Word: amsterdams
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...block is well on its way to becoming Manhattan's most chipper. On its east end a onetime porno palace--where Robert De Niro took Cybill Shepherd on an ill-fated date in Taxi Driver--is now a children's theater. Across the street, next to the New Amsterdam, is a big, bright Disney store--probably the only Disney store in the world that is just four doors away from an establishment that sells scary-looking swords and knives, boxing equipment and dusty copies of Bruce Lee videos. The latter retailer is one of two storefront businesses that remain from...
...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-Johnson-Burgee guidelines for 42nd Street, is a member of Disney's board. Stern told Eisner about the New Amsterdam. On a grim winter day, Stern and Cora Cahan took Eisner, his wife and son on a tour of the theater, shuttered since...
Today water no longer pours through the New Amsterdam's ceiling dome, once again surrounded by a thick garland of red berries and hydrangea wreaths, blue-glazed peacocks and 10-ft.-long angels. The work involved many subtle calibrations. The architect, Hugh Hardy, aimed for a final product that would return the theater to its original state yet allow it to look as if it had been gently lived in for 30 years or so. "There is," he observes, "an inherent conflict in preservation between conservation, which means you keep everything that's original and try not to have...
...referring to the theater, but he could just as easily be talking about the block as a whole--which begs the question of whose memories you take as 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...