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Urban Space and Representation: Eric Sandeen

Abstract

For nearly one hundred years Times Square has been a center of cultural production and consumption in New York City. This paper focuseson the intertwinings of three different systems of meaning at The Crossroads of the World during the first four decades of this century. First, Times Square manufactures time, both through the elaborate staging of the changing of the year and through the fictive universes created inside the theaters, movie houses, and night clubs that cluster in this entertainment zone. Second, Times Square, the Great White Way, the Deuce -- whatever moniker one gives this complex urban terrain -- generates mythic characters and life histories that are associated with New York. Finally, a look at Times Square reveals an array of cultural meaning incised in this richly encrusted environment. Times Square has been shaped by debates over urban form, sculpted.by development schemes, and festooned with the everyday life of the street. The area shows both the fissures of centrifugal movement away from the modern center city and the compression of centripetal longings to be where the actionis.

Over the past fifteen years Times Square has been transformed. What had become an entertainment district in which "excitement" could be quickly transformed to "danger" is now cleansed for theatergoers and shoppers at Virgin records or the Disney store. A middle class academic tourist, armed with camera and credit card, can feel uncomfortably comfortable in the new Times Square. Whether this reshaping represents the displacement of a local culture by multinational, corporate capital or demonstrates the culmination of a battle over the street that began with the appropriation of the square's name by the New York Times in 1904 is a matter of debate. This is an urban canyon with a history worth contemplating at century's end.

On December 31, 1921 a sizable crowd awaited the beginning of the New Year in Times Square, New York City.Having endured the second year of prohibition, many of the more affluent had spent a good deal of the evening in private dining rooms in hotels and cabarets where the contents of unwieldy suitcases were unpacked and passed among the revelers.Some had attended one of the many Broadway shows, where revenue agents prevented the exchange of bottles between audience and performers, a violation of the Volsted Act -- as well as good theatrical practice -- that has characterized the 1920 celebration.Some had been in the Square, New York's Great White Way, since dusk, enjoying the ambience of the lighted signs. The New York Times reporter, curious to see whether a dry crowd would "die of inanition," prepared to turn his eyes to the top of the building in which he worked.He then saw enacted a ritual which had been virtually unchanged for over a decade:

It was just at the stroke of twelve that a ball five feet in diameter and illuminated with 300 blue nitrogen lamps dropped eighty feet down a pole atop the times Building, announcing the departure of the old year. At the same time four electric signs six feet high blazed forth with the figures "1922" announcing the birth of the new year.

As the sun set in the evening for the last time in 1921 the ball was raised to the top of the pole on halyards and the lamps were turned on. The crowd began to gather in Times Square to witness the dropping of the ball fully an hour before midnight. As the last seconds of the dying year ticked on men and women in the gathering took their watches out and prepared to adjust them for the new year.

Up on top of the Times Building a man in charge grasped the halyard a few minutes to midnight while another stood beside him with a chronometer adjusted to the fraction of a second. "There she goes," yelled the man with the watch and instantly the ball slid down the base of the pole and the year 1922 was here. At the same moment a searchlight from the tower sprayed the city with a circle of white light.

Over the next many years details would be added to this description. Readers would learn that the ball weighed 400 pounds. That the man with the watch was Master Electrician Thomas Ward. That the crowd always numbered in the hundreds of thousands -- over a million just before the beginning of the Second World War, considerably more at war's end.That traffic was allowed to pass on both Broadway and Seventh Avenue until the crowds took over, at 11:30, or 10:20, or earlier.

Much more remained the same.The emphasis on the precision of keeping time. A fascination with the process of creating such a flamboyantly illuminated start to the year. The necessity of characterizing the crowd: where it had been, what it felt, how it behaved or misbehaved.The relishing of the spectacle in the center of the city:the vertical lean required to see the ball on top of the Times Tower;the horizontal sweep of a bow-tie shaped open space boiling with people.

