The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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M. Christine Boyer
2.4 | The cancer of recovery: Times Square vice.
street that means New York to a lot of people, but for many years what 42nd
Street has meant is six to seven crimes a day. ... It’s meant child prostitution.
It sometimes seems to me the people who sentimentalize it are up in
their houses in northern Connecticut.” 19 Even many of the legitimate businesses,
the development corporation claimed, were no better than stash
houses for drug dealers or manufacturers of false identification cards. The
street was seen as a cancer preventing Times Square’s recovery; and as long
as dozens of private owners controlled the street, Robertson contended,
there was no chance for revitalization. 20 The New York Times architectural
critic Herbert Muschamp pointed out that
the goal of the $20 million plan [of “42nd Street Now!” was] . . .
not so much to overhaul the street physically as to reconstruct people’s
perception of it. ... A lot of time, money and public relations
have gone into constructing the image of 42nd Street as a squalid
corridor of horrors that can only be redeemed by ripping it apart.
The image is not unconnected to reality. The decay, crime, drugs,
pornography and prostitution are real, and no one thinks that these
are civic assets. Still, even in its most blighted state the street continued
to draw people who came to enjoy the bright lights, crowds
and budget movie tickets. And it has never been clear that real estate
development is the ideal deterrent to squalor or crime. 21
We could claim that New York City real estate values, and the midtown
zoning district that operated between 1982 and 1987 and allowed