Chapter 11 The 1970s

Construction in the city abated in the 1970s before construction revived in the next decade. While there was some new work and remodeling on Forty-second Street during the ‘70s, the city as a whole suffered from financial problems that harmed the tax base, reduced public services, and encouraged companies to leave town for suburban locations that sometimes offered incentives for relocation. By the end of the decade, the city had lost several hundred thousand manufacturing jobs, especially in the garment industry, a former mainstay of the city’s economy. The owners had moved to southern states to avoid paying union wages.

(David E Nye, Consuming Power; A Social History of American Energies, MIT Press, 1998 p. 221; NYT 7 28 1974 pp.1, 42)

Some prominent businesses, including Stern’s department store, had closed and others followed. The shipping industry had recently relocated to Port Elizabeth, New Jersey. While the public at large felt the effects of deindustrialization only gradually unless family members lost their jobs, observers noticed indicators of decline. After Allied Chemical sold the former Times tower in 1974 to several successive buyers, the illuminated news zipper that circled the building shut off intermittently from 1977 to 1986. A proposal by the Gwathmey-Siegel architectural firm working with temporary owner Alex Parker to renovate the building with a mirror-glass surface and a diagonal glass roof met with no action, despite the speculative charm of underground floors for gardens, a children’s horror show and a hamburger restaurant. (NYT 5 15 1975, p. 47; 4 23 2008, p. A19.) A briefly-suggested Broadway pedestrian mall also lacked appeal at the time. When the handsome Franklin bank building at Eighth Avenue was demolished in 1974 to become a parking lot, with its owners calling it a “dump” despite its museum-quality bronze doors and mural by N.C. Wyeth, observers lamented the loss of one of the last works of serious architecture nearby. (NYT 8 14 1974, p. 32) No one thought the “laundromat-type” replacement for it across the street had any architectural merit, although the architects, Poor & Swanke, tried to embellish it with a trompe l’oeil mural that disappeared along with the building in a few years. Ernest Flagg’s heirs sold the remaining model tenements at Tenth Avenue in 1971, whereupon slumlords degraded the properties and tormented the tenants until the late 1990s. At last, a new developer repaired a few of the buildings as part of an arrangement to erect a forty-five-story apartment house immediately south of the surviving tenements but several of the low-rent buildings yielded their place to the new and more expensive replacement.

(For a temporary art installation in the new Franklin bank, see NYT 3 23 1975, p. 25; for one of blogger Tom Miller’s excellent postings, see http://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-lost-franklin-savings-bank-42nd-st.html accessed 6 26 2021; For the tenement problems: NYT 12 25 2000, pp. B1, B2 and https://citylimitsorg/1981/03/01/a-forty-second-street-saga/ accessed 3 19 2022. The 45-story apartment tower at 565 Tenth Avenue was designed by Schuman Lichtenstein Claman & Efron for developer Hal Fetner; it opened in 2002.)

People read about changes of this kind in the few remaining daily newspapers or saw pertinent images on television. They saw failed efforts to counteract decline and experienced the uncertainties of a fiscal crisis. That had been caused by investors’ reduced confidence about extending short-term credit to the city which then faced increasing payments for debt service. Banks refused to market short-term notes. Well over $3 billion was lacking, even without accounting for bills that would soon come due. Those who could leave the city---primarily the White middle classes---continued to do so. As they often took their office-based businesses with them, they reduced both the city’s employment level and the city’s tax base.

The outward movement of industry and population led to lower maintenance and less but often cruder policing of what remained. Observers noted that the fire safety code needed updating. (NYT 7 28 1972, p. R10) In decaying buildings, the booming trade in illegal drugs led to increased robberies, while prostitution flourished among all genders. Thugs menaced the subways that were also vandalized by graffiti writers. The sense that the national government did not care about its major cities added to public depression. When New York City appealed to the Federal government for financial relief, President Gerald Ford remained adamant for months, requiring great sacrifices from residents as well as from inhabitants of other troubled cities. For New York, his proposals included higher subway fares that hurt workers more than executives. It meant the end of free tuition at the City University--the “Harvard of the Poor” --that elevated immigrant and impoverished youth into the middle and upper classes and nurtured a remarkable number of future Nobel Prize winners. The students’ situation was further imperiled by the financial constraints at the New York Public Library, for although the Mid-Manhattan lending-and-open-shelf branch opened in 1970 using money allocated in 1960, the research library curtailed weekday hours and closed on weekends in 1971. The limited hours meant that students, people with full-time jobs, and other researchers would lack access to advanced materials, maps, original papers, and photographic archives. There were countless other problems, too. No one who was at least a teenager in 1975 can forget the headline in the tabloid Daily News on October 30, referring to the President’s refusal to help New York: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”

While there seemed to be endless misery in the city and even on Forty-second Street, a major change to building practice was in the works: the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, or ULURP, approved in November 1975 as part of the revised municipal charter. At long last, the City gained a formal procedure for determining land use by specified procedures and parties, laid out in the charter’s section 197-a. The new rules covered, among other matters, procedures for amending the Zoning Resolution, selection of sites for capital projects, and permits adopted by the City Planning Commission. Important for projects on Forty-second Street was the creation of fifty-nine Community Planning Boards including those numbered 4, 5, and 6 that superintend Forty-second Street from west to east. Their function is advisory, but they can be influential if there is a consensus favoring or opposing a project. Since 1990, they have been allowed to prepare their own plans for development. While they cannot reject plans that conform to the City’s rules, the community planning boards can influence changes in design for anything that requires a special permit or exemption. They can also hold up development, for better or worse. There were few immediate consequences for Forty-second Street, but Community Boards had a say in later proposals.

