Ball Has Dropped on Seedy Times Square

Once, it was naughty, bawdy and gaudy, the Crossroads of the World, where you were bound to meet someone you knew if you waited long enough--say, eight minutes or so.

For years, Times Square’s 42nd Street was a symbol of New York’s rakish heart, a boulevard of stately theaters, vaudeville palaces and nickel movies. Later, it became a kingdom of pornography, a mean, sinister place that drove many people away.

But the legendary street has recently undergone a dramatic change, along with the rest of Times Square. A huge cloth ad for flu medicine, fluttering next to the theater where Disney’s “The Lion King” plays to packed houses, sums up the transformation: The cold-weather drink, it boasts, is “The only hot, steamy thing still allowed on this block.”

More than 500,000 people are expected to jam Times Square this week for the 90th annual dropping of the New Year’s Eve ball, capping a year when 20 million visitors flooded the district. Yet as the clock ticks down to midnight, a spirited quarrel has erupted over the neighborhood’s metamorphosis. While boosters celebrate the area’s rebirth as the mirror of a more inviting Big Apple, critics charge that New York planners cut a devil’s bargain with corporate America.

“How could I have survived on the same street as Disney?” asked Fred Hakim, whose family hot dog stand was forced to shut down after four decades, the last mom and pop store on the fabled block between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. The area was celebrated in the 1933 musical “42nd Street” as an avenue “where the underworld can meet the elite.” But now, said Hakim, “it’s all about money here. A way of life is over.”

Other Cities Hope to Emulate Changes

Fueled by New York’s economic boom and a stunning drop in crime, city officials boast that there isn’t one vacant hotel room in Times Square this holiday season. They point to the neighborhood as a success story that other cities--such as Atlanta, Boston and San Francisco--are trying to duplicate, a model that may hold out hope for efforts to revive old entertainment districts like Hollywood.

Indeed, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has made Times Square part of his political roadshow, telling audiences from coast to coast that his tough policies on crime and blight have helped restore America’s most famous public square. Meanwhile, officials who have implemented the changes insist the area’s traditional role as a democratic entertainment hub remains intact.

“This has always been a place where high and low culture mix, and that continues,” said Brendan Sexton, head of the Times Square Business Improvement District, a powerful nonprofit organization that has spearheaded the district’s renewal by working with leaders in private business and politics. “The comeback of Times Square is an important story because cities are supposed to be quirky, exciting and edgy. They aren’t suburbs, and we can’t turn our back on them.”

Judging by the pace of development, big investors can’t get enough of the new Times Square. More than $4 billion in development is underway, totaling 21 million square feet of office space; sites under construction include new homes for Conde Nast, Reuters, Morgan Stanley and NASDAQ; hotels by the Tishman Corp. and Planet Hollywood; Sony and AMC movie complexes featuring 16 and 26 screens, respectively; broadcast studios for ABC-TV and Disney TV; a Madame Tussaud Wax Museum; an HMV superstore; and a cluster of new theaters.

Meanwhile, huge numbers of pedestrians--peaking at 5,000 per block, per hour--are flocking to newly opened sites, such as the Warner Brothers store, the Ford Theatre (showing “Ragtime”) and a Virgin Records Superstore. The district is already home to 40 theaters and 268 restaurants, plus offices for many in the entertainment and media elite.

On a recent night, gargantuan crowds clogged the sidewalks, and those caught up in the gridlock heard a smorgasbord of German, French, Dutch, Korean, Spanish, Japanese and Brooklynese. Above, huge neon signs sold everything from soup and whiskey to underwear. Teenagers swarmed in front of the MTV broadcasting studio windows, while dueling news zippers beamed stock quotes and scandal news into the streets below.

Reaching New Heights in Neon

Although Times Square has long been famous for neon billboards, the size, quantity and commercial impact of today’s 100 signs dwarf that of earlier eras. And that, critics say, shows that New York has paid a heavy cultural price for revitalizing its core. In a sense, the new Times Square is a metaphor for what New York City has become--a cleaner, safer place that is increasingly dominated by an aggressive corporate face. The joint is jumping, but for some it feels like an expensive theme park. No one is nostalgic for crime and prostitution, but critics object to the overwhelming scale of the new construction and its brutally commercial spirit.

“This place used to represent a wonderful mixture of people and different kinds of entertainment,” said Geoffrey O’Brien, a New York historian who noted that nickel movies and Shakespeare once played side by side. “But Times Square has lost much of that past. It’s been steam cleaned; it’s too expensive. The charm is gone.”

Skeptics like O’Brien mourn the shrinking number of Runyonesque characters who once gave the area its pizazz: the noisy street preachers, wisecracking shopkeepers, eccentric sidewalk barkers and colorful drifters who rubbed shoulders with middle-class tourists and high-society swells in the cheerful pandemonium of a Saturday night.

Many of the homeless who lived on the streets have also been pushed into other neighborhoods, said Mary Brosnahan, director of the Coalition for the Homeless. “The pervasive police presence has made it de facto that homeless people can’t bed down in numbers more than two to three. They’re dispersed in daylight and they lead a nomadic existence.”

All the while, the number of single-room-occupancy hotels continues to dwindle, giving low-income people fewer places to live in the area. And the new is forever forcing out the old: Last summer, a scaffolding from the future Conde Nast tower crashed into an older hotel, killing an elderly woman and forcing 250 people out of their homes for two months.

