Lights Dim for New York City’s West 42nd Street Redevelopment Project : Development: After 12 years, tens of millions of dollars and more than 40 lawsuits, one of the largest public commercial renewal projects in the nation’s history is back to square one.
The West 42nd Street Redevelopment Project was supposed to dress up the honky-tonk “crossroads of the world” with four designer skyscrapers. But after a decade, it has succeeded mainly in dimming the city’s brightest street.
By seizing dozens of buildings and evicting hundreds of tenants near 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue, this adventure in commercial urban renewal has turned a block that stood for fun--albeit a bawdy form of it--into a strip of locked-down storefronts and blank marquees.
The project has driven away the tourists along with the muggers, the characters along with the con men, the publicists and agents along with the pimps and prostitutes.
Except for sidewalk evangelists and Muslim incense peddlers, the street has been inherited by the culprit that was to have been displaced: pornography.
Outside Peepland, where voyeuristic sex is bought with 25-cent tokens, a red neon eye blinks day and night, a reminder of smut’s triumph over good intentions. A few yards away, the stage of the landmark New Amsterdam Theater is dark, and the clock above its marquee is stuck at 10 minutes to 2.
Last month, after years of delays, the city, the state and the project’s private developers finally acknowledged that an island with 64 million square feet of vacant office space has no need for another 4.1 million--the equivalent of four Chrysler buildings.
So after 12 years, tens of millions in development costs and more than 40 lawsuits, one of the largest public commercial renewal projects in the nation’s history is back where it started.
But not quite. Project officials still hold out the prospect that the towers will rise when the real estate market comes back. Meanwhile, a team of architects and retail experts will be paid to come up with a new plan for revitalizing the street with restaurants, shops, clubs and the like.
It sounds, in short, like a cleaner, safer version of the old 42nd Street. But that is a puzzle whose pieces have been scattered.
Rosenthal & Rosenthal, a financial house, moved to 37th Street following a long legal battle to stay put. Nathan’s Famous, the hot dog stand, is shuttered, its colorful clientele dispersed.
Even Dick Falk, the 79-year-old “Mayor of 42nd Street,” is in a new office up on 48th Street--”in exile,” as he puts it.
“They forced me out, and now they want to go back to what they had in the first place,” said the publicist, who on Jan. 2 became the last tenant evicted from the 12-story Longacre building at Broadway and 42nd.
Joe Franklin, who has survived for 40 years as a television show host, was unable to hang on for a 41st year on 42nd. He moved last year to 43rd Street.
A notoriously charitable judge of show-business talent, Franklin says he misses his old neighbors, whom he lists as the very nice stamp dealer, Charles Russ; the very bright real estate man, Ted Wolfson; the very helpful music teacher, Hector Lopez.
Since the indefinite postponement of the skyscrapers appears to have made his relocation needless, Franklin said, “I feel personally let down.” But he claims that in taking with him the contents of his legendary cluttered office, he contributed more than anyone else to the cleanup of 42nd Street.
There’s a lot less life on the block, be it high or low. William Kornblum, a City University sociologist who has spent 15 years studying the street’s culture, must now go farther afield to find its old denizens--west toward Hell’s Kitchen or south toward Madison Square Garden.
A decade ago a dozen legitimate, first-run movie theaters brightened the block. Now there are two, and operator Norman Adie says attendance is down at those because far fewer people visit the street.
Crime is down 54% over the last three years, possibly because you can’t have crime without people. Project supporters hail the decline as an improvement, which raises the question: How bad had 42nd Street gotten?
Pretty bad, according to many former tenants. “It’s true there were a lot of people on the street in the late ‘70s, but a third of them were after you,” says Falk, not entirely in jest.
The redevelopment plan was designed around 1980 to change that. The state would seize eight acres on and around 42nd between Broadway and Eighth Avenue; the city would promise the private developers big tax abatements; the developers would pay off the landowners, build the towers at Seventh and a hotel and merchandise mart at Eighth, fix up several historic theaters and the subway station.
But the project never jelled. Landowners and other opponents filed lawsuits, and tenants were reluctant to commit themselves. A big law firm dropped out in 1986, and a big bank did the same in 1989. This year the securities division of one of the developers, Prudential Insurance Co., declined the honor. Plans for the hotel and merchandise mart languished altogether.
The project was as unpopular aesthetically as it was economically. The office towers, originally designed as four look-alike mansard-roofed boxes, were jazzed up and slimmed down in 1989 to blend with the neighborhood. One critic complained that they looked like bankers who had been crammed into zoot suits.
Project officials numbed the public with repeated assurances that work would start early next year, which then became the year after that, then the year after that.
By April, 1990, when the state officially seized much of the development area, there was a lot of building going on in the neighborhood. But it wasn’t on 42nd Street, and it had nothing to do with the redevelopment project.
Fourteen new office towers sprouted within walking distance of West 42nd, and by July, 1990, they contained 5 million square feet of unrented space. From their perch on the upper floors of 1515 Broadway--itself mired in bankruptcy proceedings--state development officials could see empty floor upon empty floor.
As critic Herbert Muschamp noted in the New York Times, “almost the only undeveloped sites in the area today are the ones that were vacated and boarded up to make room for this project.” The only corner of Broadway and 42nd not in the project area has a renovated and fully rented 13-story building with a Gap store on its first floor.
Now the city and state are negotiating with the tower developers, Prudential and Park Tower Realty, over what will be done until they can be built. One problem might be that quality retailers won’t want to move to the street with anything less than long-term leases--which might obstruct construction of the office towers in the future.