(For the planning changes, see https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/overview accessed 12 26 2021 subhead Charter, at 197-a; Tom Angotti, “Land Use and the New York City Charter, Submitted to the New York City Charter Commission August 10, 2010” See also Richard M. Landman, “ULURP” After Nine Years, How’s It Doing?” New York Affairs August 4, 1985, pp. 120-131. Specific rules and procedures have been modified over time. See also proposals in 1974 https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/about/cpc/19740710.pdf accessed 11 11 2021.

The fiscal crisis was managed when Governor Hugh Carey asked four eminent citizens led by investment banker Felix Rohatyn to create an entity under state control that could protect the City from bankruptcy. The Emergency Financial Control Board was created to find out exactly what revenue sources were available to the city, and to use that knowledge to control the city’s power to borrow. The Board and its creation, the Municipal Assistance Corporation, also converted certain municipal tax revenues to state revenues and oversaw labor contracts with municipal unions. It was empowered to sell bonds that provided money to keep the city operating. No one found all this a perfect solution to the city’s needs, but it was apparently the only one available. By 1980, the City balanced its budget, having reduced civil service employment, instituted tuition fees at the City University, increased fares for public transportation, and received federal loan guarantees, among other more complicated fiscal measures.

The City, desperate for increased revenue since the late 1960s, had been making concessions to property interests because according to the independent Citizens’ Budget Commission, the property tax is the city’s single largest source of revenue, coming from both residential and commercial sources. In 1969, the City Planning Commission allowed a landmark that had not used all its potential development rights---and few of them had----to transfer the unused potential not only to a neighboring site but also to any site on the block that was connected to the landmark by the same owner’s property. Some sites were no longer limited by a previous rule establishing a maximum of thirty percent increased development. Landmark owners could divide their unused development rights and sell individual segments to separate developers. In 1970, a refinement approved the transfer of development rights from a landmark owned by the public to a developer who paid for the rights and improved pedestrian facilities or mass transportation. These measures helped to pay for improvements to Grand Central Terminal, but the transfer rules and their variants later enabled the erection of gigantic buildings such as One Vanderbilt just west of the Terminal or a tower proposed in 2020 just east of it on the Commodore/ Grand Hyatt Hotel site.

An enduring problem for the city was the proliferation of sex-related businesses, especially west of Broadway. The police staged periodic raids, sometimes arresting people also tied to organized crime. (e.g. NYT 12 1 1971, p 38.) The Mayor’s Office of Midtown Enforcement, headed from 1978 to 1984 by Carl B. Weisbrod, used support by the police, and inspectors from the Buildings Department to reduce the area’s sex businesses on the grounds of safety and public health. (Reichl, Reconstructing Times Square, pp. 57-59; see also pp. 30-39) .Vendors of lewd publications feared being closed down for code violations if they included prostitution or drug selling on site---the latter known in the area since the 1930s---so they carefully separated their shops from whatever was being sold next door whether live, in print, or on film. During one cleanup effort, the City let a major pornography shop remain in business, so that the City could show any judge that it was not violating constitutional rights to free speech. An official could claim to be dutifully protecting public health and honoring regulations about building safety while closing the premises of other sites conducting sex business.

(Interview with Herbert Sturz: July 2017. Mr. Sturz recruited Mr. Weisbrod for the position. For a succinct account of the early activity in the area by Sturz and Weisbrod, see Thomas Dyja, New York New York New York, pp.74-75, 107-08, 142, and Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette, passim.)

The City’s efforts were not based on aesthetics or on morals alone. The sex businesses often occupied small buildings of little value to the real estate tax base, and they dissuaded larger developments from locating near them. The sex businesses were profitable in a cluster like those of electronics or jewelry and could not be induced to move. The City could not have infringed upon free speech or the pornography vendors’ other rights. Yet something had to be done about low-rise buildings of little value from the tax-collector’s point of view but of high value to the owners. Businesses on West Forty-second Street scared respectable visitors away. City officials feared the loss of significant revenue from tourists who had visited Times Square’s family-friendly attractions, not the French Model House at 436 West and other brothels. The McGraw-Hill Publishing Company added to the downfall in its area by vacating its own skyscraper in 1970 and moving to the western addition to Rockefeller Center. While designation of McGraw-Hill’s green setback skyscraper as a city landmark in 1979 prevented its immediate demolition and replacement by a parking lot, empty buildings are not tourist attractions. In 1974, after another buyer of the building had defaulted, Group Health Insurance bought it, painted over the roof sign and altered the sign over the front door. Apart from their respectability, the new tenants had no positive effect on the neighborhood.

During the near collapse of the city’s finances, there had still been signs of hope on the west side. The impending construction of a convention center spurred developers to propose building on empty or under-utilized sites. The existing residential population had shrunk, and the area was neither needed nor ready for high-rise office buildings, in part because there was no easy subway access between Ninth Avenue and the river just beyond Twelfth Avenue. Housing might be useful there, however, and the city needed more housing. H.R.H. Construction, led by Richard Ravitch, obtained city approval for two middle-income high-rise apartment houses on land assembled earlier by Walter Scott & Co. and Seymour Durst. The sites on the 400 block West contained brick row houses, tenements, lofts, and perhaps a garage. Some buildings had survived from the years before late nineteenth century tenement house laws made the block’s four rear houses illegal. H.R.H. proposed to use the Mitchell-Lama program enacted by the state in 1955 to promote middle-income and cooperative housing that the City administered, supplemented by a small percentage of private investment. The State Supreme Court in 1974 allowed the condemnation of the few holdout properties on the block so that construction could proceed.