This paper concerns the development of Times Square up to 1982, when the first of two zoning regulations directed at the bow tie took effect, making contemporary construction along Broadway the subject of another essay.This essay treats the interval from 1904 to 1982 as the modernist period of Times Square development, a time that began with great promise and ended with equally potentious peril.

It is more common to conclude the modernist period with the financial collapse of 1975. The bankruptcy of New York coincides so neatly with dystopian visions of the city--Taxi Driver is the era's more striking representation of the Times Square area on film--that a neat conclusion in the mid-1970s is almost mandatory.However, for the purpose of this essay the end of the period is dictated by changes in the legal structures of development, not in the nature of the built environment of Times Square itself.The Astor Plaza would not have been possible without the incentives created by the Times Square Special District, created in 1967.The Portman Hotel,rechristened the Marriott Marquis after a tenant signed on,was constructed in the early 1980s but arose out of the desperation of the 1975 crisis, during which the architect/developer received building rights for the block--to be executed at his discretion--in exchange for the promise eventually to invest in the Times Square area.

The point of transformation in Times Square is more appropriately 1982.During that year the Midtown Zoning resolution was passed, giving developers extra incentives to locate skyscrapers along Broadway and Seventh Avenue,in the bow tie of Times Square. These incentives expired on May 13, 1988 and the special bulk of buildings constructed during this six year interval testifies to this effort to make skittish developers explore the west of Midtown.In 1980 the city and state entered the scene with a redevelopment scheme that showed a willingness to transform the scale of buildings and the very definition of the area.All subsequent development has been affected by this impending fact.

During the period of modernism New York went from newly consolidated financial capital of the United States, to cultural capital of the world, to the site of seeming intractable urban problems.Times Square followed a similar trajectory.Placing the end of the modernist period in the early 1980s allows us to view not just the perceived decay of this national sacrifice area but the vocabulary for a redefinition of this entertainment zone that,for better and for worse, rules at millennium's end.

Since 1904, when the New York Times followed the subway tracks uptown and laid claim to Longacre Square,famous for its stables and bawdy houses,Times Square has held the attention of New Yorkers and observers of urban American culture,most predictably at the turning of the year,but in a more sustained way through the excitement and perils represented in the most self-conscious district of the city.Defined by the diagonal slicing of Seventh Avenue and 42 Street by Broadway--that anomaly in Manhattan's grid system--the area up to 47th Street represents a break in the monotony of streets and avenues,an angular clearing in the urban forest.Around the Square cluster the theaters of Broadway, supported by more ephemeral colonies of night clubs,restaurants, cabarets,and the support services for this entertainment district --wig makers,publicity photographers,pawn shops,musical instrument repair facilities, and rehearsal studios.

The architect and historian Robert Stern asserts that the formation of the theater district around Times Square represented "a new synthesis in the city's social makeup which embodied the concept of the Melting Pot." While it is true that the area was patronized by both the old rich (in clubs and restaurants) and the middle class (in the theaters), one should acknowledge other geographies of Times Square that represent working classes, through houses of prostitution and adjacent neighborhoods like Hell's Kitchen.From the beginning, the site of the dropping of the New Year's Eve ball contained the tensions of the street the year round.

The 25 story Times Tower, designed by Eidlitz and MacKenzie, was briefly the tallest building in New York.The Times advertised its new digs by moving in on December 31,1904 with a display of fireworks.By 1908 these pyrotechnics had given way to an illuminated ball.The Times thus participated in a long tradition of seaport time-telling through the display of an illuminated ball at a specified hour for the synchronization of watches and navigational equipment.Even after the construction of larger steel frame buildings along Broadway, the peak of the Times tower could be discerned from New York harbor.The Western Union building in lower Manhattan performed this exercise more serviceably at noon each day.The Times expended its energy more spectacularly, only on New Year's Eve.And yet, from the description of its reporter,even in 1922 this tradition of time telling,which predated the 1884 regularization of American local time into four zones,was strong enough for people to grope for their watches amid the tin horns, balls of confetti,and mottled darkness of Times Square.

