Word: disneyism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This week the public will get its first look at the most spectacular fruit yet of the area's renaissance: the unveiling of the Walt Disney Co.'s $34 million restoration of the New Amsterdam theater. Originally built in 1903 and famously taken over by Florenz Ziegfeld 10 years later, it is, after its refurbishment, one of the grandest and most mind-bendingly ornate theaters in America, an eclectic melange of Art Nouveau and other turn-of-the-century ornamentation and a triumph of the restorer's art. Disney is hoping the New Amsterdam will be an economic triumph...
...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...
...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 the street's previous incarnation. The other...
...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-Johnson-Burgee guidelines for 42nd Street, is a member of Disney's board...
Having just come from a visit to the Grand Canyon, I can say without much hesitation that Roosevelt would not have been pleased. Like so many other natural wonders and wildernesses, the Canyon has become thoroughly "Disneyfied." Let no one misunderstand: I am a veteran Disney fan, but I also believe there are places that don't need to be phonied up for entertainment value. To board a bus and be taken from one tourist station to another, surrounded by "Grand Canyon" hats, mugs, and fake rattle snakes, was not my idea of escaping into nature...