The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [147]
But a hotel is, of course, the rare example of a tall building designed to evoke the idea of pleasure and excitement. An office tower, on the other hand, is traditionally meant to conjure up power, solidity, integrity. And the commercial developers who had fought the new regulations in the first place were loath to submit to them. David Solomon, who was putting up an enormous building, without a guaranteed tenant, at the corner of Broadway and 47th, was genuinely horrified at the prospect of signage. Tama Starr, whom Solomon and his wife, Jean, had retained to design signage if it proved unavoidable, says, “Their idea of a sign was very retro; it was a seventies consciousness of the tawdry ‘HOTEL’ with the ‘E’ flickering because the transformer was out. They did not see signs as having any class whatsoever.” When the new rules were passed, the Solomons did their best to circumvent them. They worked with their architect, Charles Gwathmey, to create a system of lights and signs that would operate only at night; during the day, the building would look as solemn as a judge. Even at night the lights would be visible only from directly in front of the building. The City Planning Commission responded by amending the new zoning rules to specify that signs and lights must be visible during the day as well as at night. Times Square’s new corporate tenants would have to find a way to adapt to the place’s traditions, no matter how outlandish they seemed.
The Solomons ultimately lost the building, known as 1585 Broadway, to their lenders; in 1992, Morgan Stanley bought the property at a steep discount. The firm was profoundly skittish about Times Square; it was, in fact, so dubious about urban life generally that it was seriously thinking about moving its headquarters to Stamford, Connecticut, even though virtually the entire finance industry was concentrated in Manhattan. Now it had to find a way to live with Times Square, and with the Times Square zoning requirements. The bank had opposed the new zoning regulations as ardently as the Solomons had, if less publicly. As Susan Jarrett, now an executive director of Morgan Stanley, recalls, “The fact that there had to be any kind of sign—the fact that it had to be kinetic—the fact that it had to be neon—this was so anti-image for us.” (Actually, it had to be bright, but not necessarily neon.) Tama Starr, who continued to work on the building, says, “Their first question was ‘What’s the cheapest thing we can do?’ We said, ‘We can give you some cutout plastic letters and stick them on.’ And the answer was, ‘How much will that cost?’”
Morgan plainly had to find a way to incorporate signage that enhanced, rather than damaged, its identity. Charles Gwathmey says that he always favored the idea of placing some kind of signage on the building’s lower floors, among which would be trading floors that would not require windows. And Morgan officials, he says, put up very little resistance once they understood that the sign would serve not as an advertisement but as a new corporate emblem. Gwathmey’s central innovation was, he says, “to integrate the sign into the façade rather than try to make it additive.” He and the designer Massimo Vignelli came up with the idea of using financial information as a decorative motif—not, perhaps, the most far-reaching inspiration. The Morgan Stanley Building at 1585 Broadway has three bands of stock-ticker information, each ten to twelve feet high, running across the façade at different speeds. At either edge of the building are forty-four-foot-high cylindrical maps showing the time zones of Morgan Stanley’s offices across the world. Decorative fins elegantly spell out the building’s address. The bands themselves are sky-blue, and the data is the bright white of LEDs, or light-emitting