The trouble with balls of confetti was that they begged to be wadded and thrown.The nuisance of tin horns was that they were blown directly into the ears of the unwary.The danger of bottles of merriment was that they could be hurled, smashed,or brandished on poorly lit streets.As the Times commented in a January 3, 1922 editorial:"Break bottles, windows, heads, the law--that was the New Year's spirit in too common a manifestation." Earlier,in 1912,the reformer Jacob Riis had organized a "Safe and Sane" New Year's Eve movement to bring decorum to this raucous celebration. In olden days,he pointed out,the New Year was welcomed with song and the chimes of old Trinity church.Now, he lamented,"anyone who has seen the crowds of rowdies on Broadway breaking hats and insulting women knows that a safer manner of celebration is desirable."On New Year's Eve 1912 tasteful celebrations in other squares--Herald,Madison,Union--were drowned out by the dreaded horned ruffians.By concentrating his forces in Madison Square, Riis's Safe and Sane movement ushered in 1914 with a program of patriotic hymns,speeches,and even an alternative ball dropping from the Metropolitan Life tower,witnessed by over 25,000 people. The death of Riis, the advent of World War I,and the later obsession with prohibition overtook these Safe and Sane efforts but it is interesting to note that Times Square joined parks and other emblematic public spaces where crowd behavior had to be organized and given the sanity of official cultural approbation. The lowering of the ball marked the calendar of national celebrations,along with the Fourth of July,as a yearly occasion that stretched the limits of public safety.

From the very beginning, Times Square dramatized larger cultural phenomena in American life.At a moment in which time yielded to the discipline of technology,Times Square kept the official beat. Theater-goers emerged from the imaginary worlds of Broadway's darkened houses into the regulated light of the passing year,an hour before midnight. During a time in which control over Fifth Avenue lunchtime sidewalks and Central Park greenswards was being asserted by the genteel classes,Times Square offered a rhetorically democratic but always uneasy mixing of classes and ethnicities.The police deployment for New Year's Eve always numbered more than 1,000.The daily practice for street activity was to keep'em moving.

The tension between well defined private property interests and a more broadly construed but less articulate public use produces the central cultural battle in contemporary Times Square. Significantly,the public presence in Times Square is invoked only once a year and part of these New Year's Eve rituals is the control of the crowd,physically,visually,and rhetorically. For the rest of the year the public is harder to visualize and so the struggle over both boundaries and core of this open space is easily overlooked.The late emergence of public space in a city gridded for commerce is a well-understood theme in Manhattan development.Embodying the debate over the use and value of land in a way that acknoledges culture as well and economics and aesthetics is the challenge.Too often,discussions of Times Square have focused on the evolution of skyscraper design,the change in city form,how the bulk is massed by the desire for profit and sculpted by civic regulations,or how increasing density affects urban life. These discussions are quickly drawn beyond human scale so that the analytical eye steps back from the street to view aestheticized clusters of buildings or structural, sociological principles at work.Valuable as these perspectives are,by looking up only slightly from the street we can view the signs of Times Square, the elements of this environment most heavily invested in maintaining a human scale along the Great White Way.These objects react sensitively to changes in the built environment and the quotidian culture of Times Square while,at the same time,not removing the viewer from the heterogeneous crowd that jostles and unsettles the eye.

The culture of Times Square has been negotiated in the City Planning and Zoning Commission through discussions of both design and use. Much of this discussion remains invisible to the crowd on the street until new construction signals a new development, long since negotiated among city officials,developers,and architects.The most visible and enduring design element in Times Square are the neon signs that perch from every low rooftop, setback,or street wall in the Times Square area.The most potent manifestation of the use value of Times Square--to use a term that could be interpreted through economic or cultural systems-- is the built environment of Times Square,principally,the incursion of large-scale skyscrapers in the heart of this entertainment zone during the past twenty years.This paper will focus on the former and anticipate the latter.

