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By Root 586 0

were, lived on. By the mid-1970s, 42nd Street was understood to be a dead place. Once it had been the very heart of the greatest city in the world; now, like New York itself, it felt like a relic, a reminder of past glories. Yet 42nd Street could not simply be abandoned, like the polluted terrain of an old factory. At the level of symbolism, the block’s predatory environment was disastrous for a city that already had a well-deserved reputation as one of the seamiest and most dangerous places in the country. What’s more, it was located in the heart of Manhattan, at the convergence of subway lines and bus lines and at the intersection of major streets. Here was a wasting asset of colossal proportions. The authors of the Bright Light study noted that “commercial lenders who have business in midtown Manhattan regard the Times Square area as a prime location for investment,” but added: “This mood depends on continuous action on plans to renew the 42nd Street Bright Lights District.” It is worth noting the difference between “Times Square” and “42nd Street” in this calculus: while the entire area was degraded, and in need of rejuvenation, it was understood that the distinctive pathologies of 42nd Street were the chief problem to be addressed. In the process of redevelopment, the destinies of 42nd Street and Times Square came to be seen as linked, but nevertheless separate.

And so men like Alexander Parker stood high above 42nd Street and imagined it anew. Forty-second Street’s very centrality, its antique associations, made it a thrilling screen on which to project visions of an urban future. And yet what a strange tabula rasa! Here was a teeming block in the midst of a teeming city, a block whose glamorous buildings were very much intact, if terribly degraded. Could such a place actually be called dead? Could it be “rescued,” rather than obliterated? And if so, what was to be preserved? The buildings themselves? The “spirit” of the place? Which spirit? The lobster palace society of 1910 or the carny, flea-circus world of 1940? Was the underworld once again to meet the elite? Or was the whole idea of consciously and conscientiously designing a place that for generations had been a monument to the ungovernable appetites of urban man an absurdity, a self-contradiction? Starting in the 1960s, and then increasingly in the seventies and eighties, 42nd Street became a place to be saved, restored, reimagined. The process of redevelopment became a cockpit of competing ideas not only about 42nd Street and Times Square, but about urban life itself.

At the same time, since urban development is a quintessentially political process rather than an aesthetic exercise, these ideas and images were wielded by different individuals and groups with their own interests and their own sources and degrees of power: real estate developers, urban planners, government officials, theater owners, editorialists, urban flaneurs, and, not to put too fine a point upon it, real estate developers. The prize would not necessarily go to the best or most popular idea— Alexander Parker, after all, had no plans to ask anybody whether they wanted a convention center—so the debate over the redevelopment of 42nd Street was also a struggle over who had “the public interest” at heart, and who would be able to impose that vision.

It is quite possible that there were no good answers to the problem of re-creating 42nd Street. There were only answers that would disappoint different people, in different ways.

ALEXANDER PARKER’S BULLDOZER approach was already becoming passé by the mid-1970s, for the excesses of “urban renewal” had convinced even the most pragmatic that cities could not survive the wholesale destruction of their history and texture. Now 42nd Street began to attract reformers who recognized that the block still had a life of its own, and who thus wanted to rejuvenate rather than flatten it. In 1976, just as Parker was wowing the business press with his grandiose plans, an advertising executive and urban gadfly named Fred Papert was establishing the 42nd Street