Signs of the Times

In 1981, the president of the 42nd Street Development Corporation complained to a reporter, “Do you know there hasn’t been a new building on 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues for forty years? … It’s almost as if that block is immune to change.” By the early 1980s, West 42nd had become known as “the meanest street in America,” its maze of porn theaters, disreputable hotels, all-night cafeterias, and “massage parlors” home to drug addicts, prostitutes, and shady characters. Times Square, long the image that New York City presented to out-of-towners, had fallen on hard times. Its famous electric signs had gone dark, its billboards blank. The area ranked first in the city for felonies and net crime complaints. It was a violent and forlorn place, and it seemed destined to remain that way.

Twenty years later, the sex industry had vanished, crime rates had plummeted, and a frenzy of new construction was in progress. How did this seemingly incorrigible part of New York, which countless mayors had promised, but failed, to clean up, change so drastically? How was Times Square remade? This is the subject of Lynne B. Sagalyn’s new book, which delves into the lengthy, complex, and obscure process—planning decisions, negotiations with developers, property acquisitions, legal maneuvers—that produced this result.

Sagalyn, a professor of real estate at Columbia Business School, told this story once before. In her 2003 book Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon, she described the politics, money, and personalities behind the two-decade redevelopment of West 42nd Street in almost seven hundred painstakingly detailed pages. Times Square Remade is something of a postscript, or an update on “what the transformation [of the area has] brought about” in the twenty years since she last visited the subject. It is also broader in scope: Sagalyn contends that by reviewing the “ways in which real estate and its particular dynamic have shaped Times Square,” we gain insight into “the dynamics of urban change” more generally. For this reason, she sets the redevelopment project in a longer historical perspective, narrating the rise, decline, and renewal of the area since the early twentieth century. Her account ultimately affirms the outcome and vindicates those who overcame both naysayers and red tape in order to achieve it, aligning them with the march of Progress.

LONGACRE SQUARE was rechristened Times Square on New Year’s Eve 1905, when print mogul Adolph Ochs threw a massive public celebration to mark the completion of the new, twenty-five-story New York Times building (then the second tallest in New York) at 42nd Street and Broadway. Just months earlier, the new IRT and BMT subways opened in the area, making it the most crowded place in the entire city and cementing its status as New York’s entertainment district. Alongside its many “legitimate” theaters were dozens of burlesques, cabarets, and, eventually, movie palaces, all of which catered to popular tastes. Thrill seekers flocked to vaudeville theaters to gawk at strongmen, trained animals, ventriloquists, and other exotica. In this soil, the American art of the con thrived. On sweltering summer days, the lobby of Oscar Hammerstein’s Victoria displayed a thermometer, resting atop a hidden cake of ice, that indicated a mysteriously consistent indoor temperature of seventy degrees. Heated elevators conveyed visitors to the building’s roof garden, perpetuating the false impression that the air somehow really was cool up there.

Times Square was a place of illusion and magical thinking, and it quickly emerged as a laboratory for the development of a distinctive, if extremely crass, commercial aesthetic. In the 1910s, new zoning laws permitted the display of giant, building-sized billboards, which soon filled seemingly every inch of the square. These were accompanied by equally enormous electric signs, or “spectaculars,” composed of many thousands of individual bulbs, which became attractions in themselves. As Sagalyn notes, “the exceptionally long sightlines of the square’s bowtie—1,400 feet from 42nd to 47th—made a perfect showcase for these signs.” Over time, the spectaculars grew bigger and brighter, and they were enhanced by new technologies, such as neon light and animation. According to the historian William Leach, by the mid-1920s, the square had become “the most densely packed and most expensive advertising space in the world,” a place where advertisers sometimes paid for locations “simply to keep others out.” The advertisers and designers who ruled Times Square viewed the crowds with chilling condescension. O. J. Gude, the inventor of the spectacular, proclaimed that his creation “literally forces its announcement on the vision of the uninterested as well as the interested passerby. … Signboards are so placed that everybody must read them … and absorb the advertiser’s lesson willingly or unwillingly.” Douglas Leigh, who added animated motion to the spectaculars in the 1930s, likened their viewers to “moths [drawn] to a flame.”

