that the Dursts, acting in concert with the owners of the block’s porno theaters, had forged “a litigation conspiracy trap aimed at preventing the reclamation of what was—and should be again—New York’s most glorious street.” Of course, the trap worked. But while the small fry who owned the theaters disappeared from Times Square, Douglas Durst returned in glory: when Prudential, George Klein’s financial backer, forced him to sell in 1995, it was Durst, acting with the family gift for adroit timing and the well-calculated gamble, who bought the choicest of all the office parcels, at the southeast corner of Broadway and 42nd Street.

If there was any single moment that marked the emergence of the shining new Times Square of global media and entertainment firms, it was Durst’s announcement that he had secured Condé Nast as the anchor tenant of 4 Times Square. And he had been able to do so by exploiting the enormous subsidies that the family professed to despise. Whether this constituted gross hypocrisy, or merely a very high order of gamesmanship, was perhaps simply a matter of perspective. Douglas, while protesting rather feebly that the family never really tried to impede the project, concedes, in his laconic way, that the outcome was “ironic.” Lawrence Silverstein, a fellow mogul and old friend of the family, says, “Seymour, God bless him, as he looks down, what must he be thinking?” Of course, one should not entirely dismiss the possibility that Seymour is thinking, “Excellent deal.”

Douglas had vindicated his father’s faith in Times Square and paid for a twenty-five-year-old investment many times over. At the same time, he didn’t seem to feel at home in the new Times Square he had wrought: he didn’t eat in the fancy new restaurants or meet friends for a drink in the chic hotels. I persuaded Douglas, against the force of his habits, to have lunch with me one day by suggesting that we meet at the irredeemably unchic Howard Johnson’s, where he could be certain of meeting no one who recognized him, much less knew him. As we sat in an orange booth on a blazingly hot day, Douglas pointed across the street and said, “I used to go to the Ripley’s between Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth after school.” He was, he said, a great aficionado of the arcades in the late fifties. When the kids were young, he would leave them to play pinball with Jimmy Glen, the owner of Jimmy’s Corner, an old Times Square bar on 44th just east of Broadway, while he and his wife went out to dinner. That was the Times Square he cared about; and none of it, he said, was left (except Jimmy’s). I asked Douglas how he felt about the new Times Square, which he had done so much to bring into being. There was a long, long pause. “I think,” he finally said, “it could do without all the development—except, of course, Four Times Square.” And he smiled ever so slightly at this shaft of Durstian wit.

AS I WALKED ALONG 42nd Street in the early months of 2002, I often looked at a shabby little structure huddled in the lee of the mighty Condé Nast building. On top of the storefront was a big billboard that featured a rendering of the American flag, an outline of a hand clutching a can of spray paint, and the slogan, “Declare Independence from Corporate Rule.” Here, apparently, was a refreshing howl of protest at all that Times Square had become, and all that was embodied in that great glass tower occupied by the world’s most glamorous media company. The storefront housed some kind of alternative arts complex called Chashama. It was Aaron Beall who told me that the founder and director of Chashama was Anita Durst—Douglas’s older daughter. It seemed that the family predisposition to the peculiar had been passed on to yet another generation.

When I went to meet Anita, in a cubbyhole office on the second floor of Chashama, she was bouncing lightly on one of those big blue balls said to be