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to be festooned with signs and light. But the key requirements applied to the office buildings, which constituted the great threat to Times Square’s traditional character. They were to have a highly reflective skin of glass or metal to distinguish themselves from the old masonry structures of 42nd Street; the skin would stop fifteen feet or so above ground level in order to create a sense of pedestrian scale for shops. Lower elevations would feature “prominent signage and dramatic lighting” to keep 42nd Street from looking like just another office district. Storefronts would be 75 to 85 percent glass. The buildings would be sharply set back at the fifth floor to preserve the area’s traditional cornice line, and then set back again at intervals, while “diversity and contrast in the use of materials, colors and finishes” would “prevent a monolithic appearance.” The Times Tower would be preserved as “a focal point for Times Square.” The entire street would be bathed in brilliant white light from 120-foot-high poles.

Most important, the guidelines offered a guarantee of public control. The city was turning over 42nd Street to private owners—or rather, by means of condemnation, transferring it from one set of private owners to another—but doing so only under stringent conditions. The guidelines, in effect, precluded the kind of privatized decision-making represented by the City at 42nd Street. And they stood for the values that the city’s unofficial stewards held dear. William Taylor, a prominent urban scholar and essayist, described the Cooper & Eckstut plan as an homage to the city’s traditions and “a strong statement for public values” rather than those of the marketplace. Paul Goldberger wrote that the design “emerges out of a strong understanding of the nature of the existing city, with strong architectural ties to what is best in what is already there.”

The detailed guidelines meant, at least in theory, that many of the architectural decisions had been made in advance. The city would not be choosing an architect; it would be choosing a developer, who in turn would supply an architect. In September 1981, developers submitted proposals to the 42nd Street Development Project. The following April, planners offered “conditional designations” for the twelve sites. The most important, by far, involved the four parcels set aside for office towers, which went to a developer named George Klein. This was a surprising choice, for Klein had far less experience, and cut a far smaller profile in the world of real estate, than virtually all of his competitors. Heir to the Bar-ton candy fortune, Klein had started building just eight years earlier, in Brooklyn; he had erected only two office buildings in Manhattan. He was an outsider in the intensely clannish world of New York real estate, politically conservative and religiously Orthodox in a liberal, Reform culture. Klein was a circumspect, solemn, and eminently respectable character who had decided to make that respectability his calling card. “The best way to break into this world,” he had concluded, “was to get the finest architects and put up the kind of buildings that would attract the best tenant.” In his brief career as a developer he had already worked with I. M. Pei, Edward Larrabee Barnes, and Philip Johnson.

Klein was, in his quiet way, a man of very large aspirations, much larger than those of the old-line families whose status he hoped to share. Klein wanted to change the face of the city—for the better, of course. His very first real estate venture had been an urban renewal project which he felt had spurred the revival of downtown Brooklyn. And in the redevelopment of 42nd Street he had been granted, he felt, “the opportunity to do something on a grand scale.” Klein would never have accepted the distinction between the real estate dynamic and “public values”; he saw Times Square as a blighted area which, like downtown Brooklyn, could be restored to life through development. “Times Square was a real mess,” he recalls. “Children were falling into this den of drugs and crime.