Word: 42nd
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...clip than in the rest of the city. The area is bustling with new hotels, new office buildings--not to mention new chain stores and corny theme restaurants that would be at home in any suburban mall. Not that Times Square (which technically refers only to the triangle above 42nd Street where Broadway and Seventh Avenue meet but casually takes in the entire neighborhood) doesn't still retain some of its seedy, pre-Gap allure. Indeed, sailors still flock here during Fleet Week, but last year they were reportedly heard complaining that prostitutes had grown scarce...
...Amsterdam--and more to the point, Disney's corporate presence and the vote of confidence it represents--is the anchor for an ambitious city and state plan to make over 42nd Street, long the area's most notorious thoroughfare. As the sleaziest strip in the sleaziest part of town, the stretch of 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues was from the late '60s until just a few years ago the ninth circle of Times Square. "You could buy anything you wanted, whether it was drugs or girls or boys or green cards or telephone cards. You really felt like...
Once the home of John Barrymore, Eddie Cantor and Fanny Brice, 42nd Street began to decline with the Crash of 1929, which bankrupted a number of the theater owners, turning legitimate stages into burlesque houses and movie theaters. Even in Giuliani's youth questionable entertainments were a staple (the future mayor could have paid to see a man eat live mice at Hubert's Museum and Flea Circus). The postwar exodus of the city's middle class continued the block's slow skid into porndom...
...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...