To the critical mind, Times Square epitomized the worst aspects of mass culture. Writing in the WPA Guide to New York City (1939), a young John Cheever deadpanned: “a wall of light and color, urging the onlooker to chew gum, drink beer, see the world’s most beautiful girls, or attend the premiere of a Hollywood film, lights the clouds above Manhattan with a glow like that of dry timber fire.” To G. K. Chesterton, the square was “a magnificent spectacle … for a man who cannot read.” But Times Square was also a powerful symbol of modernity, and it was, for better or worse, New York’s portal to the rest of the world. Images of “the Great White Way” appeared on postcards that millions of tourists sent to friends and family, stimulating more pilgrimages and, in an endless feedback loop, putting more postcards into circulation. Decades later, in On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square (2006), the urban theorist Marshall Berman would champion these enthusiasts against the snobs, celebrating Times Square as “a great fair or bazaar or agora of human possibilities, an exemplary democratic space”—a place where, under the immense pressure of light, density, and motion, “ego-boundaries liquefy” and “identities get slippery.” (To Berman, anyone who did not share this enthusiasm was hostile to change and unprepared for the challenge and thrill of modern life.)

The early-twentieth-century boom that brought breakneck commercial development to Times Square quickly stalled. With the onset of the Depression, the area acquired the tawdry and unsavory character that would haunt it for half a century. The class composition of the area shifted downward. Legitimate theater was replaced by vaudeville, burlesque, and “grind houses,” which showed sensational, low-budget movies to a largely male audience. Sexual segregation of the square increased, and 42nd Street in particular became a cruising ground for male hustlers and their johns. Parts of the district developed a reputation for being unsafe. The breathtaking wave of development that reshaped Midtown after the war, saturating the area with office towers, bypassed Times Square. By 1960, the blocks near Grand Central were overbuilt and congested, but corporate tenants remained uninterested in relocating to the West 40s.

The reputation of Times Square went into freefall during the 1960s, bottomed out sometime in the ’70s, and barely recovered in the ’80s—a thirty-year span that marked the golden age of what the cognoscenti called “the four Ps” (prostitutes, pornography, peep shows, and pimps) and which is immortalized in such films as Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Taxi Driver (1976). As Sagalyn writes, Times Square had become “a sad place, often a repository of runaway and forgotten youth”—and, to a significant extent, a lawless and dangerous place, one that many thousands of commuters took care to avoid on their daily routes to and from the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Despite the intense police presence, and regardless of repeated efforts to crack down on vice, things only seemed to become more chaotic. “Cleaning up West 42nd Street was something of a long-running joke in New York City politics,” she notes, adding that “everyone running for city office promised to do ‘something’ about the street, but little if anything changed.” The many unemployed people who filled the district, left behind by deindustrialization and dependent on public assistance, lived primarily in former hotels that had been converted into squalid SROs—“warehouses for the new generation of urban poor,” Berman writes, that allowed negligent landlords to collect “bonanzas from the Welfare Department.”

Unsurprisingly, Times Square was the whipping boy of conservatives like Pat Buchanan and Midge Decter, for whom it embodied the excesses of midcentury urban liberalism. It was both a symbol of a culture that had lost its way and living proof of the unintended consequences of overly generous social spending. To others, West 42nd Street was a thrilling, even a sacred place. In his celebrated 1999 memoir, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, the science fiction writer and queer theorist Samuel R. Delany lovingly recalls the area’s porn theaters as a liberating, cosmopolitan venue for intimate encounters of a kind rarely possible elsewhere. Far from the soulless, lonely places many imagined, they were “humane and functional, fulfilling needs that most of our society does not yet know how to acknowledge.” But this was a fringe view; to the vast majority of New Yorkers, “the Deuce” was a moral disaster. And while the commercial sex industry was extremely profitable for landlords, whose byzantine chains of ownership and leasehold interests (“aimed to confuse, if not obfuscate,” according to Sagalyn) allowed them to declaim responsibility for what went on inside their buildings, its existence presented an economic conundrum for the city’s elites and policymakers. As Sagalyn writes, the area’s “Sodom-and-Gomorrah form of social ecology inhibited new investment,” while its down-on-its-heels image “threatened to jeopardize the city’s economic viability and global reputation.” Developers continued to pass it over at a time when the logic of urban governance was tilting in their direction.

