The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [79]
Nor was that all. It had become plain that the cost of buying the condemned property and of building the attraction would greatly exceed the revenues from corporate sponsorships and paying customers. So Cityscape underwent another transformation. What had begun as a modest attempt to revitalize a block had expanded into a theme park; now the theme park expanded yet again, into a giant real estate venture. The organization’s financial advisers concluded that Cityscape, now known by the more corporate-sounding title “The City at 42nd Street,” would have to include substantial office development and then plug the revenue gap with rental payments. Paul Reichmann, head of the Canadian development firm Olympia & York, agreed to build office towers on three parcels at the crossroads of Seventh Avenue and Broadway; in order to make the deal more attractive, the City at 42nd Street agreed to transfer the unused “air rights” available in the middle of the block to the three parcels, thus allowing the developer to build a much larger structure than zoning regulations would otherwise have permitted. Rockefeller Center, Inc., and Harry Helmsley, one of the city’s biggest real estate operators, also agreed to construct a “fashion mart,” which would run from 40th Street to 42nd and would take up an additional 2.3 million square feet. Since the attraction itself amounted to slightly over 500,000 square feet (and the restaurants and retail downstairs occupied an approximately equal space), the enormous tail of real estate would now be wagging the rather modest dog of entertainment. The City at 42nd Street was now a blockbuster project that would transform the street almost as drastically as Parker’s convention center would have done.
Mayor Koch had never actually pronounced a death sentence on the City at 42nd Street; and as the project grew into a juggernaut involving many of New York’s leading foundations, financial institutions, and real estate developers, it seemed that the resurrection of 42nd Street was finally at hand. But it wasn’t. In May 1980, the Koch administration finally rejected the plan. At the press conference at which he administered the coup de grâce, Koch dispensed with orange juice and seltzer in order to discuss the city’s role in development. “We aren’t going to let one group get the inside track,” he said, “no matter how good they are.” For all its avowals of public-spiritedness, the City at 42nd Street was a private project; in New York, with its tradition of strong government, accepting private control over so symbolically fraught a piece of property would have been an abdication of municipal authority.
And yet the Disneyland factor was never far from Koch’s mind. These many years later, the former mayor vividly recalls his trip to the Ford Foundation to see the model. Koch was seventy-seven years old at the time of this recent conversation, perfectly bald, potbellied and suspendered, but he was every bit as vociferous, as theatrically hyperbolic, as he had been as mayor. “Their exhibit included a Ferris wheel on Forty-second Street!” he cried—freshly amazed, across the gulf of decades, at the sheer gall. “It was shit, to put it bluntly. I don’t pretend to be a city planner, but I know dross from gold. So I said, ‘We’re not going to do this.’” Unlike the Establishment figures who sponsored the City at 42nd Street, Koch viewed himself, and was widely accepted as,