The apartment houses were to have a thousand-car garage between them, and five tennis courts, among other amenities that might lure hesitant renters to the north block between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. Some row houses and a health club were other inducements. The project’s opening was delayed until 1977, as we will see. Before the fiscal crisis, the Glick Construction Company contracted to build tall middle-income apartments on the entire block between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues, but that project was never realized. The fiscal crisis was surely responsible, supplemented by the need to rezone the block from industrial to residential, a change only accomplished half a generation later. (NYT 2 18 1973, pp. RE1, RE 8.)

When the worst part of the fiscal crisis was over, amenity organizations such as the Municipal Arts Society and landmarks lovers tried to change public perception of the western half of the street. They focused on past glamor as a guide to a more wholesome future. In 1975, Esther Schwartz of the City’s Office of Midtown Planning and Development proposed that private donors in midtown pay for a “Times Square Environmental Art Gallery” and before that initiative shut down, a contract was signed with RKO, which had its WOR-TV studios in the Rialto Theater building. It was then that artist Alex Katz provided images for a twenty-foot-high frieze of young women’s heads that stretched 247 feet around the top of the low Rialto theater and office structure. (Chap. 8, Fig. 16 and Fig. l here, below). A projection at the curved corner of the theater and studio building reached three heads higher toward the sky. The smoothly depicted heads were bold and easy to apprehend from a distance. The images appear to have been portraits of specific people. Katz did not execute the images himself; professional sign painters Jerry Johnson and Marvin Adelson were engaged from the Seaboard Outdoor Advertising Company, Inc. Of course, money was required—for Katz, for the painters, for maintaining the leased space for two years. It came from the Public Art Fund. Katz donated his maquette to the Public Arts Council, which supported the artist’s request for a tax-deductible contribution. The Council proposed to cut up the maquette and give parts of it to donors.

(Fig. 1. Alex Katz, “Nine Women” 1977. Photo: Chuck DeLaney , Public Art Fund. © 2025 Alex Katz / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY)

(https://juddtully.net/articles/katz-meow-on-broadway/accessed 7 24 2021, written Oct. 8, 1977; at each end of the building, cinemas showed films named with pornographic puns. Between the cinemas were small restaurants, Thomas B. Hess, “Alex Katz’s Sign of the Times,” New York, Oct. 3, 1977, pp 68-70. NYT 11 21 1976 VIII, pp 1, 10; Marshall Berman offered social context in On the Town, 2nd ed., London and Brooklyn, NY, Verso Books, 2009 pp. 189-191.)

Meanwhile, there had been some proposals for remodeling and for small building projects. A more effective impetus for improving the condition of the western parts of the street came from the 42^nd Street Redevelopment Corporation, established in 1976 and later called Building for the Arts but usually referred to under its initial name. This entity was founded by Frederic S. Papert, a former advertising agency executive who turned his talents to civic advocacy. It had offices in the McGraw-Hill Building, where rents were low. Among the features of Forty-second Street that attracted his attention was the potential for trolley car service along its entire route, as there had been only bus service for the previous quarter century. Buses use more energy and create more pollution than trolleys do, but if trolleys break down, they hold up others behind them. He also promoted the preservation of Grand Central Terminal, the rehabilitation of Bryant Park, and the development of small theaters in what became known as Theatre Row.

(For Papert, see Susan Henshaw Jones in New York Preservation Archive Project Newsletter, Fall 2016, pp 4-5. The Project’s archives include material on Papert’s work on Forty-second Street; see www.nypap.org. Reichl p. 184 on the Board of Estimate’s approval of the project.)

The Redevelopment Corporation was the first client of a newly formed law firm, that of David Stadtmauer and Michael Bailkin, who were former public employees. They specialized in economic development projects that offered incentives to entrepreneurs.

(https://www.villagevoice.com/2019/02/28/the-dirty-deal-that-helped-make-donald-trump/ accessed 1 23 2021, with relevant material especially from articles published on 12 17 1991; 2. 26 1979; 9 22 1987; 1 3 1974.)

The Corporation’s reports supplemented a study called Urban Design: Manhattan, produced in 1969 by the Regional Plan Association, that focused on transit access and on the problems of crime and degradation. The Redevelopment Corporation’s efforts had begun during the mayoralty of John V. Lindsay (1966-73) who also created the Office of Midtown Planning and Development that studied the area and issued reports. Mayor Lindsay organized a Times Square Development Council, but it had a limited life once some of its members were exposed as landlords of sex-centered businesses.

(Taylor, ed., Inventing Times Square pp. 344-345, citing insights by Gail Sheehy in New York magazine, 1972.)

The Redevelopment Corporation was formally established only in 1976 under Mayor Abraham Beame (1974-77). It obtained initial funding in 1977 from corporations located in the area and from the Ford Foundation. The mayor also established the Office of Midtown Enforcement to punish violators of the rules governing adult entertainment. In 1976, the Mayor’s Midtown Action Committee had studied the Times Square Redevelopment District, an area encompassing more than Forty-second Street. In the same year, the Corporation bought the useless Heidelberg/Crossroads Building from the Maidman family; the City itself could not buy it then because seven of Maidman’s creditors submitted almost two million dollars in liens that the City would have to pay. In 1979, Richard Haas painted his mural of the former Times tower on the Heidelberg’s tower, commissioned by the Midtown Office of Planning and Development.

(Fig. 2 Richard Haas, image of the Times tower on the Heidelberg/Crossroads Building, 1979. Photo artnet.jpg)

People enjoyed looking at it, but the disguise had no positive effect on the monetary value of either building. When three original mortgage holders waived their claims, the City bought the useless building in 1981 from the 42^nd Street Development Corporation. The New York Telephone Company and the Port Authority funded its conversion in 1984 to a small but reassuring police station instead of the pornography store that had been there earlier. No one regretted any loss other than Haas’s mural

(“Streetscapes,” NYT 4 16 1998, p. RE7. For Haas’ mural: Derek Christopher Satchell, “At the Stroke of a Brush: Painted Architecture as a Preservation Alternative” University of Pennsylvania thesis in Historic Preservation, 1994, posted 4 29 2014. Accessed 1 3 2020, pp. 26-28. See also NYT 9 6 1979, p. B3. Local banks and the 42^nd St. Development Corporation paid for the work. https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1260&context=hp_theses accessed 1/3/2020, pp.26-28; NYT 7 17 1976, p. 30.)