In the mid-1970s, just as the spigot of federal and state funding for municipal budgets dried up, New York City entered a traumatic fiscal crisis that reoriented its political economy in ways that continue to shape policymaking many decades later. Business elites, empowered by their role as creditors and the institution of the Emergency Financial Control Board, seized on the opportunity to create conditions more favorable for the accumulation of capital. The city’s budget shrank by 20 percent from 1975 to 1981 as its political leaders sought to refocus on attracting private investment rather than providing social services. As historian Kim Phillips-Fein has argued, a new consensus emerged: economic growth, through tax incentives and reduced spending, would be the key to the city’s recovery. Although Sagalyn does not present it in these terms, she maps the efforts of policymakers to adapt to the new landscape of fiscal austerity, in which they were forced to rely on real estate development and attract white-collar service and finance jobs in order to bring in much-needed tax revenue. From this perspective, the success of the Times Square redevelopment served as proof-of-concept for a new type of city-building. It showed that cities could once again do Big Things in the neoliberal era.

THE REMAKING OF TIMES SQUARE was, according to Sagalyn, “the biggest and riskiest redevelopment project in New York’s history.” The heart of her book is the story of how that project came to pass despite the many challenges standing in the way. Although plans had been brewing as far back as the Lindsay administration, the project began in earnest under Ed Koch, who saw it as a means of securing his legacy as the mayor who led the city’s recovery from the multiple crises of the ’70s. (Contrary to popular belief, Giuliani bore little responsibility for the gentrification of Times Square, which was a fait accompli by the time he assumed office.) Because “the market on its own could not effect a makeover of [the square],” the city had to take the lead, offering generous (and controversial) incentives to developers and using its condemnation powers to clear the way for construction, thus smoothing a path for private actors to step in and finish the process. The goal was not simply to sweep the district clean of the four Ps, but to stimulate its gentrification. “City officials,” Sagalyn writes, “wanted to flood the place with thousands of middle-class pedestrians—office workers, wholesale buyers, tourists, theatergoers. These were the types of people that had made Manhattan street life vibrant and abundant—and relatively safe.” Attracting them would require a two-pronged approach: while corporate office development was “the linchpin of the city’s financial strategy,” the eventual plan also emphasized retaining the district’s historic identity as a center for “popular entertainment for the middle class,” lest the place lose any character it had left.

In the early 1990s, the Victory Theater, which once screened pornographic films, reopened as a venue for children’s theater. Its reincarnation was both a symbolic triumph for champions of what Sagalyn calls the city’s “tourist-based agenda” and a sign of more changes to follow. Disney moved in soon after, then Madame Tussauds, along with an impressive number of new hotels, restaurants, and retail establishments. In 1996, the last adult store in Times Square shut its doors (a victim of the internet as much as the city’s zoning restrictions). Most critically—at least in the official view and in Sagalyn’s—was the long-hoped-for arrival of a white-hot commercial real estate market. By the late ’90s, “the district had become one of the most desirable locations in Manhattan for developers who were building office towers.” The unthinkable had happened: A blaze of new construction picked up where it had left off more than half a century earlier. Property values went into overdrive. As the millennium approached, Times Square shed its identity as a seedy backwater “immune to change,” becoming a place where glitzy new towers scraped the sky and rents rivaled, or surpassed, those in even the most reputable parts of Manhattan. New spectaculars arrived: the world’s first Jumbotron and then the Nasdaq stock ticker at 43rd and Broadway, which, at seven stories and $37 million, was the world’s biggest and costliest electronic video screen. As brands once again sought advertising space in the square, billboard owners raked in record profits. “In 1998,” Sagalyn tells us, “the income the Durst Organization expected to take in from signs on Four Times Square, estimated by the firm at more than $10 million, had become comparable to that expected from the building’s 120,000 square feet of retail space.” Visitors, meanwhile, converged on the area in record numbers, averaging 350,000 a day by 2019.

To Sagalyn, who deftly explains the intricate institutional action that made this outcome possible, the success of Times Square’s redevelopment has not been sufficiently appreciated. Among her goals is to unearth the “hidden stories of success overshadowed by much too much commentary on what many critics considered the ‘Disneyfication’ of 42nd Street.” The planners who conceived and executed the project were, in her view, visionaries who showed tremendous ingenuity and chutzpah in their daring effort to remake a forlorn area from the ground up. “Never before,” she writes, “had New York employed the heavy hand of eminent domain to take private property for a commercial redevelopment project in Manhattan or relied on deals with private developers to fund the cost of doing so.” Those developers who were persuaded to take the risk made out like bandits. Taxes on their high-yield properties, meanwhile, made Times Square “a potent cash cow” for the city, plowing vast sums of money into the public treasury. Nor was culture sacrificed on the altar of commerce: rising property values “helped fund the theater agenda.” The pedestrianization of Broadway, to which Sagalyn devotes an entire chapter, was a feat of urban design—much to the surprise of the many local merchants who initially opposed it. And, in what she considers the “most unusual and little-known outcome” of the project, the community in nearby Hell’s Kitchen managed to secure funding for the preservation and construction of affordable housing. In the end, everybody won.

