The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [85]
To the critics, the 42nd Street plan was an urban nightmare they thought had long since been put to rest—“a back-from-the-dead example of the thoroughly discredited bulldozer urban renewal of the 1960s,” in the words of the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable. Thomas Bender, an urban historian at New York University, wrote in The Times that Philip Johnson’s “gargantuan office towers” would turn 42nd Street into the equivalent of downtown Washington—“and everyone knows what kind of frightening urban space that becomes after 5 o’clock.” Brendan Gill, a writer of suave and lapidary essays on architecture at The New Yorker, the president of the Landmarks Conservancy, and one of the city’s great boulevardiers, fought the project at every turn, arguing at a UDC hearing that the “four million square feet of conventionally dreary office space” would kill Times Square, not revitalize it. Martin Gottlieb of the Times raised a series of disturbing questions: “Can a buoyant street life be designed without seeming contrived and lifeless? . . . Would the sense of place of Times Square be ruined by the demolition of the curved Rialto Building at 43rd Street and Broadway, which houses Nathan’s, or of 1 Times Square Plaza?” The answer to the first question was no, and to the second, yes.
The critics did not, on the other hand, have a convincing answer to the question of how one could eliminate the predatory street culture of 42nd Street without making the large-scale changes that would alter the character of the place beyond recognition. Some of them, like Gill, seemed perfectly happy to accept the predatory street life as the price to be paid for preserving 42nd Street’s roguish charms, whatever they were. There was a much more plausible argument for smaller buildings, or for less grimly uniform ones, than there was for no office buildings at all.
But it scarcely mattered. This was a public process, but not a plebiscitary one. And the plan had too much political momentum to be stopped in its tracks; both Mayor Koch and the new governor, Mario Cuomo, were committed to it, as was much of the city’s corporate and media elite. The New York Times, which considered 42nd Street its front yard and which had become increasingly disturbed over the years about the deterioration of the neighborhood, strongly backed the project, even going so far as to accept the proposed demolition of the Times Tower. The Board of Estimate hearings, in late October and early November 1984, were an elaborate formality. Public officials praised the project, while local politicians, community board members, scholars, and gadflies grandiloquently denounced it. The Board of Estimate heard one and all, and then voted unanimously to approve the project.
The argument over 42nd Street redevelopment, like virtually all issues involving planning, was largely a debate among elites. And it was the pro-growth elite, not the preservationist elite, that held the balance of power. But there could be changes at the margin. Neither George Klein nor Philip Johnson wanted to put up buildings the public hated, and the outcry forced them back to the drawing board. Johnson, in particular, seems to have had immediate second thoughts. He told an interviewer in 1994 that he had “never liked the big towers.” Asked why, then, he had designed them, he said, “Because I wanted a reminiscent thing that would look like the Pierre Hotel. I thought it would look natural. You have to have a top on these things. I was totally post-modern at the time, and I wanted