A Times Square renaissance is underway, but instead of pointing to the future, the operative word is nostalgia.
On a Jenny-Holzeresque message strip, the words "Jane Austen" inexplicably zip by. Across a vast billboard, 50-foot slackers exude just enough ennui to sell CK One. Bolted to the tower that once housed The New York Times and gave this place its name, the Sony Jumbotron TV demands, "Have You Seen 'Dignity'?" - a video promo for Bob Dylan's latest album. And everywhere you look, Godzilla-sized electronic signs strobe out their logos in a druggy come-on: Coca Cola spirals, Fuji ripples, and Hertz flickers so slickly it almost hurts.
New York City's Times Square. An outdoor info cathedral. A neon nirvana. Dysfunction junction. The "Crossroads of the World." And the original multimedia experience. Every possible source of information and stimulation - not to mention degradation - is stuffed into these few famous blocks.
Although the Times Square Business Improvement District claims crime has dropped 42 percent since 1992, chaos still reigns here. Taxis fight with pedestrians. Down the street from Beauty and the Beast (in its - what, 174th month?), Little Miss Anal is pulling in crowds (has she seen dignity?). A single store sells CD-ROM porno, a high-resolution monitor, a US$2.99 Statue of Liberty pencil sharpener, a $3,900 chandelier, an electronic device billed as "the world's smallest loser detector," cloissoné eggs, and a postcard that reads "Sex With Strangers in the Middle of the Night."
It's doubtful that Times Square will ever see dignity, but big changes are due. As a traditional media center in the midst of a digital media revolution, the Square's future poses some interesting questions. Will it remain an evolving cultural pulse-point in the next millennium? Or will it become an irrelevant kitsch zone, a ghetto for quaint signage and bloated musicals like Cats? Many architects and city planners are asking themselves, What might Times Square - the manic zone where Seventh Avenue, Broadway, and 42nd Street cross - look like in 2020?
The possibilities of a truly plugged-in Times Square are tantalizing, in that "AT&T - You Will" sort of way. Imagine: a screen mounted on a Benetton façade that sucks street-fashion video clips over the Net from Tokyo's Ginza or London's Piccadilly Circus and "unites the world's colors" in real time. What about rows of e-booths, where Type A personalities could check their e-mail on the run? You can even envision the Square as a giant open-air videogame - from a booth in the center, jaded millennial kids with laser guns could track little hologram villains, as they scamper over the area's rooftop signs. Step right up! Shoot to kill in the HoloSquare!
Don't count on it, kids. A Times Square renaissance is underway, but the operative word is nostalgia. The south end of the Square, a battleground for more than 10 years in a troubled marriage between public and private enterprise, is currently undergoing a major redevelopment known as "42nd Street Now!" Instead of looking forward to the next millennium, the project - overseen by New York State's Urban Development Corporation, as well as the New York City Economic Development Corporation - is largely about the past.
It's a wonder anything is happening, given the project's tortured history. The area hit a sleazy low in the late '70s; then the state looked to begin buying property on 42nd Street. In an ensuing decade of squabbles, conditions, counter-conditions, and anti-conditions - not to mention the perceived need to lure back the tourists in safe, familiar ways - the bureaucrats ignored the unfolding media future. In the end, their agenda focused on re-creating Times Square's glory days. 42nd Street Now! - a theme-park reincarnation of 1940s New York - has been a critical success, earning praise from The New York Times's architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, among others.
But the question remains: Has the potential for truly relevant vitality been lost? Will the "new" Times Square be new enough?
This isn't the first time New Yorkers have been subjected to the resurrection buzz. Dreaming up new futures for Times Square is a hobby here. Over the years, architects have held Utopian contests ("Cover every vertical surface in light bulbs!"), developers have proposed drastic surgery ("Porno out! Convention center in!"), and even infovisionaries have had their say ("ATMs for Broadway tickets!").
The north end of the Square has seen a vulgar renewal marked by the recent arrival of some clumsy skyscrapers and some corporate big boys (David Letterman, Morgan Stanley). The south end, anchored by the Times Tower, has remained creepy and bleak: a big mess.
