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air rights would be transferred from midblock to permit developers to construct extra-large—indeed, gigantic—towers. Current zoning laws permitted structures on the four parcels to rise as high as 280 to 370 feet; with the additional air rights, they could range from 365 to 705 feet. The tallest of the buildings, at the northeast corner of 42nd and Broadway, would be one of the most massive office buildings constructed in New York in many years. Why were such big buildings necessary? To make everything else possible. Developers would not build in Times Square without large-scale inducements; and without revenues from development, the planning documents explained, it would be impossible to finance improvements or to preserve the theaters. In effect, 42nd Street’s unique character had to be annihilated in order to be preserved.

Why would the construction of office buildings make it possible to improve the subways and preserve the theaters? Because it was the developer, not the city, who would pay for the renovation of 42nd Street. The developer who won the right to build the office towers would be expected to pay for improvements to subways and the street, for private property that public authorities would seize in the condemnation process, and to some extent for the preservation of the theaters. Had the city chosen to pay those costs itself—as it had in other projects, such as the recent Battery Park City in lower Manhattan—it could more readily have dictated terms to developers. But the Koch administration made the fateful decision to sacrifice a large measure of public control in exchange for private investment. In doing so, it also surrendered pieces of the sky, and of the urban landscape: intangible assets that seemed, at least to city planners, far easier to part with than money. And so the Koch administration preserved public control of the project by surrendering precious public assets.

Commercial development was not only a means to some other good on 42nd Street, but an end in itself. The city had been trying since the 1960s to shift development westward; by the late 1970s, the west side of midtown retained the low scale it had had for generations, while the east side was choking on office buildings. As Herbert Sturz, who was then the city’s planning commissioner, recalls, “You had the AT & T Building and the IBM Building going up on Madison Avenue; you had high-rises in midblock. It was bringing midtown to a halt. We very much wanted to shift development to the West Side.” And so, at virtually the same time that the 42nd Street project was announced, the city also began the process of developing new zoning regulations. The new rules, announced in 1982, eliminated many of the bonuses that had made it possible to build colossi like the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, though that by itself would not have accomplished the city’s goals; parts of the West Side were also “up-zoned,” which is to say that developers would be permitted to construct larger buildings, and would pay far lower taxes on them. The 42nd Street Development Project, like the new zoning rules, was designed to stimulate commercial construction.

So the new project was shaped by the political imperative of inducing private actors to pay for public goods, and by the real estate imperative of fostering the creation of a new business district. Whatever happened to “seltzer”? How, that is, could you “preserve the unique ambience of Times Square”—that precious essence which Mayor Koch had vowed to preserve—if you were erecting a forest of massive high-rises? The answer was that you couldn’t, since that ambience was plainly connected to Times Square’s scale. The city’s second-best answer was to establish design guidelines that would accommodate these conflicting goals as far as possible. Public officials assigned this task to the architectural firm of Cooper & Eckstut, which had created the specifications for the well-regarded Battery Park City development. The highly detailed guidelines required that the buildings in midblock retain their low scale and continue