To some, these developments are a monument to heartless city planning. But for others, they are the inevitable price of progress. On a blustery day, people working and partying in Times Square offered radically different views.

“I’ve been coming to plays here for 17 years and the area has never looked better,” said Kathy Havens, a mother in her 50s, bundled up and waiting in line for half-price theater tickets. “Both of my kids live in this area now and I’m happy about that. I would never have said that 10 years ago, but give the city credit. They made Times Square a nicer place.”

Ten feet down the line, Roberta Lopez, a Mexican tourist, said she feels safer in Times Square than in Mexico City. But the area’s consumer culture, epitomized by its neon signs, “feels like an assault,” she added. “There are just too many people here; they might now be too successful.”

One block north, Salil Duggal sat glumly at the counter of Peepland, one of the last remaining adult sex shops in Times Square. Business “is really not as bad as you would think,” he said, but under the city’s new zoning law, only 40% of adult stores’ merchandise can be hard-core materials.

The results have been swift: Neighborhood porno shops, which once numbered 145, have dwindled to 15. To comply with the new standards, Peepland now sells perfume, cologne and New York City T-shirts in its front room.

“Giuliani wants to run us all out of here, but many people come to this store and want to be here,” said Duggal. “Don’t they have a right to be customers in Times Square too?”

Others are unmoved. “I know some people are nostalgic for an earlier time, but personally I think the neighborhood’s character has improved significantly,” said Kenneth T. Jackson, a Columbia University history professor who compiled The Encyclopedia of New York City. “A grandmother should be able to take her granddaughter to a play in Times Square and not be assaulted by signs that say ‘Nude Girls!’ ”

An Irrevocable Transformation

Both sides agree that Times Square has been irrevocably transformed. If America had come to think of the area as a circus overrun by hookers, pimps and junkies--an urban dump memorialized by movies like “Midnight Cowboy” and “Taxi Driver”--Disney’s renovation of the New Amsterdam Theatre for “The Lion King” and a host of other corporate investors shows how much the district has changed since 1992, when the area’s Business Improvement District began its work.

Under the leadership of then-director Gretchen Dykstra, the group began collecting $6 million in annual dues from local business owners, paying for programs ranging from homeless outreach and security officers to orange-uniformed sanitation teams that patrol the 12-square-block area day and night. The New York Times Co. played a major role in launching the group.

But an equally important change came in 1980, when the state condemned the block between Broadway and Eighth Avenue as blighted. It opened the floodgates for new investment, spelling doom for the adult shops and small stores like Hakim’s hot dog stand.

“The place hit rock bottom,” Sexton said. “But Times Square has had many lives.”

Originally called Longacre Square, the 14-block area stretching north from 40th to 54th streets and running from Sixth to Ninth avenues was renamed Times Square in 1904, when Adolph Ochs moved the headquarters of the New York Times from lower Manhattan. The district was originally a home to horse stables and brothels, but it grew in importance as subway connections linked Times Square to virtually all city train lines.

More important, theaters began popping up in the area beginning in 1895. At one point, there were more than 250 theaters operating on Broadway’s Great White Way, but the Depression took a heavy toll. Although its economy recovered, Times Square began playing to a less affluent crowd.

The slide deepened in the 1970s and ‘80s, when city economies took a nose dive. Property values declined sharply, and the only people ready to invest on 42nd Street were entrepreneurs seeking quick bucks from porno shops. When Disney announced its ambitious plans, skeptics had a field day. But nobody’s laughing now, said Sexton, who gives the company a lot of credit for turning the street around.

“You could say we’ve had ‘Disneyfication’ of Times Square,” he concedes, “but I call it ‘Mallification,’ the fact that you lose the little boutiques and see a lot of the same stores everywhere. This is not just an issue here--it’s happening all over America.”

Even so, Sexton believes New York has managed to preserve the feisty essence of Times Square. A 1988 zoning plan ensured that new buildings would be entertainment-oriented; they also must adorn themselves with the brilliant neon signs that have been a fixture for decades.

Meanwhile, a surging economy guarantees that every buildable inch of Times Square will go to the highest bidder. A recent survey pegged its $340-per-square-foot rental rate as the sixth priciest in the world--ahead of Rodeo Drive. One Times Square, a virtually empty tower that is covered with huge neon signs, recently sold for more than $110 million, the record for a commercial building in New York, according to the Business Improvement District.

The district has 12,500 hotel rooms, approximately one-fifth of New York’s supply. A weekday room for two at one of the new hotels can go for $350, including tax, and with some tickets on Broadway now hitting $80 apiece, a night on the town in Times Square, including a dinner for two, can cost $600.

Some corporations, including CBS and Random House, are hungrily eyeing the few vacant sites left. And many of the new buildings will sport a new look, what New York Magazine called “the marriage of architecture and electronic technology, of form and image.” Soon, for example, a futuristic Westin hotel split by a mock lightning bolt will tower over the street where Hakim’s hot dog stand once stood.

“They’ll do well,” Hakim conceded. “But people won’t be able to spend $3 for two hot dogs and a Coke here anymore. And they won’t come for a cheap date on Saturday night either. That Times Square is dead.”