Or did they? The new Times Square, which bore few vestiges of its gritty past, left many observers with an empty, uneasy feeling—an unmistakable sense, as Ada Louise Huxtable wrote, that “something is being lost rather than gained.” Delany, writing against the backdrop of redevelopment in the 1990s, cursed it as “a violent reconfiguration of [the city’s] landscape” and predicted that it would produce only “a glass and aluminum graveyard.” Despite his unshakable faith in the vitality of urban public life, even Berman anxiously wondered if the new square was destined to become “the vestibule for a gated community.” Sagalyn, whose primary interest is in profitability, avoids relitigating these feuds. When they do appear in her narrative, critics of the redevelopment come off as myopic, petty, and insensitive to its inevitability—and inevitable success.

Sagalyn also brushes off well-worn complaints about the square’s sterility and homogeneity by pointing to their lack of novelty, writing “whether Times Square was a place for tourists or New Yorkers was a question as old as its transformation from Longacre Square.” But that question now seems settled in favor of the critics: the new Times Square is brighter and more crowded than ever, but regardless of its resonance on the global stage (which is ever-diminishing as new hubs of cyber-modern spectacle overtake it, particularly in East Asia), its existence is basically irrelevant to locals. It has come to seem less a “real place” (let alone “the heart of the city,” as Eric Adams recently claimed) than a space entirely engineered to maximize profits for retailers, advertisers, and landlords and, in recent years, a hallucinatory backdrop for TikTok videos. As for Hell’s Kitchen, which Paul Goldberger described in 1986 as “the closest thing left in Manhattan to a true mixed-use neighborhood,” the spillover from Times Square’s redevelopment effected a complete transformation. By 2021, Sagalyn notes with satisfaction, looking west down 42nd Street, one could see “a high-rise phalanx of glass, steel, and concrete, sixteen towers strong.” Despite the modest achievements of community activists, climbing rents displaced many longtime working-class residents. White-collar professionals accounted for most of the astonishing 47 percent rise in the newly trendy neighborhood’s population between 2000 and 2020.

A series of events, however, has exposed the fragility of the new Times Square. In the mid-2010s, officials worried that a rise in aggressive panhandling and solicitation would spook corporate tenants, empty the district, and ultimately return it to the disorderly place it had so recently been. With crime rates so low across the city, their fears seemed far-fetched, but then again, a tremendous amount of money was at stake. The pandemic was another matter. It devastated the commercial real estate market, and while there has been some recovery, vacancies in the second quarter of 2022 remained just shy of 25 percent. Nationwide, the theater industry is in crisis, sending shock waves through the district.

In a recent interview, Sagalyn confidently waved away grim prognoses for the district, insisting that plummeting prices reflect “just the way the market works.”
This echoes her invocation, throughout Times Square Remade, of the “inevitability of change.” Indeed, for her the moral of Times Square’s redevelopment is that “in a market economy, the forces of economic change, however slow to manifest themselves, dominate in the long run.” If the blandness of this mantra is disappointing, it is also a strangely self-undermining conclusion from someone who has, in not one, but two books, documented the indispensable role of the state in spurring the process. Nothing about the area as it now exists was, or is, inevitable—except, perhaps, the boosterism and showman’s bluster that made the square what it is (and remade it several times over).

Whatever the future brings, new development is on its way. The former Times Building, which gave the square its name, will reopen in summer 2024 as, in the words of its owners, a “next generation brand experience offering brands the added ability to connect with their customers in Times Square through immersive technology-enabled activations.” The entire twelve-story tower will be “a giant billboard.” It will surely be a fitting symbol of the triumph of neoliberal urban policy in a location whose guiding principle has long been the speculative hypercommodification of visual and physical space. If we’re lucky, it won’t last.