Times Square Roulette - Remaking the City Icon

The author chronicles the recent remake of Manhattan's most famous district, revealing the complex series of political and economic relationships that made the dramatically successful overhaul possible.

Lynne B. Sagalyn, director of the MBA real estate program at Columbia University's business school, explores the underpinnings of New York's concerted mid-1990s gentrification efforts in Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon. Alongside the usual suspects Giuliani, Disney, the ousted peep shows and porn venues Sagalyn places Koch, the Broadway Association, "maverick realtor" Irving Maidman, Frederic S. Papert and his not-for-profit 42nd Street Development Corp., and a host of other major and minor players in the continual plans for redeveloping Times Square. By the 1960s, '70s and '80s, the area had become a blatant symbol of the decline of urban America, a far cry from its glory days in the 1920s as the pinnacle of theatrical couture. On the other hand, when redevelopment plans threatened too drastic a face-lift, critics waxed nostalgic about "the symbolic soul of New York." The jumble of symbolisms, politics, policies and business plans characterizing 20th-century 42nd Street has never before been subject to such thorough and perspicacious scrutiny. 175 illus., 25 in color.

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