The Midtown Action Committee gave its blessing to the construction of small theaters that used Irving Maidman’s former theater buildings and other structures between Ninth and Tenth Avenues that had been offering adult entertainment.

This group of buildings has long been known as Theatre Row, and while the individual theaters have changed names and presentations over the years, the fundamental activities of nurturing new talent and providing performance space for small companies have endured.

FIG.3. Theatre Row. Photo 2023, the author. See also Chap. 12, Fig. 10)

The Black Theatre Alliance, one of the theatrical organizations in the district, coordinated its members’ work and offered opportunities to actors and playwrights before its demise in 1984. Playwrights Horizons, another component of the group, presents the work of American playwrights, became affiliated with New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and developed a central box office for off-Broadway presentations. Other components of Theatre Row have changed or moved but throughout the decades, this pioneering enterprise was one of the chief agents of west side development. (NYT 5 26 1982, p. C23),

The Ford Foundation supported a private-public study by professors at the City University that recommended developing a privately funded tourist-centered entertainment facility at first called Cityscape and then City at 42^nd Street. The Office of Midtown Planning, the development firm of Olympia and York, and businesses in the area --such as Morgan Guaranty Trust, CBS broadcasting, accounting firms, the New York Times, and Hilton Hotels --also funded the study, addressing particularly the problematic block between Seventh and Eighth Avenues but then expanding its purview. The tourist-focused project would be made possible if the City of New York obtained the sites by eminent domain and provided financial aid. The elaborate plans publicized in 1979 foundered when the finances could neither be predicted accurately nor assured; moreover, as the plans were not initiated by the new mayor, Edward Koch (1978-89), they lacked support from his office. As we shall see, there was a concurrent proposal to erect an apparel merchandise mart facing the Port Authority bus station, to demolish several theaters and the Times tower, and to cede control of three-and-one-half blocks to private entities. The Forty-second Street Study of 1978 indicated that under the zoning rules then in force, up to five million square feet could be built in the area, reaching the maximum of 21.6 floor-to-area ratio.

(For far more about these and subsequent events, see Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette, passim; Reichl, Reconstructing Times Square, passim, Stern et al., New York 2000, passim; and https://edc.nyc/project/42nd-street-development-project accessed throughout 2020.)

This was too much for the City Planning Commission and for Mayor Koch. It was certainly too much for those whose properties would be taken by eminent domain, or whose residences would be condemned. For a while, only variants of these proposals survived. In 1980, the Mayor and Herbert Sturz refused to consider demolishing four theaters and to condemn the large area envisioned for reconstruction. The mayor, whose ego was too big to permit a grand scheme to be credited to others, nevertheless persisted in the overall desire to change the character of the troublesome block between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.

(George Gelles,“The Rise and Fall of ‘The City at 42nd Street’,” LAFF Newsletter, http://www.laffsociety.org/OldNews.asp?PostID=989 accessed 6 19 2021; “r NYT 11 14 1978 pp. B1, B6 For all this, see Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette, esp. pp 70-73; NYT 12 12 1979, R1, R2)

Others had also objected. Among them were Douglas Durst, a real estate magnate who might have had one of his parcels condemned, and the Brandt theater owners who had already rehabilitated two of their theaters at their own expense. If they could do it without public subsidy, they thought that others could, too. The Brandt directors understandably objected to proposals to take over private property by eminent domain.

(Their Apollo Theatre reverted to a cinema in 1983 and later was converted to a rock concert hall before being mostly demolished in 1996: Henderson, Ten Theaters, pp. 80-82; http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/1079 accessed 6 6 2021)

In 1979, the Brandt company reopened their Apollo after its brief use as a night club that didn’t entirely conform to the current building codes. They gave it a new entrance on Forty-third Street to keep its patrons safe from encounters with the people on Forty-second. Real estate reporter Carter B. Horsley had characterized the existing theaters and some of their patrons two years earlier: the Victory, he wrote, appealed to middle-aged white men, and he quoted the operator of three theaters who said that he did not book X-rated films, though obviously others did. (NYT 6 19 1977, p. 209; for the Apollo 2 18 1979, p. 64)

The architectural firm of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer with Brannigan-Lorelli Associates –well-established lighting and rigging technicians---presented a report in 1980 describing the condition of the theaters. It included the essential and the optional requirements for their rehabilitation. The work would be costly because parts of the theaters were decrepit, unsafe, and in violation of current building codes, but if the spectacles on stage were exciting enough, some economies could be practiced in the public areas. One of the principal buildings eligible for rehabilitation was the New Amsterdam Theater-- infested by both rats and mice; it also flooded intermittently, but it might be salvaged. By 1981, architecture critic Paul Goldberger could report on still vague new plans to rehabilitate theaters, preserve the Times tower, and offer tentative proposals to potential private developers.

(Goldberger: NYT 2 17 1981, p. B4; for planning: 3 11, 1981, p. B4; Horsley. NYT 7 1 1981, pp. B1, B8. Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, “10 Theaters on Forty-second Street: A Report,” 1980; New Amsterdam Theatre, Forty-Second Street, New York City, New York, Theatre Historical Society, 1978.)

