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By Root 576 0

may have been more brilliant than the idea. Absent the polemics, the design itself was just a little bit . . . Disneyesque. The conceptual drawing for the eastern end of 42nd Street, with a huge globe plastered with TV screens and a giant can of Diet Coke launched halfway out of a billboard and a wrapped gift box on a rooftop, looked like a delirious version of Disneyland. There was no Ferris wheel, but one wouldn’t have been out of place. Wasn’t this, then, old orange juice in new cartons? The answer was “Not quite.” The City at 42nd Street had offered a semisealed and altogether controlled environment, an unspontaneous monument to urban spontaneity. The 42nd Street Now! plan offered a design matrix, a set of materials and dimensions and aesthetic principles from which infinite possibilities could spring. And the plan was oriented to the street—to the pedestrian—rather than to the interior; it embraced the daily drama. Nevertheless, the new willingness to explore pop culture, with whatever level of irony or camp, meant that “Disneyesque” was not the epithet it had been in 1980. The Technicolor world of the urban theme park no longer inspired the horror it had before.

A public that had long since given up hope for the block greeted 42nd Street Now! excitedly. (Muschamp called it a “wonderful plan,” which would “encourage the dormant genius of the place to shine.”) But the Cooper & Eckstut guidelines had been admirable, too, and they had been brushed aside when they proved inconvenient (though the design principles for Times Square had been strictly applied). George Klein was just as eager as Rebecca Robertson to see glimmers of life on 42nd Street, and Prudential Insurance, which was financing the office development, had agreed to pay $20 million to bring the interim plan to life. But the plan applied to Klein’s five sites as well as to the rest of the block; and Klein was still dreaming of Rockefeller Center. “If you’re tearing an area down because of tawdriness,” he asks plaintively, “why are you putting the tawdriness back in?” Klein argued, correctly, that the welter of signs and the flashing lights were native to Times Square, but not to 42nd Street; Stern and Kalman had, at the very least, stretched a point. But Klein was in a much weaker position than he had been in 1984: Prudential had already paid out well over $200 million for condemnation and improvements. “We had so much money in this already that we really didn’t have much of a choice,” as he says. And Robertson would not back down. So this time, when the real estate dynamic came up against public values—or at least against a publicly determined sense of the common good—it was the latter that won.

Now a stunning new script was ready for 42nd Street; but it was still only a script, until someone actually decided to move in. Since the street would be about popular entertainment, it plainly needed one of those giant entertainment companies Herbert Muschamp had fantasized about. And this led to a crowning irony. The single brand name that could do the most for 42nd Street was plainly Disney. But Disney was not only a nonurban but a fundamentally antiurban entertainer; the supremely orchestrated environment of a Disneyland was utterly incompatible with the accidental nature of urban life, not to mention the thrillingly unpredictable daily drama of 42nd Street. But by 1992, Michael Eisner, the chairman of the company, was thinking about creating live stage plays from Disney’s hit movies, starting with the new Beauty and the Beast. And Eisner was himself a New Yorker and a theater buff who rarely missed a Broadway play.

Both public and private officials in New York had been urging Eisner to look at Broadway as the flagship for his new theater effort. Eisner had consistently declined, unwilling to bring Mickey Mouse into such close proximity with massage parlors and head shops. In March 1993, Eisner paid a visit to New York and went to see the blueprints for his new house in Robert Stern’s office. Stern showed him the twenty-five-foot-long foam core model for 42nd