The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (33 page)

What was plain, though, is that there was a wish, both in the window installations and in many of Anita’s terribly of-the-moment productions, to bring back to life an old, knockabout, spontaneous Times Square, a Times Square devoted to the marginal and the odd—the Times Square of her grandfather’s collection. Many of Chashama’s productions dabbled in the forgotten forms of Times Square, like cabaret or vaudeville, and for all their rather mannered weirdness had something good-natured and fun-loving at heart. Chashama’s hardiest production, which ran from July through December 2002, was a kind of neo-vaudeville production known as the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus. The circus consisted principally of two characters, neither of them actually named Bindlestiff, and was organized as a variety act, with old-fashioned rope tricks, sword swallowing, a bed of nails, and the like performed on a tiny stage before a tiny audience. Alex and I went one Saturday afternoon and found that most of the dozen or so people sitting with us were either wheelchair bound or mildly disturbed. The overall impression that we had wandered into the Twilight Zone was very much enhanced by the Museum of Times Square, located in the theater’s lobby—a collection of old programs from Hubert’s Museum, a carousel with odd little mechanical animals, and, in the back, behind a curtain, a collection of “frozen fetuses” in bell jars.

Anita had, perhaps unintentionally, created a kind of italicized, spoofy, self-conscious version of the Times Square that had been obliterated beneath the office towers. It wasn’t “the real thing”; but, of course, if Chashama had been the real thing, it would have been a preposterous exercise in nostalgia. The old Times Square was not a thing you could bring back; but you could restore its spirit in an entirely new key. Chashama’s marginalness, its pluckiness, even its amateurishness, was an antidote to the glittering Times Square of the office tower. It was a delicious, and very Times Square, irony that the man who made it possible owned the biggest office tower of them all.

19.

A SIGN OF THINGS TO COME

IN THE LATE SUMMER of 2001, a beautiful art object appeared in Times Square. This was, in itself, an almost unprecedented event. Works of art, in the form of plays, are regularly presented inside buildings in Times Square; but, considered as a physical entity, Times Square contains very little that is beautiful, or that even aspires to the status of art. And this new object was, in fact, a building, though it was, at the same time, a show. The building was a thirty-two-story office tower built for Morgan Stanley on the east side of Seventh Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets. It was an attractive enough building, though scarcely interesting as architecture. The art object wasn’t the building, but its sign. Actually, it was hard to know how to characterize the relationship between the two— between the solid thing and the evanescent thing that played across its surface. In effect, the building
was
a sign, for imagery appeared, dissolved, and reassembled itself across the entire block-wide façade of the building and wrapped around either side, up to the twelfth-story setback.

The pictures had a wildly exaggerated pop vitality, as if Roy Lichtenstein had scripted the show. The best place to watch was from the street-side counter of the Starbucks across the way. There you could see immense red piggybanks performing a sort of piggybank shuffle; the dance gave way to a cascade of green apples bouncing down a chute. The piggybanks were of the reddest red, and the apples of the greenest green, you could imagine. The apples in turn gave way to a computer-animated image of a great suspension bridge soaring over a sparkling bay, and this in turn to an image of silhouettes walking down a long corridor, perhaps one inside the building itself. Words and numbers sometimes flashed on the screen—that is, on the building—but never the word “Morgan.” This was a sign, but not a billboard or a television commercial. The images bore an intentionally tangential, sometimes almost a mocking, relationship to their sponsor. The piggybanks and the apples constituted a wry, children’s-book version of the global marketplace in which Morgan operated.

Kevin Kennon, the architect chiefly responsible for the sign, was delighted to see that people would walk by the building, look up, startled, and then stand and stare, as they had half a century earlier, in the glory days of the spectacular. Kennon had hoped to design an idiom, or a medium, in which the new, corporate Times Square could express itself without blotting out the meanings that had made Times Square such an object of veneration. He had hoped to find a means by which an increasingly “virtual” Times Square could at the same time be thrillingly actual. And the reaction of those commuters and tourists told him that people wanted to be engaged, that they would stop and look if given something to stop and look at. But he also knew, like Aaron Beall, that he was pushing against the limits of his patron’s patience, taste, and budget. He was trying to move Times Square in a direction it was reluctant to go; to put it more optimistically, he was trying to shape Times Square while its direction was still an open question.

TIMES SQUARE HAS NEVER, in all its long history, had so many signs as it has today. Forty-second Street is bedecked with signs as it never was in the heyday of Erlanger and Klaw, and even the upper reaches of Times Square are dense with billboards. The 1987 zoning regulations forced developers to put up brightly lit signs, while Times Square’s rejuvenation filled it once again with the kind and number of people advertisers were eager to reach. The logic was no different than it had been in the twenties, when an adman had calculated that a spectacular could be erected for fourteen cents per thousand viewers; now, through some extremely creative math, Spectacolor, the largest sign company in Times Square, calculated that the cost-per-thousand of a Times Square sign was one-sixth to one-tenth that of a network television spot. For a brief period in the mid-nineties, Times Square signage had its own tulipmania. In 1995, a group of partners at Lehman Brothers stunned the real estate world by buying the Times Tower, essentially a nineteen-story signboard, from the Banque Nationale de Paris for $27 million. Within two years the building had been sold twice, each time for double the previous sum, so that the final price tag was an astounding $110 million.