A marker of urban entertainment zones,neon signs have come to represent the cut rate honky-tonk of the central city, yet the displays--called spectaculars in signmaker's lingo--advertise the largest corporations:Coke,Canon,or,until recently, the now banished Joe Camel cigarette extravaganza.Often taken as a marker of depersonalized,urban modernity, the signs are actually handcrafted items,assembled with the discipline of a craft that has changed very little since the process of neon illumination was released from the monopoly of its patent holder in 1926.

Since the late 1920s,most of the signs of Times Square have been made by the Artkraft Strauss Sign Corporation,a firm that has just celebrated its 100th birthday.In its factory on West 57th Street--right down the street from the CBS television network and MTV--the commercial culture of the United States has been designed and sold in electrical wiring and glass tubes,four feet at a time.Another archive of Times Square history is scrolled under the workers' benches in the asbestos pattern sheets for signs,most of which have long since been darkened. Sign manufacture uses the language of entertainment. Signs are animated through the use of different layers of neon that are sequentially fired according to a score or script. They become spectaculars,a term which invites comparison with the Broadway sets inside some of the adjacent buildings. For example, across from the Astor Hotel, on the east side of Times Square, the roof of the Bond clothing store held a waterfall, framed first by naked figures, then by gigantic Pepsi bottles.One block to the south, the site over Toffenitti's restaurant presented a Budweiser beer tableau, featuring the Grand Canyon,or,later, a mound of ice.This ledge supported TWA and the Yellow Pages, among other signs, before relinquishing ground to the first of the new super-skyscrapers, which should be finished in 1998.

These signs of the times are important.They show at least one negotiation among local,national,and international forces.They help keep time in commercial culture.They mark important moments in national history.During World War II, for example, advertisements reflected the patriotic iconography of the period. The original model for the Camel cigarette sign that blew steam versions of smoke rings across Times Square from 1941 to 1966 was GI (and non-smoker) Lyman Clardy.During the War years members of the other branches of the armed forces were enlisted in the Camel campaign.Patriotic tableaux,featuring the Statue of Liberty and a monument to the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima,entered the Square,as did almost 2,000,000 people to celebrate both VE and VJ Day in 1945. Signs are the most obvious product of an area of immense cultural generative power. On a different sale, they represent the persistence of family owned business and handcraft in a city of overpowering capital consolidation. Most importantly,at least for this look at Times Square,they require a particular environment in order to survive.

Sign display relies on low rooftops--like the Bond building --ledges,or set backs.The New Year's Eve ball aside,people will not concentrate on a sign at that height.As is true of so much of New York,a sign needs to be in your face. So, signs thrive in an area that is undercapitalized. The Bond building is an example of a "taxpayer," a two story building intended to cover property taxes on the site until something more profitable can be constructed.Signs cluster around businesses like theaters that rely on a modest,highly ornamented building form to advertise what lies inside.In transitional areas,signs love hold outs that stand stubbornly anticipating the extortion of a final,timely offer from a developer assembling a large site.Or, as a last resort,spectaculars can coexist with a sculpted,skyscraper environment of street walls and set backs.In short,the survival of signs is tied to zoning regulations and to the perilous balance between economic and cultural systems of value.The signs of Times Square present one reading of the history of this urban landscape and capture one of the dilemmas of this important American site.They define one of the most famous public environments in the United States and yet they represent private enterprise in their own making,the products they represent, and the building platforms from which they shine.

Edward Bassett,the Brooklyn lawyer who headed the commission which produced the Zoning Ordinance of 1916,said "I sometimes think that a sentence should be added to the constitution stating that in the exercise of the police powers of the state every intendment should be taken in favor of the people of the state as against the owner of private property." By dividing the city into three zones--residential,business,and unrestricted--the Commission on Building Districts and Restrictions constructed the template upon which public and private spaces have been negotiated throughout the remainder of the twentieth century.As Robert Stern pointed out,they also "codified and protected the status quo," which most forthrightly in New York meant the privileging of the desires and demands of private property owners.Bassett was right to be alarmed. Private developers could be attracted to Times Square by the centripetal force of its cultural importance and could destroy the area through the irresistible weight of capital.

