The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [93]
The block had finally become the tabula rasa developers always wished it to be; the question was whether anyone would come along to write a new script. The premise of the 42nd Street Development Project had always been that everything had to happen at once; in fact, George Klein had originally bid for the entire package in order to protect himself from a situation in which he was trying to attract corporate tenants at one end of the street while the wrong sort of people streamed out of Ginger’s Wet Dream at the other. But now the street was being held captive to the towers.
It was the condemnation process, oddly enough, that freed public officials to see the street anew. The 42nd Street DP now owned much of the block, and thus had to take responsibility for it. “The best thing that happened is when we took over the street,” says Rebecca Robertson, a former New York City planning official who became the DP’s executive director at the time of the condemnation. Robertson spent a good part of 1990 talking to the sex shops’ owners, and the theater owners, and the lighting and costume suppliers and rehearsal studio managers who worked in the buildings upstairs. She came to realize that 42nd Street was not simply a case history of urban pathology, as it seemed to George Klein or Philip Johnson, but a great mecca of entertainment in serious disrepair. She saw, or felt she saw, the vanished traces of Hubert’s and Nathan’s and the penny arcades. “If you spent time on the street,” Robertson says, “it spoke to you. Much of it was in ruins, but there’s something more powerful about ruins than any reality.”
The city-state plan had envisioned that the theaters on the block would be restored to operation as legitimate theaters, which of course they had not been for more than half a century; two, the Victory and the Liberty, were to open as nonprofit venues, while the others were to be self-supporting. Exactly where the audience for these new theaters would come from was hardly clear. And it was obvious to Robertson, and to everyone else in the theater world, that, with the exception of the New Amsterdam, the 42nd Street theaters were too small to turn a profit. Robertson concluded that the public planners had cynically dangled the prospect of theater preservation before the public in order to win approval for commercial development. But preservationism itself seemed like a specious response to 42nd Street’s crude, commercial, hectoring soul. “If they had more respect for what the street had been,” Robertson says, “they never would have fashioned a plan like that.” Her vision for 42nd Street was not so very different from Hugh Hardy’s for Times Square: flashing lights, big signs, popular entertainment. The new Times Square zoning rules offered a forward-looking program designed to preserve the area’s essential character—though they, too, conceded the inevitability of overscale office towers.
Robertson’s ambition was to fashion a populist alternative to the backward-looking and in any case unachievable elitism of the original plan. And she had arrived at her job at what turned out to be an oddly propitious moment to forge a new 42nd Street. It was becoming fashionable to embrace the heady chaos and cheap thrills of Times Square, as it had not been a decade earlier, when Cityscape would have enclosed 42nd Street in glass. Pop culture, which is to say commercial culture, was lapping at the ramparts of high culture. The controversial “High and Low” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, held in 1990, questioned