The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [92]
FORTY-SECOND STREET HAD to be drastically transformed, for the street had swallowed up all the piecemeal solutions that had been tried before. The rest of Times Square, for all its seediness, was a functioning entertainment district. And so whatever was lost of Times Square in the process of development did not have to be sacrificed for the good of the neighborhood. Indeed, the angriest critics of the new Times Square felt that the very act of “developing” such a place was a profanation, a blow against urbanness itself. Writing in The New Yorker in 1991, Brendan Gill described Times Square as the heart of a new urban Disneyland. In place of “a gaudy, tawdry medley of theatres, restaurants, rehearsal halls, hotels,” and so on, Gill wrote, public officials and private developers had fostered “a cold-blooded corporate simulacrum of an amusement park, designed to contain millions of square feet of offices filled with tens of thousands of office drones.”
The Municipal Art Society’s simulation had persuaded Paul Goldberger that Times Square’s spirit of “contained chaos” would evaporate amid the office towers. This might or might not prove to be true, but there could be no question that development had eliminated Times Square’s defining sense of scale. In The Experience of Place, published in 1990, the journalist Tony Hiss, who had worked closely with the MAS and contributed the image of the bowl of light, evoked the last moments of Times Square as a place of human scale. Standing in the afternoon sunlight, he wrote, “I took a good look at the low buildings along Broadway and realized that from the center of the Square, these small buildings seemed to be much farther away than just across the street. At this point, one part of what I was experiencing began to make better sense to me: Although Times Square isn’t as big or as open or as carefully planned an open space as, say, the Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, it used to have an unusual feeling of welcoming spaciousness that wasn’t to be found at the Brooklyn plaza or at any other New York intersection. It gave you the sense of being protected, because it gave the sense that there was room enough here for all.”
And so something irretrievable, something precious, was lost when the floodgates of development were opened in Times Square. Gill, in fact, prophesied that the resulting horror would become so manifest that it would undermine the very idea of the skyscraper—a prospect he heartily welcomed. That, of course, hasn’t happened. And it would be terrible if it had, for no truly modern city can accept the retrograde notion that office buildings, and the white-collar economy which they make possible, are inherently philistine. The argument may work in Florence, but not in New York. Does this require the remorseless destruction of the old? Perhaps it does. But that’s what cities do: they build the new right on top of the old.
12.
DISNEY EX MACHINA
THROUGHOUT THE 1980s, the 42nd Street Development Project had appeared to consist of a cluster of office towers dragging a tail of theaters and stores, and a giant wholesale mart glimmering in the remote distance. By the end of the decade, though, the office towers were locked in the doldrums of a sinking real estate market, the mart had become a tar baby from which one developer after another had extricated himself, and the planned hotel across the street was barely a hypothesis. The only noticeable effect of this immense public venture was on 42nd Street itself. In 1990, the lawsuits that had held up the development having finally been settled, the Urban Development Corporation formally condemned the eastern