Historically, solutions to the Times Square mess have tended to fall into two categories: the Clean Slate Approach (pave over pimp paradise, put up more banal skyscrapers) and the Turbocharged Nostalgia Approach (pump in new power, but keep the honky-tonk chaos). 42nd Street Now! takes the latter approach.
It is only an "interim design strategy" - a temporary compromise reached by the Urban Development Corporation and a pair of private developers, The Prudential Insurance Company and Park Tower Reality; together, the team has a longstanding development deal for four pivotal sites around Times Tower. Intended to serve the area for 5 to 15 years, 42nd Street Now! could give way to more lucrative skyscrapers once the real estate market revives. (More on this curious condition later.) Nevertheless, this interim plan has proven a hot public relations tool. In a strategic move, the Urban Development Corporation hired the creative team of Tibor Kalman, the innovative force behind Benetton's Colors magazine, and Robert A. M. Stern, an A-list architect, to draft the sketches and guidelines for 42nd Street Now! As Stern puts it: "We used the Field of Dreams approach. If we showed people what it could be like, they would come."
And come they have. A key corporate player is the Walt Disney Company, future tenant of a 47-story hotel being developed by Dream Team Associates. Disney has also pledged to renovate the New Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street. It's hard to imagine a better new neighbor, given the state's agenda. Tomorrowland and Tron aside, Disney is more about cleverly recycling a fuzzy-wuzzy dwarf-filled past than conceptualizing the future. Its PG-rated reputation is considered a crucial element in the effort to recast the Square as a squeaky-clean tourist destination. It's almost as if Disney is a guard against Blade Runner scenarios. Keep it clean. Keep it safe. Catalyzed by its presence, tenants as disparate as MTV and Madame Tussaud's have been pondering leases in the area.
Meanwhile, a series of bright-red construction barriers went up, enlivened by hypey slogans ("The Crossroads of the World: Dazzle, Shopping, Fun!"). Coming to life behind those barriers, 42nd Street Now! is focusing on refurbishing about 14 existing buildings (and erecting two small-scale additions) for retail/entertainment uses. With a cheery influx of pop iconography, Kalman and Stern want to lure a technology-addicted public away from the screen and back to these once-scummy streets. "At a time when pop's technology (VCRs, Walkmans, virtual reality) tends to reinforce spatial isolation," observed the Times's Muschamp, "a public space built on pop is practically a Utopian proposition."
Kalman and Stern want to see a fresh mix of old and new, of high tech and low tech, of high-rise and low-rise structures. The 42nd Street Now! development code, which the architects call an "anti-plan," prescribes street-level glass (no chilly mirrored exteriors) and a deliberately tasteless riot of signs on every building. A certain percentage of signs per site must be retro-neon constructions - a glowing, steaming 3-D teacup, for instance, to mark a new café - yet mixed with newer formats (video, LED, and digitally printed "flex-face" billboards).
Exactly how the code will be realized remains to be seen. The sketches envision sports cars spinning, auto-show style, atop hotels; zillions of clocks keeping global time; stadium-style scoreboards issuing continuous sports updates. Meanwhile, speculation has spurred other redevelopment interest. Around the Square, a number of proposals have already come and gone, while others have zoomed into high gear.
Until recently, Madame Tussaud's, which has made a name for itself in theme-park high tech, was eyeing the old Times Tower as a millennial tourist draw. The Madame's concept: a series of interactive displays to re-create mythical Manhattan, from Warhol's Factory (audio animatronic Andy!) to the top of the Chrysler Building. But another company purchased the tower earlier this year; its plans have not been made public.
Across the street, Stern had envisioned a 60-foot globe cantilevered over 42nd Street from a café's roof and slathered with dozens of screens, each rented, theoretically, to an advertiser. From an adjacent rooftop, his "noise tower" would bark out ad pitches, poetry, even pointless ambient noise. "Every place in the world, you're supposed to be quiet," he says. "I wanted an alternative." Unfortunately, advertisers tend to like clearer message delivery systems. As 42nd Street Now! moved from vision to reality, both ideas failed to make the cut.
