The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [78]
The design firm produced a cutaway aerial view of the project which today has about it a Flash Gordon sense of the fantastical. A monorail runs all around the perimeter on an upper floor—the orientation ride. Then, moving from east to west along the southern side of 42nd Street, the plan shows a theater containing “the world’s largest movie screen,” utilizing the then novel IMAX technology to offer a bird’s-eye view of the city’s five boroughs; the restored New Amsterdam Theatre and two other legitimate theaters; a kind of fashion theater in which a narrator, according to Weinstein, explains “the relationship between fashion and the social-cultural-political moment the fashion was created from,” while lights pick out mannequins lined up in niches along the walls (after which viewers would be treated to an actual fashion show); and sound stages and studios where visitors could watch commercials or television shows being made. The northern side of the block included the project’s two most ingenious inventions: a conical theater in which patrons seated around a spiraling rim would look straight down at a movie screen showing a balloon’s-eye view of the world’s great cities, and a Ferris wheel, “The Slice of Life,” in which viewers would appear to rise from the cables and tunnels far beneath the streets all the way to the rooftops of the highest skyscrapers—“to make people understand the city as a sectional reality,” as Weinstein said.
For all its imaginative richness, Cityscape was steeped in self-contradiction. Here, after all, was a theme park whose theme was “the city,” which is to say that it would function as a simulacrum of urban life while urban life in all its messy actuality tumbled along the street on the other side of the walls. Here was a controlled environment designed to illustrate the urban creativity that springs from uncontrol. Underlying the Cityscape plan was something of that horror of the streets, and of their culture, which had made Alexander Parker brag about large wrecking balls. And the figures behind Cityscape, unlike Parker, were not moved by calculations of self-interest; they were reacting to what was a virtually con-sensual view of 42nd Street, and perhaps more broadly of the urban street itself. The Bright Light study, which Ford had commissioned, seemed only to confirm the sense of 42nd Street as irretrievably lost, though the authors themselves scarcely took this view. “At the time,” says Fred Papert, “all you had to say was ‘Forty-second Street’ or ‘Times Square,’ and it evoked a groan. So part of the appeal was that you were protected or isolated from the street.” Roger Kennedy, especially, did not view the idea of enclosure as inimical to urban life. Before coming to Ford, he had worked as a banker in St. Paul and had funded a downtown redevelopment that had connected buildings with aerial bridges. Just as St. Paul had arctic blasts, so the streets of New York had obstacles of their own. “If you want to go to dinner or theater without putting your coat on, that’s pretty nice in New York,” says Kennedy. “It’s not a bad thing not to have your pants splashed walking past an ugly puddle. And if someone’s going to put their hand in your pocket, that’s an additional reason.”
The project required the approval of city officials, who would have had to condemn the private property along the block and turn it over to Cityscape. The designers built an elaborate model of the project, and in late 1978 and early 1979 invited journalists, civic figures, potential investors, and officials from the administration of Mayor Ed Koch to come to the Ford Foundation’s splendid headquarters for a viewing. Both the model and the project itself were generally well-received, save by one all-important figure: Mayor Koch himself. The mayor had apparently taken a visceral dislike to the model. In an interview with Paul Goldberger, the architecture