But as signs increased in number and value, they became, inevitably, commodities—utilitarian articles designed to sell, not to dazzle. In an earlier day, the spectacular had been a medium of sheer virtuosity—the bigger, the brighter, the more wildly and improbably inventive, the better. O. J. Gude’s dazzling Spearmen, or Douglas Leigh’s Camel smoker, were something like the Super Bowl ads of their day—to be judged not by how much product they moved, but by how much glory they reflected on their sponsor. And in the days before television, how could any other advertising medium compete with a Times Square sign, either aesthetically or commercially? But that era was long gone by the 1990s. A few advertisers—Budweiser, Wrigley’s Gum, Planter’s Peanuts—returned to Times Square as a way of reminding viewers of past glories. But even Budweiser, according to Tama Starr, the third-generation chief executive of the venerable sign company Artkraft Strauss, couldn’t be bothered to use most of the fancy graphics on its sign on the Times Tower, which Artkraft Strauss had designed. Most of the signs in Times Square could have been transplanted easily enough to, say, the Queens entrance to the Midtown Tunnel.

By the 1980s, sign-making had ceased to be a form of handicraft. The old sign companies were gobbled up by huge billboard firms that were in turn owned by multinationals like Viacom or Clear Channel. Artkraft Strauss, which has been building signs in Times Square for a century, is the last survivor, and today it owns only a dozen locations in Times Square. Tama Starr is afflicted with a rather extreme, if understandable, sense of declinism. Leaving aside her own signs, she says, Times Square has been overtaken by “video and vinyl”: oversize screens showing commercials, and giant billboards of computer-printed vinyl, which can be discarded and replaced at a moment’s notice. Even the executives of Spectacolor, a company founded in 1976, suffer pangs of nostalgia for a golden age they had no role in shaping. “You have an explosion of inventory,” says Michael Forte, the company’s president and CEO, “but you also have a lost art of spectacularity.” Spectacolor’s fourth-floor boardroom looks across Broadway to the spot where some of Times Square’s most spectacular signs once stood—Wrigley’s wiggling fish, the Bond waterfall, the giant Pepsi bottles. Today there is a forest of bodacious—but very vinyl— blondes strutting their stuff for Pony and Liz Claiborne. Forte gazes through the boardroom’s picture window and says, with piercing regret, “To think that it went from that to this.”

Signs have been banalized; at the same time, the rise of the office tower in Times Square has posed new questions about the relationship of signage to architecture. The 1987 zoning changes forced developers to think about signage in new ways. A few Times Square developers immediately embraced the new aesthetic. One, Jeffrey Katz, built a black glass hotel at 2 Times Square, between 47th and 48th Street, and used the entire south façade, which looks straight down at the Times Tower, as a rack for a column of giant signs, precisely what it had been throughout the century. The developer William Zeckendorf hired Alan Lapidus, an architect whose father, Morris, had designed many of the glitziest hotels in Miami Beach, to build a hotel on the west side of Broadway between 47th and 48th; Lapidus worked closely with the City Planning Commission to design a structure that would conform to the new rules.

But a hotel is, of course, the rare example of a tall building designed to evoke the idea of pleasure and excitement. An office tower, on the other hand, is traditionally meant to conjure up power, solidity, integrity. And the commercial developers who had fought the new regulations in the first place were loath to submit to them. David Solomon, who was putting up an enormous building, without a guaranteed tenant, at the corner of Broadway and 47th, was genuinely horrified at the prospect of signage. Tama Starr, whom Solomon and his wife, Jean, had retained to design signage if it proved unavoidable, says, “Their idea of a sign was very retro; it was a seventies consciousness of the tawdry ‘HOTEL’ with the ‘E’ flickering because the transformer was out. They did not see signs as having any class whatsoever.” When the new rules were passed, the Solomons did their best to circumvent them. They worked with their architect, Charles Gwathmey, to create a system of lights and signs that would operate only at night; during the day, the building would look as solemn as a judge. Even at night the lights would be visible only from directly in front of the building. The City Planning Commission responded by amending the new zoning rules to specify that signs and lights must be visible during the day as well as at night. Times Square’s new corporate tenants would have to find a way to adapt to the place’s traditions, no matter how outlandish they seemed.

