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By Root 625 0

the board of Disney and had designed a house for its chairman, Michael Eisner. But he was also a former student of Robert Venturi’s at Yale, and he had absorbed Venturi’s reaction against the high modern aesthetic into his own form of postmodernism, more playful than Johnson’s. He was, as well, a New York kid who had fond memories of the era of carny populism in Times Square. Stern would resist what he called “the Rockefeller Center impulse.” Though he shared none of Kalman’s subversive impulses, Stern, like Robertson, felt that you could use pop culture and kitsch to trace a path back to the old 42nd Street without losing yourself in nostalgia.

The interim plan, evocatively called 42nd Street Now! and released in September 1993, was a Kalmanesque manifesto as much as it was a planning document. Probably it was the first document of any kind in the history of Times Square redevelopment that excited urbanists more than it did real estate developers. Stern and Kalman evoked the “thrillingly unpredictable daily drama” of the block’s street life in its age of glory, as well as its shameless commercialism: “42nd Street celebrated, as perhaps no other street or neighborhood did, the individual entrepreneur, whose brash confidence and on-the-money commercial instincts went such a long way towards defining the city’s energy and outlook, at once wildly optimistic and coolly bottom line.” The idea that there need be no contradiction between the drama of the streets and the ring of the cash register, between “authenticity” and the marketplace, was itself something of a revelation, at least in the debate over the future of 42nd Street. Indeed, the document pointedly, if hyperbolically, observed that “top quality office buildings have always been part of the 42nd Street Project Area, and will continue to be a major part of the long-term redevelopment.” Even office towers need not be incompatible with a vibrant street life. (And by this time, the original Johnson/Burgee design was history.)

A brief on behalf of a theory about a place, 42nd Street Now! was more a rhetorical document than a planning one. “The new 42nd Street will be an enhanced version of itself,” Stern and Kalman wrote, “not a gentrified theme park or festival market.” But there was a problem. How can a plan foster a spirit whose essence is spontaneity? How can you intentionally recreate a thing never created by intention in the first place? Martin Gottlieb of the Times had asked the same question ten years earlier, without offering an answer. Stern and Kalman argued that the answer lay in 42nd Street’s peculiar archaeology. “New had been heaped on old,” they wrote, “so that the street now has a richly layered, collaged look almost unique in the world’s great entertainment places.” Forty-second Street was “a collage awaiting yet another layer.” They proposed to add, not subtract; and what they would add, essentially, was a gaudy layer of lights and signs and shiny new outer surfaces. They could not specify how these would be added without destroying the spontaneity they hoped to spark; indeed, 42nd Street Now! presented itself as “an unplan”—a very Kalmanesque word—whose goal was to provoke wild diversity by prohibiting “any uniform or coordinated system.”

Stern and Kalman’s premise was that if you gave 42nd Street a new skin to wriggle into, the old spirit would eventually return on its own. The plan included three “conceptual drawings” of 42nd Street sites decked out in glowing signage, but these are only suggestions (though the northeast corner of 42nd and Eighth now looks very much as Kalman and Stern imagined it). Stripped to its essentials, 42nd Street Now! was a mildly redacted version of the 1987 Times Square guidelines. The plan mandated minimal levels of signage and lighting up and down the street, transparent façades, long hours of operation, sidewalk amenities, and the like. Like the earlier guidelines, it largely left the question of usage—of what would actually happen on the street—up to the tenants themselves.

It was a bold idea, though the language