The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [99]
No one will ever know what would have happened had the 42nd Street Development Project never existed. But the essential problem with the laissez-faire theory is that 42nd Street already was a self-sustaining marketplace in the early 1980s—a market for pornographic and action movies, for drugs and alcohol and sex and con games. Absent outside intervention, the perverse ecology of the street would have remained— which is to say that the street could not have been cleaned up without the use of the state’s condemnation powers. And the pattern of fragmented ownership would also have precluded much new investment: there were 240 owners in the project area as of 1981. The real estate heir Douglas Durst insists that a patient assembler—like the Durst family—could have slowly amassed property until they were ready to build, but the Dursts themselves have been assembling parcels for thirty years on 42nd Street immediately to the east of Seventh Avenue without finding the opportunity to build—and this without the perverse ecology of Times Square. What’s more, developers eager to build office space on the Deuce would have had a tough time persuading tenants to relocate to a street whose sidewalks were crowded with hustlers and vagrants.
What about the opposite scenario—a more obtrusive, more intellectually serious, and better-heeled state? Look at the city of Paris, which in recent decades has rebuilt its highway system, expanded its periphery, and built such extraordinary monuments as the Pompidou Center. This last, in fact, was a part of a much larger project to level and rebuild the ancient quarter known as the Marais—a project as large as the 42nd Street redevelopment, and occurring at much the same time. In Post-Industrial Cities, H. V. Savitch compares the two projects, as well as the renovation of Covent Garden, in London. Paris, as Savitch points out, is the great pride of France and of the French people; it would be unthinkable to leave so profound a matter as the expansion or preservation of an ancient Parisian neighborhood to the marketplace. The French government bore much of the $1 billion cost of the redevelopment of the Marais, and the plan was fashioned by the Prefect of Paris, an haut fonctionnaire operating at the highest reaches of the bureaucracy and insulated from virtually all outside influence—a modern version of Baron Haussman, who dynamited ancient Paris and created the modern city in the middle of the nineteenth century. The public had virtually no role in the reconstruction of the Marais: the great market area of Les Halles was leveled without so much as a hearing. And private developers had little more say than the public. In New York, by contrast, as Savitch writes, development is a matter of “political entrepreneurship” in which various contending forces struggle to assemble a coalition of the self-interested. It’s no coincidence that Paris feels like a supremely planned city, and New York like a supremely unplanned one. Paris is shaped according to a set of beliefs about its nature; in New York, Savitch writes, “The momentum for growth is so strong that little is sacred when it comes to matters of architectural preservation.”
If New York were more like Paris, then the redevelopment of 42nd Street would have been guided more by a sense of the street’s place in New York’s history and culture, and less by the wish to expand commercial space westward. Planning would be a far more serious occupation than it is now. And city government would not have surrendered its municipal obligations to the private sector by counting on developers to pay for public amenities. Presumably, if Americans