by Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region
Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon, by Lynne B. Sagalyn, MIT Press, 2001.
Visitors to Times Square these days will stroll past bold new skyscrapers that constitute some of the best contemporary architecture in the world. There are the Reuters and Conde Naste headquarters at 3 and 4 Times Square, both designed by Fox & Fowle. There's the Ernst & Young headquarters at 5 Times Square, designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox. A few blocks up at 745 7th avenue is the 38-story Lehman Brothers headquarters, also by Kohn Pedersen Fox, with its atrium-like glass top and two-story imbedded electronic sign at street level. All these new towers slice upward and outward with bold angles, colors and materials.
Less than a decade ago, none of these buildings existed, and families dared not walk streets lined with decaying theaters showing X-rated movies. Times Square was a center mostly of vice. Now, Times Square is a center for global media, Broadway theater, and family entertainment.
Not everyone thinks the city's center has changed all for the better, but few would want to return the district to where it was 15 years ago. How did it come to be so utterly re- invented?
In her new book, Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon, Lynne B. Sagalyn shows clearly how the bright new Times Square emerged from a typically opaque 20- year process of redevelopment. Sagalyn, director of the MBA Real Estate Program at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, shows who fought the fight, and how, to remake the district that Rolling Stone labeled "the sleaziest block" in the nation in 1981.
Along the way, Sagalyn eviscerates the various "myths" that have grown up around Times Square redevelopment: that Disney did it, that the market did it, that Giuliani did it. Actually, public policy did it, working with private interests and modified for the better by "the civics." As far as politicians, mayors Koch and Dinkins, and Gov. Cuomo, deserve most of the credit, Sagalyn says. Other vital players were Prudential Insurance, which fronted the money, and various community groups that pushed the city and state to redesign a lousy initial plan.
The book is very readable, although at 600 pages it's heavy enough to crack walnuts and not exactly bedtime reading. Sagalyn separates her story into three parts: planning, implementation, and assessment. The story she tells is essentially this: city leaders, eyeing a seedy Times Square, imagine a more prestigious and valuable district. But how to pay for it, particularly when the public is wary of new taxes? They get the giant insurance company, Prudential, to put up the money to condemn and purchase 13 acres of property. In return, Prudential gets the right to build four huge skyscrapers. As Sagalyn explains, the city basically used floor-to-air-ratio (FAR) rights as "a license to print money," and a way to hide redevelopment costs from the public. Once the porn is gone, big companies move in, paying for big new skyscrapers plus the renovation of the district's famous Broadway theaters. In the process, they create a revived and reimagined Times Square, with giant electronic signs, new skyscrapers, and tacky corporatized attractions.
Not everyone loves the new Times Square. "Disneyfied" and "corporate theme park" are usual pejoratives. Roberta Gratz, author of Cities Back From The Edge and an advocate of grassroots planning, laments the ejection of the small theater and music businesses that once were in many non-descript buildings. "The fact is that it is an office park with a shopping mall and all New York character is gone," Gratz said in an interview. Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch architect, has said the new district is a faux, simulacrum of itself.
Their criticism is accurate, but incomplete. At street level, Times Square is overly sanitized. But the center of the nation's biggest city should not be a porn-capital. The long- term legacy of the new Times Square will be its exciting architecture. In 50 or 100 years, people will fight to save the Durst or Lehman building the same way they did the Flatiron or the Chrysler. The current uses that define Times Square - from NASDAQ to MTV - may fade, but the architecture will endure.
Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon, by Lynne B. Sagalyn, MIT Press, 2001.
Visitors to Times Square these days will stroll past bold new skyscrapers that constitute some of the best contemporary architecture in the world. There are the Reuters and Conde Naste headquarters at 3 and 4 Times Square, both designed by Fox & Fowle. There's the Ernst & Young headquarters at 5 Times Square, designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox. A few blocks up at 745 7th avenue is the 38-story Lehman Brothers headquarters, also by Kohn Pedersen Fox, with its atrium-like glass top and two-story imbedded electronic sign at street level. All these new towers slice upward and outward with bold angles, colors and materials.
Less than a decade ago, none of these buildings existed, and families dared not walk streets lined with decaying theaters showing X-rated movies. Times Square was a center mostly of vice. Now, Times Square is a center for global media, Broadway theater, and family entertainment.
Not everyone thinks the city's center has changed all for the better, but few would want to return the district to where it was 15 years ago. How did it come to be so utterly re- invented?
In her new book, Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon, Lynne B. Sagalyn shows clearly how the bright new Times Square emerged from a typically opaque 20- year process of redevelopment. Sagalyn, director of the MBA Real Estate Program at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, shows who fought the fight, and how, to remake the district that Rolling Stone labeled "the sleaziest block" in the nation in 1981.
Along the way, Sagalyn eviscerates the various "myths" that have grown up around Times Square redevelopment: that Disney did it, that the market did it, that Giuliani did it. Actually, public policy did it, working with private interests and modified for the better by "the civics." As far as politicians, mayors Koch and Dinkins, and Gov. Cuomo, deserve most of the credit, Sagalyn says. Other vital players were Prudential Insurance, which fronted the money, and various community groups that pushed the city and state to redesign a lousy initial plan.
The book is very readable, although at 600 pages it's heavy enough to crack walnuts and not exactly bedtime reading. Sagalyn separates her story into three parts: planning, implementation, and assessment. The story she tells is essentially this: city leaders, eyeing a seedy Times Square, imagine a more prestigious and valuable district. But how to pay for it, particularly when the public is wary of new taxes? They get the giant insurance company, Prudential, to put up the money to condemn and purchase 13 acres of property. In return, Prudential gets the right to build four huge skyscrapers. As Sagalyn explains, the city basically used floor-to-air-ratio (FAR) rights as "a license to print money," and a way to hide redevelopment costs from the public. Once the porn is gone, big companies move in, paying for big new skyscrapers plus the renovation of the district's famous Broadway theaters. In the process, they create a revived and reimagined Times Square, with giant electronic signs, new skyscrapers, and tacky corporatized attractions.
Not everyone loves the new Times Square. "Disneyfied" and "corporate theme park" are usual pejoratives. Roberta Gratz, author of Cities Back From The Edge and an advocate of grassroots planning, laments the ejection of the small theater and music businesses that once were in many non-descript buildings. "The fact is that it is an office park with a shopping mall and all New York character is gone," Gratz said in an interview. Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch architect, has said the new district is a faux, simulacrum of itself.
Their criticism is accurate, but incomplete. At street level, Times Square is overly sanitized. But the center of the nation's biggest city should not be a porn-capital. The long- term legacy of the new Times Square will be its exciting architecture. In 50 or 100 years, people will fight to save the Durst or Lehman building the same way they did the Flatiron or the Chrysler. The current uses that define Times Square - from NASDAQ to MTV - may fade, but the architecture will endure.
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