Efforts to police the area also began to show success by the end of the 1970s. Carl Weisbrod at the Midtown Enforcement Project said that the number of massage parlors had declined from fifty-nine to sixteen in the district under his supervision. New zoning rules prevented the resurrection of shuttered businesses. The police were arresting about two hundred drug dealers each month on Forty-second Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, although anyone who remembers the scene at the time could have imagined reasons for more than an average of six or seven arrests per day. One reason for the disparity between arrests and expectations may have been that some products sold as illegal substances were actually oregano and parsley. (NYT 4 15 1979, pp. R1, R 2)

At various dates, city officials expressed concern about displacement of low-income residents. Mere concern has rarely stopped higher-yield property development, nor did it then. By the end of the decade, plans had been made for new buildings on available sites west of Eighth Avenue. The architecture critics for the New York Times---Ada Louise Huxtable, Paul Goldberger, and Herbert Muschamp---published their reservations about the proposals for West Forty-second Street that were conceived from the late 1970s through the 1980s after the fiscal crisis had abated. Few of their comments caused major changes to the plans. Since the City and private interests had some success in arresting blight, optimistic observers of the theater district noticed the potential for renovation and reuse of older properties such as lofts and single-room-occupancy hotels, known as SROs, which had restrictions imposed on their construction after 1955. Limiting SROs seemed at first to be a positive measure and from the viewpoint of the City’s need for tax revenue from high-value development, it was. But the baleful consequences of converting SROs with common bathrooms to more elevated uses included a huge increase in homelessness among working men and people in distress who had lived in those meager accommodations. Everyone began to see more men and women sleeping on sidewalks, in subway tunnels and doorways. After the City closed some mental hospitals in the 1970s, outdoor living became more frequent and accelerated when the SROs were remodeled or destroyed. A report produced by the City University’s Law Review in 2013 said that in 1976 and the five succeeding years, almost two-thirds of the remaining single-room units were lost to redevelopment. According to the online publication, Slate, “New York lost 109,000 single-room-occupancy units between 1971 and 1987.”

(Brian J. Sullivan, Jonathan Burke, “Single-Room Occupancy Housing in New York City: The Origins and Dimensions of a Crisis,” CUNY Law Review, 17 #1, 2013, pp. 113-143, esp. p. 122; see also https://www.curbed.com/2021/06/sro-hotels-nyc-bring-back.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Curbed%20-%20June%2025%2C%202021&utm_term=Subscription%20List%20-%20Curbed by Karrie Jacobs, “Living Small,” Curbed, June 24, 2021 accessed 6 25 2021; “We Could Solve Homelessness if We Wanted,” Slate https://slate.com/business/2021/03/homelessness-lets-solve-it.html and 2019/ 04 old-buildings-house-fewer-people-than-they-did-fifty-years-ago-what-happened.html, accessed 6 25 2021)

Another report from the City University stated that between 1960 and 1978 the number of these units fell from about 129,000 to about 25,000.

(https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/affordablehousingnyc/homelessness-in-nyc/ accessed 3 25 20)

Whatever the exact number was, the effects on the homeless were devastating and the results were visible in doorways on and beyond Forty-second Street.

For a while, though, there seemed to be several promising developments in the area. In late October 1979, the Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China bought the former Sheraton motor hotel at Twelfth Avenue. It had lain empty for two years. The new owners improved security by altering the open aesthetic. (Chap. 10, Fig. 2). The four-story limestone-faced garage at the base is covered with bars, and metal mesh. A long panel of windows has mirror glass, precluding any view of the rooms inside. Atop the garage, the glass-walled pavilion retains its once-fashionable angled roof, and the polygonal pavilion also survives. (NYT 11 1 1970, pp. B1, B10)

To the east, the Carter Hotels Corporation anticipated positive change at the Hotel Dixie and therefore from 1942 onward invested in extensive renovations to Emery Roth’s design. The corporation’s president renamed the Dixie so as to give his small chain a consistent identity. More important was the provision of comfortable convertible rooms---parlors by day, bedrooms by night---intended for couples who had business in the city. The furnishings were simplified Georgian models in pale colors that subtly magnified the apparent size of the room. The decorators apparently tried to suggest modernity without upsetting potential renters who had traditional tastes. Until the mid-1970s, the hotel restaurant was a center for local and visiting magicians, and in the late 1960s, it had replaced its Plantation Room night club with the small Bert Wheeler Theater, later called the Carter, that had a circular bar next door. It staged performances until at least 1980.

The hotel had problems, nonetheless. Once its bus depot closed, the hotel was truncated on the Forty-second Street side. Carter Hotels sold the building in 1977, perhaps fearing that the area would not be cleaned up soon. The buyer was Tran Dinh Truong, who not long before had escaped from Vietnam with two million dollars concealed in an assistant’s battered suitcase. The new owner may have been clever, but he was entirely inexperienced in hotel management. After he neglected the building for years. and used it as a municipally sponsored homeless shelter from the early 1980s to 1988, the City sued and fined him in 1983 and 1984. That made no evident difference to his management or to the misery of the people housed there, but the City did install a temporary administrator and used the GF Management firm to correct major violations. Minor ones persisted even though two floors were rented to a youth hostel in the late 1980s.

(The owner’s estate sold the hotel in 2018 to the Chetrit company which expected to erase the Carter’s reputation as the dirtiest hotel in the city. https://therealdeal.com/2014/01/02/times-squares-hotel-carter-under-renovation-and-soon-to-hit-the-market/ accessed 6 6 2021. NYT 10 23 1976, p. 29; 4 23 1978, p. R1; 2 20 1994, p. R1; 1 2, 2014, p. A 17; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Carter_(Manhattan) with further references. Accounts vary about Tran’s means of escape from Vietnam and the number of his children; https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/nyregion/mr-trans-messy-life-and-legacy.html? and other online obituaries).

