The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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M. Christine Boyer
neon. It has designed the new fast-paced triple zipper on the Morgan Stanley
building on Broadway between 47th and 48th Streets, which tells the
spectator the latest financial data and stock quotes. 3 There is plenty of new
signage to be seen in the square: Eight O’ Clock’s steaming coffee mug,
Calvin Klein’s computer-colored vinyl billboard, 55 tons of fiber optics on
the scrolling ticker of the Coca-Cola sign. In fact, Times Square is now so
bright at night that not only can you see its glow from lower Manhattan,
but a new ball was required for New Year’s Eve in 1995 because the old one
no longer stood out in the blaze of lights. 4 But a cry has been heard on the
Internet that this traditional media center is losing its vitality and will
never survive the electronic media revolution. 5 It is feared that Times
Square/42nd Street, register of the cultural pulse, is doomed to become a
ghetto of quaint neon signage and saccharine musicals like Cats or Beauty
and the Beast, for the operative word on the square is nostalgia—or staged
chaos—not reconceptualizing the future. Instead of retro signage, Times
Square needs a dozen fast-paced flex-face billboards that change every thirty
seconds. And it should become a space incubating the new electronic arts
rather than providing yet more shopping and fun as proposed.
All of these so-called improvements took place in the early 1990s
under the watchful eyes of the self-proclaimed “three witches” who kept an
eye on “the gestalt of Times Square”: that brew of the “electric, vital, colorful
and sort of in your face, a certain aesthetic chaos.” Cora Cahan was president
of the New 42nd Street, a nonprofit organization responsible for
2.3 | Luts time: the Triple Zipper, Morgan Stanley building.