MTV, perhaps the quintessential new Times Square tenant, has been contemplating a street-level presence on 42nd Street. The plan, according to MTV: to combine three "spermy" historical theaters (including the Lyric, the place Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver dragged Cybill Shepherd to see Swedish Marriage Manual) into a mixed-use complex. If the project goes ahead, expect a theater to stage "Unpluggeds," a gonzo concept-restaurant, a studio tour, and an influx of hyper-edgy design.
Already in full makeover mode is the Bertelsmann Building at 45th and Broadway; owned by the German media company, it was a meek behemoth until recently. Now its lowest floors are undergoing a transformation: soon it will be a pop culture circus, an entertainment complex combining a Virgin Megastore (the largest in the world), a Planet Hollywood-esque sports restaurant, and a Sony fourplex theater.
The most dramatic announcement to date has been Dream Team Associates's successful bid, in a partnership with Disney, to build a 47-story hotel on 42nd Street (a short walk from the New Amsterdam Theater, which Disney is renovating to house Broadway versions of its blockbuster animated features). Playfully garish, the hotel design supposedly represents a meteor in midcrash, the tower representing the meteor trail (it will emit bursts of "pixie dust" light). The New York Times called it "a jazz fanfare for the millennium, an apocalypse with room service ... deliberately evocative of chaos." But for those who miss the obscure meteor metaphor, it looks a lot like a Vertical Disneyland. Hopeful completion date: December 31, 1999.
Looking ahead to the same pivotal date, the Times Square Business Improvement District has launched a Web site called "The Search for the Big Idea: Times Square New Year's Eve 2000" (www.mediabridge.com/nyc/bids/tsbid/ ). The contest will run until September 1995. Ten area "visionaries," including Frank Biondi from Viacom Inc. and Richard Branson from the Virgin Group, will choose the winning entry. The most festively gargantuan idea, that is.
It all sounds rather appealing, but the "new Times Square" is actually part of a bigger story of stalemates and misguided reform that spans the last 10 years. This history explains why interim renovations on four central sites may get bulldozed within a decade and why some of the more "millennial" concepts for the Square have already bit the dust.
Think back to the early '80s: Brooke Shields is starring in Endless Love, preppies are reading handbooks, and Andy Warhol is still alive. It's post-disco, pre-Macintosh, and the sleazy south end of Times Square is a pit of crime, porn, and drugs. Enter the Urban Development Corporation with its initial redevelopment scheme, a quartet of massive skyscrapers. The Prudential-Park Tower development team would finance and build these office buildings (clustered around the Times Tower at 42nd Street and Broadway on sites currently affected by the 42nd Street Now! plan) in exchange for substantial long-range tax breaks.
The $1.6 billion design by architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee featured four stupendously boring and nearly identical towers, ranging from 29 to 56 stories, topped with "classy" mansard roofs and untainted by any exterior signage. When it was unveiled in 1984, their design was a critical bomb, depressing almost everyone. It did, however, clarify the Times Square debate.
Supporters of the skyscraper scheme, including then-Mayor Ed Koch, said: Yes! Clear away the scum in one fell swoop and impose this respectable new order to lure Fortune 500 folks. Opponents, including theater denizens and media pundits, argued that the scheme ignored Times Square's entertainment history as well as its still-walloping tourism potential, and would render 42nd Street a dead zone after dark. In a fairly typical reaction, The New Yorker's Brendan Gill lamented: "It's going to gut the life out. We'll never see [Times Square] again." Others invoked Nazi conformity, calling the design "Albert Speer's tribute to the Third Reich."
The developers successfully weathered protests and legal challenges. Passions ran high. So did the bills. To acquire, condemn, and vacate the existing structures, Prudential and Park Tower spent over $300 million. But then the '80s ended and the real estate market collapsed. Suddenly, skyscrapers held little appeal. Waiting for its future, 42nd Street - one of the most famous streets in the world - had gone from a steamy hellhole to a boarded-up ghost town, with a row of blank theater marquees and a few tenacious sex shops. Everyone involved was tired.