Nearby, the West Side Bus Terminal closed in 1972 because it, like the Dixie/Carter’s bus terminal, could not compete with the Port Authority’s facility. The West Side Bus Terminal countered potential decay by becoming home to the National Video Center recording studio, the Spanish Television Network and shorter-term tenants. A jeweler, Leon Scheftel, kept his store at 402 West at least until 1972 and perhaps longer. He noted that the nearby sex establishments catered not to “the riffraff” but to men who would pay $25 to $50 for a visit----a considerable sum at the time. Mr. Scheftel implied that the wealthier men would not disturb the block or qualify as riffraff. The Sanitation Department district office occupied the ground floor of 412 West in 1972 although it adjoined the Geisha House Massage Parlor at 414 West where the management set fire to a rival at 410 West in 1977. This clearly antedated the renovation of these buildings as Theatre Row. (http://www.nysonglines.com/42st.htm accessed 6 6 2021) The Forty-second Street Development Corporation moved the City’s mounted police unit to 621-625 West, replacing a child-pornography peepshow (Sagalyn, Inventing Times Square, p. 346). The newcomers provided a semblance of area supervision there even if people who could exercise housing choices might not have wanted to live near horses.

The most significant positive change near the west end during the 1970s had to do with housing at Manhattan Plaza. It is the apartment complex on the north side of the Ninth to Tenth Avenue block that developer Richard Ravitch had proposed for middle-income housing. Ravitch of HRH Construction Co., in partnership with Irving Fischer, working as Manhattan Plaza Associates LLP, engaged the architectural firm of David Todd & Associates, otherwise known as Todd, Basile, Cabrera & Wong, who renovated Theatre Row. The new project replaced tenements with ground floor shops, and a building converted to a burlesque theater from what may have been a garage.

(Fig. 4. Manhattan Plaza, David Todd., 1977. Photo: author, 2023. More recreational facilities were added later; see lower central buildings.)

Manhattan Plaza was built from 1974 to 1977, comprising two 45-story towers with more than 1600 apartments, some town house units, ground floor shops, recreational facilities, and a 900-car garage stretching between the towers. The tall buildings with balconies had unimpeded views at the time. The architects maintained the low-rise character of the mid-blocks by placing the towers at the ends, close to the wide north-south avenues. One tower has forty-six floors, the other forty-five because the terrain slopes and this difference makes them seem to be of the same height. Health club facilities were included, as well as a playground, tennis courts, and a swimming pool within the fitness center. Shops and a bank at street level offered convenience. A theater and a cooperative preschool were additional amenities. Intended as dwellings for the comfortable middle classes and touted as luxury development the way most reasonably decent buildings still are, the complex had fallen afoul of the city’s financial stresses in the mid-1970s. Moreover, the oil crisis at the time made an all-electric building more expensive than predicted. However, the Mitchell-Lama Housing Program required a $95 million commitment by the City, which, facing bankruptcy, it could not fulfill above $65 million. Potential residents, too, were adversely affected by the fiscal crisis of 1975.

Without middle class tenants who could be lured by financial advantage to a center of the drug and pornography industries, the complex might have remained empty in a city where thousands of people were desperate for permanent housing. The project was rescued by providing that advantage to a different class of tenant---poor people. The City could then apply for money from the Federal Government’s Department of Housing and Urban Development. Its Section 8 program subsidizes rent for those with limited incomes. Tenants pay thirty percent of their incomes and the government pays the rest. Roger Starr, the administrator of the city’s Housing and Development Administration, applied for the funds. Daniel Rose, a real estate developer whose company, Dwelling Managers, Inc., had been chosen by HRH to manage the project, proposed that the new residents be not just any poor people but members of the arts and entertainment professions, many of whom had irregular and low incomes. He gained support from Rev. Richard Rodney Kirk, an Episcopal priest who had developed a ministry to people in the arts. As Mr. Rose put it in a draft document, “our tenants would be ‘middle class professionals without money.”

Clara Fox, a tenant advocate and tireless social worker, chaired a committee that helped to persuade the city fathers of the merit in this plan. It had the support of Peter Joseph, then commissioner of the City’s Housing Preservation and Development office. Local area residents, who had objected to unspecified poor newcomers who might threaten their property values, or rich ones who could price them out of their homes, could hardly object to members of the arts professions who provided cultural activities for the city and beyond. Left unsaid was the likelihood that stagehands, most actors and most directors would likely be White, although musicians and other theatrical personnel were more diverse. The neighborhood would only be enhanced by the presence of stage directors, actors, dancers, musicians, stagehands, choreographers, and others whose lifeways were included in the middle class. The list of former residents is star-studded. Not all the units were destined for people in the arts, however; thirty percent were allotted to neighborhood residents with disabilities or who had been living in substandard apartments. The residents were therefore integrated in ways that aroused no opposition. During the worst years of the HIV/AIDS crisis, social services served residents and others who were afflicted, and then when long-term treatments became available, the facility switched to serving the elderly.