The task of balancing the cultural power of a public space with the demands of private property has become all the more difficult over the past three decades,as this entertainment area was redefined as a zone of nighttime peril and urban blight.The language and aesthetics of development were quick to coalesce;a compensatory rhetoric--based on preservation,public use, cultural value,or the democracy of the street--has come slower to tongue and pen.The remainder of this paper looks briefly at the period in which the developer's voice was strongest,the 1970s.

Ada Louise Huxtable has commented that:

In New York, the impact of these concentrated super-skyscrapers on street scale and sunlight,on the city's antiquated support systems,circulation,and infrastructure, on its already tenuous liveability,overrides any aesthetic ...Architecture,in this context,is only a game architects play.Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.

How can such developments be visualized? One way is to look at hotel construction in Times Square.The Americana Hotel (Seventh Avenue and West 52nd Street,Morris Lapidus architect),completed in 1962,is a traditional hotel design made modern:a taxi pull-in, a ground floor lobby and core area of meeting and dining rooms, and a high-rise stack of rooms.Slightly offset from Seventh Avenue,the hotel anticipates the angle of Broadway,about to merge from the West.Twenty years later, in the heart of Times Square, Robert Portman constructed the Marriott Marquis Hotel on a site formerly occupied by five Broadway theaters.The only entrance to the hotel from Times Square is a dangerous-looking passageway capped by a metal awning.In a city of gridlocked streets and efficient public transportation,the proper way to enter the Marriott Marquis is by stepping from a cab or a private car in this protected drive-through between 46th and 47th Streets. Having been rescued from the street,prospective registrants discover that the real lobby for the hotel,four floors up,is accessible only by elevator.Inside,in front of the piano bar offering safe surveillance of Times Square,one is enveloped by a massive interior atrium, an alternative New York,a private New York.Portman said that he "had to create a design that looks to security,though not in a negative way" and arrange services that "would not be readily accessible to passersby." That is to say, Portman created a safe New York that defied the mixing of the street.In interesting ways, the Marriott Marquis emulates the flight from urban life represented by the first Midtown motels constructed during the 1960s on Tenth Avenue--the entrance (front or back) nearest the guest's automobile became the most important one.This hotel,a suburban high rise in the heart of Manhattan, embodies the Fourth Migration to the suburbs that Lewis Mumford had predicted and shows the more recent re-migration of Edge City aesthetics--malls,hotels,and automobile culture--into the Central Business District.

The Marriott Marquis was followed by others.The Holiday Inn (with its drive-through),the Renaissance Hotel behind the prow of 2 Times Square (with its lower lobby),the lower lobby of the Double Tree across the street,the lower lobby of the Novotel two blocks up Broadway.While offering surveillance of the street,these hotels disdain lkife at ground level,signaling a different cultural moment in Times Square.

All of these structures were built to exploit the Special Zoning District allowances which lured large-scale construction into Times Square through incentive zoning.Over the past thirty years developers have been allowed to build bulkier -- and hence more profitable--buildings by agreeing to include public amenities in the zoning lot:a block-through passageway, a remodeled subway station,or,in the case of the 1967 Times Square Special Zoning District,the inclusion of a theater in the newly constructed building.One Astor Plaza (Kahn and Jacobs,1971),on the west side of the Square,represents the plaza and tower design guidelines of the 1961 zoning revision and testifies to the limitations of zoning incentives intended to benefit a broader public than the corporate building tenants.The building offers s small concession to the street wall of Broadway but otherwise rises straight from the sidewalk to the height of 55 stories.

