The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [86]
Back at the drawing board once again, Johnson produced a new set of buildings—sleeker, more abstract, and less referential. The towers were now made almost wholly of glass, as the guidelines foresaw, and they no longer formed a wholly matched set; but they still lacked setbacks as well as signage. In a final design, executed in 1989, John Burgee, by then separated from Johnson, produced far gaudier buildings, with busy surfaces and with extensive electronic signage incorporated into the structure; these came closest to satisfying critics’ wishes, though the setbacks that had been so integral to the guidelines were now a mere memory. None of these designs, in any case, were destined to be executed.
It turned out that in the new, post-Moses world of planning, the political process had become vulnerable to outsiders in all sorts of ways. Opponents had learned that even if you couldn’t outvote the party of growth, you could peck it to death through a combination of bad publicity and litigation. And the pecking process over 42nd Street began right away. Indeed, the first lawsuit came even before the project was approved; and then came the deluge—forty-seven suits in all. This was an astounding number even by New York standards. And though they alleged violations of free speech or due process rights, or of antitrust or eminent domain statutes, all but two of them, according to one tabulation, were filed by those with vested interests, principally developers who hadn’t been awarded—or hadn’t even sought—a piece of the action, or property owners who hoped to force public officials to pay them more in exchange for their property. These included such families as the Milsteins and the Dursts, who had been playing the game of real estate for generations, and who understood very well how to get things done, or blocked, in New York.
The biggest potential loser in the development process was the Brandt family, which operated a near monopoly of the movie theater mini-district on and around 42nd Street. Running eighteen hours a day, the fourteen theaters in the project area controlled by the Brandts and a partner generated enormous amounts of revenue even if most of their seats were empty at the average showing. The Brandts also owned two office buildings on Broadway between 42nd and 43rd Streets, and another on 43rd between Seventh and Eighth. If it was an empire of sleaze, it was an empire nonetheless, and the Brandts were not about to surrender it without a fight. The Brandts had bid for the rights to develop the five theaters that were to be restored to use as private legitimate theaters, but the real game always had to do with compensation. “They were using the development designation as a carrot to try to get us to agree to the low values,” says Robert Brandt, who directed the family’s real estate operations. “The numbers they were putting on the table for our properties were grossly inadequate.” The Brandts fought back in letters to the editor and op-ed articles; they hired a prominent social scientist to trumpet the evils of urban renewal; and they ended with a fusillade of litigation.
The implacable opposition of the Brandts and other powerful real estate forces demonstrates why it was so difficult to use urban renewal laws to revitalize Times Square: the state was seizing property with great current economic value and even greater potential value. If the state had to pay what the owners considered fair value, the project would never happen. But the battle also proved why forceful state action was necessary. The businesses that catered to Times Square’s population did very well; they had no more incentive to enter a more respectable line of work that would draw different