(NYT 8 2 1976, p. 28, which Daniel Rose,(personal correspondence), said presents the accurate history of the project; NYT 9 14 1979, pp. B1, B18; https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/manhattan-plaza-year-pact-helps-actors-48161/ accessed 6 7 2021; Office of Midtown Planning and Development, Times Square Action Program, Manhattan Plaza, September, 1975. I thank Mr. Rose for sending his document, Draft Housing for the Performing Arts; obituary for Clara Fox, NYT 11 16 2007, p. B7; Alexander Reichl evidently talked to Frederic Papert who took credit for the idea of installing theater people, see Reichl, op. cit., pp. 81-82. The building was owned since 2004 by The Related Companies. http://www.related.com/our-company-properties/99/manhattan-plaza. See also https://t2conline.com/meet-the-former-and-present-residents-of-manhattan-plaza-irving-fischer/ and a related documentary Miracle on 42nd Street. “Manhattan Plaza Building History,” https://vimeo.com/42411998 from Paladin (accessed 1 24 2017) See also NYT 2 18 1973, pp. RE1, RE8; 1 6 1974, p 37. Ackman Brothers, brokers at 110 East 42nd Street, arranged the sale of most lots. See also NYT 1 15 1977, p. 20; 2 5 1977, p. 24; 4 11 1976, p. 46. As of March 24, 2022, a studio rented for $1950 per month, utilities included, and the tenant needed a minimum income of $93.612; the prospective tenant no longer had to be in the arts, https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGmvTzffmMmMnlQxNjRBNlHtmJG accessed 3 20 2022. Three to five people could occupy a two-bedroom apartment for $2679 per month, if their annual income was between $128,569 and $224,996-- an interesting idea of middle income. (New York City Council Member Gale Brewer’s Update, March 17, 2022) For summary articles, see NYT 6 9 2002, p. XI: 1 and XI 6; 12 31 1978, RE 1,3.)

Nearby there were a basement dinner theater and some retail establishments but the street frontage on Forty-second remained less agreeable. Policing and altering the penal code to increase penalties for prostitution had some effect, but further measures were required and adopted in the 1980s. Tourism was the major growth industry in this decade, but families and many big spenders did not venture west of Broadway. The fame of the award-winning films “Midnight Cowboy” of 1969 and “Taxi Driver” of 1975, which showed the degraded physical and social conditions of the street, kept family-based tourists away. It was an ominous sign that hotel occupancy citywide was only 72% in 1976, albeit an improvement over the 66% of the previous year.

(42nd Street Study, NYC Department of Planning, CPC Urban Design Group, 78-04, January 1978 p. 35; the hotel occupancy rate in 2018 was 87.3 % even though there were more rooms built by then https://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2019/01/22/new-york-city-hotel-occupancy-rate-rises.html)accessed 3 25 2019 The Study took account of earlier surveys and studies of the area, cited on its first eight pages. The occupancy rate in 2024 was 84.3% and the average room rate was $268.72; yahoo search 2 13 2025. Do the statistics include Airbnb or similar companies’ occupancies? That is unclear.)

Even local residents began to leave if they could. It was no wonder that the Holy Cross Academy closed in 1972 and sold the site to a real estate developer. The population of the neighborhood had declined by about a third, parents were not eager to send children to a school near the degraded storefronts, and the school buildings needed expensive maintenance. A new owner demolished the academy and installed a long-lived parking lot that did nothing to improve the area. (http://www.nycago.org/Organs/NYC/html/HolyCrossAcad.html accessed 3 25 2019; also NYT 8 12 1972, p. 26).

Construction of the Port Authority’s bus terminal extension at Eighth Avenue might have helped, but only if transportation centers had been less appealing to homeless and disturbed individuals. The building and its extension were not City projects but belonged to the interstate Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. This entity used its own architects to enlarge the existing terminal to serve the increasing numbers of commuters from New Jersey. The crowding became worse after the West Side and Dixie bus facilities closed. Parking sites were also needed. The necessary land for the terminal’s extension came from Irving Maidman who had never been able to build profitably on the southwest corner of Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue where the lot was large enough for a significant addition to the bus terminal. In 1965, the Port of New York Authority became the owner of record, obtaining the site from the First National City Bank which apparently had issued a mortgage to Maidman. The Port Authority also obtained another former Maidman property from McGraw-Hill.

(Fig. 5. Port Authority Bus Terminal, north wing. 1979. Port Authority architects. 42^nd Street is at right, toward McGraw-Hill Building. Photo: Author, August 2025.)

The process of building was beset by a tenant’s rent strike, by financing questions, by complaints by the Trailways bus company about fees and by competition from the subsidized Amtrak railroad system. Inevitably the project proceeded because its commuter service was essential for thousands of weekday patrons. When the building opened, the bus operation was smoother, but the building staff and police had to set up a special unit to assist runaway teenagers and counter the pimps and drug dealers who preyed upon them. Some merchants complained of theft and begging. Not one of these problems was new to transportation facilities

The new rectangular building added fifty-two bus-boarding platforms and parking spaces for two hundred cars. The north wing has offices, shops, and services around a central corridor on the street level. Below ground is a subway access level above departure gates for about two dozen buses. The second overground level has shops and a few services, and the third level has other departure gates. The upper floors accommodate vehicles visible at the building’s perimeter through x-shaped trusses that form the façade above the ground floor. This design adds a certain engineering energy to the streetscape, emphasized initially by the trusses’ cover of red paint, but the ensemble is hardly beautiful. There is no obvious visual link between the glass walls at street level and the metal above, except perhaps the canopy over the entrance that features a lattice of metal rods. From time to time, the trusses have been partly covered by signs or art installations. Art appears now and then inside the building, too, particularly in a statue of commuters by George Segal (1982) in the south wing.

(Fig. 6 George Segal, “The Commuters” (1980). Photo: Author, August 2025)

and in the form of a grand piano which professional musicians and commuters are free to play.

(NYT 11 17 1977, pp. B1, B22; Blake Gopnik, https://brooklynrail.org/2021/02/special-report/Praising-the-Port-Authority-Terminal offers a rare appreciation of the building’s aesthetics, accessed 6 25 2021)

In 1975, despite the problems facing the City, transportation authorities were able to open an underground passageway to link the number 7 subway train to Queens to the Eighth Avenue line. Designers enlivened the corridor with eight photo murals of local views, past and present, such as the reservoir, the Crystal Palace, and the Public Library.

