On the privatization of Times Square
Kasinitz, Philip
The rags of the squalid ballad singer fluttered in the rich light that showed the goldsmith's treasures, pale and pinched up faces hovered above the windows where was tempting food, hungry eyes...
...Its sixty restaurants and stores will undoubtedly provide a cornucopia of goods, but there will be little to distinguish the types of establishments from those in other "classy" malls...
...They will be visible, of course, but on the other side of the glass wall...
...Physical safety, certainly...
...One Broadway Place" is truly a building for our times...
...Thus, even at the "crossroads of the world," their paths need never cross those of the tourists who will be the mall's primary customers...
...In a marvelously semiotic touch, 360 video screens and an enormous sound system will present (signify...
...The retreat from the cosmopolitan ideal of great public spaces has already cost New York much of what makes it unique...
...390 • DISSENT...
...Nor can they be solved by urban design alone, although more humane notions of urban design can indeed play an important role in their solution...
...All in all I suppose we can't really blame the developers of One Broadway Place for using a wall of glass to keep harsh reality at bay...
...seems a cruel rejoinder to the city...
...A "private" Times Square...
...any great public space must provide that...
...The mall will also be enclosed behind an enormous glass wall, so that the real Times Square can serve as a backdrop to the one recreated inside...
...Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby We live, my more literary minded friends tell me, in an age when irony is highly valued...
...What does safety mean in this context...
...In a theater district increasingly bereft of theater, the fact that real estate developers have hired a theatrical special-effects designer to create their "Times Square" motif is not completely unexpected...
...This is the tragedy that the developers of One Broadway Place seek to render as farce...
...This is, no doubt, a sound business decision...
...half naked and shivering figures stopped to gaze at Chinese shawls and golden stuffs of India...
...This legal distinction, the Times notes, will allow the operators to exercise control over "how, when and by whom the mall is used," a polite way of saying that they will be able to keep out the homeless, the hustlers, and other sundry Times Square denizens...
...Carefully screened out will be the tawdry, raucous, and yes, sometimes dangerous hoopla that this part of town has been known for during more than half a century...
...Still, there is something downright unsettling about the latest chapter in the ongoing assault on the theater district: the plan to SUMMER • 1989 389 Notebook build a suburban style shopping mall based on a "Times Square" theme—on the real Times Square...
...It is scheduled to open in the summer of 1990...
...The social ruptures that have made it so—poverty, homelessness, crack—were not primarily caused by developers and architects, although both certainly played a part...
...Yet Jerde's plan will also provide the psychological safety of a predictable, risk-fee consumer environment...
...But you can't have it both ways...
...The six-level mall, to be housed in an atrium at the building's base, will feature a ninety- by one hundred-twenty-foot semicircular wall of Times Square—like neon signs designed at considerable expense by the special-effects firm of Associates and Ferren, whose credits include the films "Altered States" and "Little Shop of Horrors...
...And the fact that the mall will occupy the bottom of yet another skyscraping office building only makes the irony complete: a theater set invoking the dense street life of the past in a building designed to insulate people from the less savory street life of the present...
...It is true that the Times Square that exists today is often unsafe, or at least unpleasant...
...Perhaps, in a city increasingly divided and mean-spirited, that sort of street life does not work as well in reality...
...In short, One Broadway Place seeks to ape the appearance while denying the spirit of Times Square...
...visual and aural images of street excitement: an idealized version of what actually exists a few hundred feet away...
...According to the New York Times of February 24, 1989, Jon A. Jerde of the Jerde Partnership, the architects of One Broadway Place, claims that the building will "do a distillate of Times Square" while at the same time guaranteeing "safety...
...Contact with the new, the different, and the bizarre is what creates the atmosphere that the stage set in One Broadway Place will attempt to evoke with lights, sounds, and video screens...
...The rags of the squalid ballad singer fluttered in the rich light that showed the goldsmith's treasures, pale and pinched up faces hovered above the windows where was tempting food, hungry eyes wandered over the profusion guarded by one thin sheet of brittle glass—an iron wall to them...
...Yet their voyeuristic solution (you can look, but you can't touch...
...So I suppose I should not be surprised that the continuing overbuilding of midtown Manhattan has taken a distinctly ironic twist...
...The excitement of public spaces derives from their being public...
...It rubs our noses in one of its saddest civic failures...
...It is also an amazing contradiction...
...Yet I do get a little worried when it appears that the designers are confusing their stage set with reality...
...The developers also brag that the mall will be "entirely private," unlike other recently built New York atriums: not one of its 140,000 square feet will officially be public space...
...Everyone, including the riffraff (perhaps especially the riffraff), is welcome...
...This plan was announced on February 23, 1989, by the developers of "One Broadway Place," the oxymoronically named skyscraper now under construction on the site of the old Loew's State Theater at Broadway and 45th Street...
Vol. 36 • July 1989 • No. 3