The name,"One Astor Plaza," memorializes the Astor Hotel,the most famous hotel in Times Square--and site of New Year's Even bacchanals in restaurants,ballrooms,and rooftop gardens--which had been demolished in favor of the new skyscraper.Because the old theaters of Times Square were deemed by 1960s-era urban planners to be "uncomfortable and obsolete," designers saw the opportunity to encourage the construction of new theaters while promoting Times Square as a zone in which offices would be a primary rather than a secondary use.In order to exceed maximum bulk allowances,the developer proposed a modest public plaza, tucked inconspicuously away from the valuable Broadway frontage. Over the course of months the city negotiated design changes that produced a new Broadway theater--the Minskoff,named after the developer--inside the building.In return for a truly uncomfortable,hard to reach theater,the Minskoffs received permission to exceed maximum bulk allowances by 20%.

Such generous allowances lured large-scale construction into the Times Square area.During the 1970s, Times Square epitomized the decline of New York as powerfully as it once displayed its dominance.In addition to tax incentives and building allowances, the city cooperated with the Urban Development Corporation,an authority created by the state to encourage large scale projects, in a massive redevelopment scheme.Through this plan,announced in 1982,four unimaginably dense towers--the largest more than twice the maximum density allowed--were to inundate the area with more than 23,000 office workers.The promise of this foundation,it was hoped,would transform Times Square into a less buttoned-down version of Wall Street.

The plan could not have anticipated the mini-stock crash of 1987 that made the rental of space more difficult.The UDC might have prepared itself better for the large barrage of law suits,which it,in fact,had to contend with for fully a decade.However,the plaN should have foreseen what cultural values would have been elicited by pioneering new construction at the Crossroads of the World.The recent history of Times Square transformations since the intervention of the state in the early 1980s is, as they say, another story.

The new Times Square that came into being during the 1980s was the creation of overlapping periods of Times Square history.The Marriott Marquis was a product of the despair of the 1970s. Post-1982 development was shaped by the Urban Development Corporation's mega-development plan for the south end of the Square.More than indicating a new scale for the built environment of the area, the plan redefined "development," "entertainment," and "legitimate use" in a way that solidified control over the Square more effectively than the Special Zoning district had done in the fifteen preceding years.Although the Square that presented itself for the New Year's Eve celebration in 1989 was thought to represent a thorough transformation of the area,it was,in retrospect,only a transitional moment in the evolution of the present Times Square,the Times Square that will be the starting point for the new millennium. As we await the lowering of the ball, we might give one final thought to the building that will be the platform for the new century.

In 1965 the Allied Chemical Corporation bought the Times tower and had it de-historicized--a euphemism for a thorough scalping that left the structure shivering in a thin coat of bathroom-quality marble.Perhaps the plane and chisel replaced the wrecker's ball because the site is a zoning anomaly:only in pre-zoning days could it have been built upon at all.One would think that an awkward,naked structure would have been the first to vanish under the state-sponsored project surrounding it. Such, in fact,was the proposal,but not the result.Horribly out of scale in comparison to the Philip Johnson-designed skyscrapers that were to surround it,One Times Square (as the Times tower is now identified) has endured.In fact,to some degree,it has enforced a scale in the new Times Square,drawing down new construction to meet what used to be the tallest building in New York.

The remaining question in Times Square is,as always,on the street --to be answered in the plain light of day by office workers, tourists,and denizens of the street,and in the illuminating darkness of evening between class-oriented ideas of entertainment.The bright light zone has been maintained but the crowds that will assemble in Times Square for the coming of the millennium will be surrounded by a more forthrightly private environment.From eye level, this represents not so much a transformation as an apotheosis.A look at the history of the promotion of the Square,the celebration at year's end,or the manufacture of the neon signs that still characterize this environment calls into question pristine notions of authenticity: the self-conscious marketing of Times Square should not prohibit newer enterprises like the Disney Store or Virgin Records from cashing in as so many have done before.If we pull back slightly to view the Square over the heads of the crowd--the rhetorical position of the New York Times reporter in 1922 and the perspective of accompanying photographs in later years--we can see more clearly that control of the street is still the most important activity relating Times Square to the urban culture in which it is situated.Surrounded by private property and the delights of consumer culture,the drama of Times Square as a public space is still the best show in town.

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