Word: 42nd
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...brash impresario who has come from the Great White North to show the Great White Way how to do it. Unlike traditional Broadway production organizations, Drabinsky's Toronto-based Livent Inc. not only owns theaters (six of them, open or being renovated, in Toronto, Vancouver, Chicago and on 42nd Street in Manhattan) but also seeks to fill them with homegrown shows that Drabinsky initiates from scratch. Livent uses profits from long-running road companies to finance new works, which may run a year or more in cities like Toronto before going to New York. Broadway thus becomes just...
...neat irony, then, that the crash of 1987 is in great part responsible for 42nd Street's rebirth as a middle-class destination. Earlier in the decade the city and state agreed on an ambitious $2.5 billion redevelopment plan for 42nd Street and Times Square, the driving force of which was to be four mammoth, nearly identical office towers designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee as a kind of chilly Rockefeller Center South. Fortunately for fans of Times Square's higgledy-piggledy aesthetic, the late-'80s economic downturn pulled the rug out from under that plan. And there...
...most of the old theaters and porn shops were boarded up. Despite a building boom in the rest of the Times Square area, 42nd Street's caretakers were having a hard time interesting new tenants because a figurative stench still lingered. Of the few serious inquiries about the old theaters, one came from a mud-wrestling entrepreneur, another from Michael Eisner. Disney's chairman became interested in owning a theater in New York because the company's theatrical version of Beauty and the Beast was imminent on Broadway. As it happens, the architect Robert A.M. Stern, who had devised post...
...romance but the potential." What Eisner also came to see, after two years of tough negotiations, was a deal that included low-interest loans from the city and state to cover 75% of the restoration--a good deal for both sides, since Disney's involvement proved to be 42nd Street's turning point, encouraging other corporations to sign...
...your signpost. Rudolph Giuliani's? Those of the kids who used to watch kung-fu movies in the old New Amsterdam? John Barrymore's? With the mix of live and canned entertainment, shopping, restaurants and tourist attractions, and with the hoped-for blend of high, middle and low brow, 42nd Street's caretakers are aiming to re-create the traditional ambiance and uses of 42nd Street in a late-'90s context. Since 42nd Street's traditional ambiance is chaotic, the city and state are in the odd position of planning something that is supposed to appear unplanned. Conundrum...