The Solomons ultimately lost the building, known as 1585 Broadway, to their lenders; in 1992, Morgan Stanley bought the property at a steep discount. The firm was profoundly skittish about Times Square; it was, in fact, so dubious about urban life generally that it was seriously thinking about moving its headquarters to Stamford, Connecticut, even though virtually the entire finance industry was concentrated in Manhattan. Now it had to find a way to live with Times Square, and with the Times Square zoning requirements. The bank had opposed the new zoning regulations as ardently as the Solomons had, if less publicly. As Susan Jarrett, now an executive director of Morgan Stanley, recalls, “The fact that there had to be any kind of sign—the fact that it had to be
kinetic—
the fact that it had to be
neon—
this was so anti-image for us.” (Actually, it had to be bright, but not necessarily neon.) Tama Starr, who continued to work on the building, says, “Their first question was ‘What’s the cheapest thing we can do?’ We said, ‘We can give you some cutout plastic letters and stick them on.’ And the answer was, ‘How much will that cost?’”

Morgan plainly had to find a way to incorporate signage that enhanced, rather than damaged, its identity. Charles Gwathmey says that he always favored the idea of placing some kind of signage on the building’s lower floors, among which would be trading floors that would not require windows. And Morgan officials, he says, put up very little resistance once they understood that the sign would serve not as an advertisement but as a new corporate emblem. Gwathmey’s central innovation was, he says, “to integrate the sign into the façade rather than try to make it additive.” He and the designer Massimo Vignelli came up with the idea of using financial information as a decorative motif—not, perhaps, the most far-reaching inspiration. The Morgan Stanley Building at 1585 Broadway has three bands of stock-ticker information, each ten to twelve feet high, running across the façade at different speeds. At either edge of the building are forty-four-foot-high cylindrical maps showing the time zones of Morgan Stanley’s offices across the world. Decorative fins elegantly spell out the building’s address. The bands themselves are sky-blue, and the data is the bright white of LEDs, or light-emitting diodes. The information comes from a real-time feed from the Reuters wire; the numbers appear to speed up as they round a curve leading from the façade of the building—an Artkraft Strauss optical illusion designed, says Tama Starr, “to give the feeling that the information was coming out of the building, crossing the front, and going back into the building to be reprocessed, as if it were a manufacturing process.” This enormous sign, which Morgan Stanley executives once cringed at the thought of, makes a series of essential statements about the company: that it traffics in information and not just in money; that it is a central node and switching device in the global economy; that it is in the moment; and not least of all, that it is cool enough to claim a space for itself in the new Times Square. The sign was, in effect, a branding device both for Morgan Stanley and for Times Square.

By 1997, Morgan Stanley had so thoroughly accommodated itself to Times Square, and all it stood for, that it was looking to expand; it purchased a ground lease from the Rockefeller Group for the parcel on the east side of Seventh Avenue, between 49th and 50th Streets. The Rockefellers had long thought of the parcel as the western gateway to Rockefeller Center, and in 1989 had hired the firm of Kohn Pederson Fox to design a building that would essentially incorporate the property into Rockefeller Center. The architect, Greg Clement, had designed a building with Rockefeller Center limestone and a Rockefeller Center top that would line up horizontally with 30 Rockefeller Center, directly to the east. Here was yet another manifestation of the apparently irrepressible urge to subsume Times Square into Rockefeller Center—the urge that had guided Seymour Durst and George Klein and Philip Johnson. And then the market had collapsed, and Clement’s building went into the deep freeze.

Now Clement and Kevin Kennon, who had since joined the firm, went back to work, this time for Morgan Stanley. Kennon says that he came to think of the new building, at 745 Seventh Avenue, as a “hinge” between two geographical axes, and a “hybrid” of the cultures of Rockefeller Center and Times Square. The new Times Square was, itself, a hybrid place—for, just as Toys “R” Us made Times Square into a more “family-oriented” locale by placing its flagship store there, so Morgan Stanley helped erase the distinction between the corporate world of midtown Manhattan and the old honky-tonk world of Times Square.

Kennon is a sandy-haired, soft-spoken man of an academic bent. His father had been the head of the largest corporate architecture firm in the United States and the dean of architecture at Rice University. While still in college, Kennon had studied at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, a study group founded by a group of young architects and theorists, including Peter Eisenman and Kenneth Frampton. One of Kennon’s fellow students was Rem Koolhaas, who was working on a project that ultimately became
Delirious New York,
a manifesto that celebrated Manhattan’s raw power and indifference to traditional aesthetic standards, somewhat as Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour had done with Las Vegas. Koolhaas wanted to celebrate Times Square, and its frankly commercial and bluntly sexual traditions, rather than gentrify or erase them. In fact,
Delirious New York
includes a project Koolhaas called the Sphinx, a giant complex facing the Times Tower that would combine the functions of hotel, apartment house, sports complex, nightclub, auditorium, and sex parlor. Kennon was neither the theorist nor the radical that Koolhaas was, but the Institute gave him a critical language and approach that allowed him to operate beyond the conventions of corporate architecture.