In 1992, the Urban Development Corporation, stung by criticism and unwilling to wait for the market to revive, decided to try again. The result was the modest and "sensitive" 42nd Street Now!, an "interim plan" for the same four sites, intended to last 5 to 15 years. After some coaxing, the Prudential-Park Tower team agreed to finance the renovations to the tune of $25 million, with the guarantee that, once the demand for office space picked up, they would be free to clear the sites and build some version of their skyscraper plan.
Lively as it is, 42nd Street Now! poses a couple of problems. Efforts to attract hip retailers (think Nike Town) may be compromised by the short leases inherent in an interim plan. The development can also be seen as an overcompensation, a deliberately "charming" retro version that's certainly reassuring after those four scary Big Brotherish towers, but now reflects a distinctly anti-technology bias.
Stern speaks nervously of the "cybernetic people" and his belief that, despite the PC revolution, there is a "viable but fragile culture supporting live entertainment uses." Disney chair Michael Eisner, announcing his company's development plans for 42nd Street, called the area's revival as a public place a strike against the electronic "cocoon."
In the two years since the announcement, of course, rampant cyberfever has moved beyond home PCs, redefining the Zeitgeist. For example, Jane Thompson and Ben Wood - the architects from Cambridge, Massachusetts who won the job of translating the guidelines of the 42nd Street Now! "anti-plan" into 110,000 square feet of rentable rehabilitated space for Prudential and Park Tower - are wary of creating an anachronism.
Thompson, who successfully revived Union Station in Washington, DC, sees Times Square as part of a bigger trend - the transformation of the City into the Theme Park. "You can't prescribe this kind of nostalgic, staged chaos," she says, "without introducing the danger of hyper-reality, the substitution of simulated memories for the real product."
Wood, meanwhile, admits some disappointment that his firm's more progressive ideas could not be renconciled with the lease constraints or the retro mandate of the official vision. "I regret the attempt to preserve Times Square as a vision of the past rather than a vision of the future," he says. "If Times Square became a cultural artifact for the new media age, people would come to it for the right reason."
Wood had earmarked one of the "interim" sites for an online café (to be developed with Jeet Singh of Art Technology Group Inc., the company responsible for the Cybersmith online café in Cambridge), but a lease limit of less than 10 years snuffed this idea; the cost of installing the infrastructure couldn't be justified. "People ought to be able to go to the Café of Tomorrow and dial up Tokyo if they wish," says Wood.
When it came to signage, he wanted to see Times Square exploit a similar digital ease. Rather than 3-D retro signs perched "permanently" on top of buildings, Wood favors the flex-face billboard, which is printed digitally on a single huge sheet of plastic, and can literally be changed in minutes. He imagines scenarios where a single company - say Calvin Klein or Sony - would unveil 10 new flex-face billboards at once, as a "monthly media event." The public may cherish neon, says Wood, but "the market would much prefer these instant billboards." The Nintendo generation would, too, he adds: "My kids aren't going to go to Times Square to see a bunch of [sculptural] camels smoking cigarettes. But they'll go to see 10 billboards change in 30 seconds."
With Singh, Wood also imagined a sort of neo-Tin Pan Alley - a series of ateliers for new media production that would take advantage of disused storefront sites, and rent them on a short-term basis to entrepreneurs. A Kinko's for the next generation.
Instead, are we going to get "dazzle, shopping, fun"? DisneyNYC? Yep, it certainly looks that way.
With the campaign to revive Times Square entering its umpteenth year, New Yorkers aren't sure what they're going to get. In the meantime, Disney's presence should be a sufficiently powerful magnet to draw other big spenders to the area, whatever happens to the four interim sites down the line. The needs of "Fortune 500 folks," which meant yawny, sterile towers in 1984, may well evolve beyond recognition, forging a new pop-corporate culture, one that doesn't sleep and has no need for "respectable" mansard roofs.
It's tricky, though, to make predictions. Times Square is a bratty place, unlikely to obey any official vision, and likely to buck the odds. As Thompson puts it, the Square's authenticity has always been rooted in the free market and in the risk-taking individual "barking his story, singing his song, shouting his name in all the lights he can afford." She adds: "Chaos will take care of itself."