Above ground, the demolition of the Franklin savings bank at Eighth Avenue and the closing of several restaurants, a Woolworth store, and a Liggett Pharmacy meant further decay. When a delicatessen closed at Broadway, the building owners expected to allow a topless bar in its place. As one small measure taken against pornography, the State Liquor Authority refused to issue a license to the bar so at least that scheme failed although a peepshow later opened there.

(NYT 9 26 1975, p. 36 editorial; 11 2 1975, pp.1, 16. For peepshows that included violation of children and animals, see editorial 9 26 1975, p. 36; the proposed cleanup was not just a matter of improving bad taste. See also NYT 11 2 1975, pp. 1, 16. Every book about the Times Square area has equally lurid information.)

The city’s planning departments were less active and effective during Abraham Beame’s mayoralty than they had been in the Lindsay years. Mr. Beame’s uninspiring leadership was due in large part to the city’s perilous financial condition. An accountant by training, he had to watch every expense. Leading personnel departed for other jobs. The remaining planners studied potential zoning controls, law enforcement, and problems connected with the single-room-occupancy hotels. A Commission for Cultural Affairs began deliberations in 1975 with the goal of reminding Americans that New York was the country’s cultural capital. While there was no lack of research conducted by planning agencies, most larger visions faded during the fiscal crisis.

(NYT 2 9 1975, p.132; 4 20 1978, p. C 21. Mayor Beame established a task force in 1975 to improve the Times Square area but dismissed real estate owner Seymour Durst when he learned that Durst was landlord for the notorious Luxor Baths massage parlor; Charles V. Bagli, "Durst May Put Up a New Skyscraper on Times Square,” NY Observer, 8 21 1995, p. 16. The same Martin E. Segal who had been involved in the hotel labor dispute in the 1940s chaired the Mayor’s Committee on Cultural Policy, leading to the creation of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and the advisory commission to the mayor.)

At least the studies continued---one of 1976 pertaining to subway improvement, another about Forty-second Street from Broadway to the Hudson River produced in 1977 by the Forty-second Street Redevelopment Corporation, another that analyzed the Regional Plan’s Urban Design Manhattan publication of 1969, a transportation study by Madison Praeger Inc. in 1974, and a report on the condition of Bryant Park in 1976 issued by the Mayor’s Midtown Action Committee. There was an investigation of midtown loft conversions in 1977, when a Port Authority study of the midtown terminal also appeared. Mayor Beame’s Commission for Cultural Affairs proved the value of cultural institutions to the city’s financial health. (For the Commission’s structure, see NYT 4 20 1978, p. C 21) The 42nd St Study, produced under Mayor Beame but published in January 1978 by the city’s Department of Planning-- by then under Mayor Koch-- was the product of the Urban Design Study Group in the Department of City Planning. The study started under the Beame administration’s planning director, Victor Marrero, assisted by Raquel Ramati and other important participants. They were concerned with the proper location of a convention center which might have reached Forty-second Street but didn’t, whether to build the Westway road or an alternative along the Hudson shoreline, and how to deal with the ‘adult uses’ that were hard to eliminate. The officials also studied land assembly, traffic, parking, curb cuts, pedestrian density, the bus terminal, hotel occupancy, and the physical condition of buildings, some of them suited for demolition. But they did not suggest a solution for the problem of pornography that disfigured the street.

(For the plans: NYT 12 30 1977, p. B3; for Westway 2 3 1975, p. 25, and the Times’ endorsement 3 5 1975, p. 38; for the convention center up to Forty-second Street, 4 26, 1963, pp. 1,18).

Private automobile traffic and parking facilities also required attention. Some traffic was funneled to Forty-second Street from the Lincoln Tunnel. Anyone stuck in traffic at the corner of Dyer Avenue and Forty-second Street after 1979, as many people often were, could thoroughly appreciate Richard Haas’s murals on the walls at both sides of the intersection; they have now disappeared. A survey of parking places on the west side showed that they were provided in various buildings including the Hotel Carter, more in the new Manhattan Plaza apartment complex-- where the garage entrance on Forty-second Street impeded the flow of traffic--and in two larger lots between Tenth and Twelfth Avenues. The study recorded the existing spaces and identified sites ripe for remodeling. It expressed hope for increased tourism and theater patronage, and also for help from the Federal Government.

(The 42nd St Study, p. 61 (Urban Design Group); May Callas, Inside 42nd Street: An exhibition of architecture and decoration, New York, 1978, aroused some public interest in rehabilitating the theaters. City Planning Commission, Hebert Sturz, Chairman Midtown Development. A Report of the Department of City Planning June, 1981 https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/about/city-planning-history/midtown_development.pdf accessed 3 12 2018; Rai Y. Okamoto, Frank E. Williams, et al., Second Regional Plan. Urban Design Manhattan, Regional Plan Association,1969; Kristine Miller, “Condemning the Public: Design and New York's New 42nd Street” GeoJournal 58 #2/3, 2002, pp. 139-148. New York City Department of Planning, 42nd Street Study, ed. Victor Marrero, Raquel Ramati et al, p 35 for hotel occupancy rate, p. 42 ff for the 42nd Street Redevelopment Corporation).

Another matter related to traffic was the collapse of part of the West Side Elevated Highway in December 1973, after which only southbound traffic crossed Forty-second Street. In fact, a four-volume study commissioned by the City from Hardesty and Hanover, Consulting Engineers in 1974 pointed out that city officials had been aware of the highway’s problems since the mid-1950s. They attributed the most recent failure---parts of the deck had fallen into West Street earlier---to salts that melt ice and snow, poor drainage, and traffic. They recommended closing the entire structure south of Forty-sixth Street and indeed, the entire elevated roadway from Fifty-ninth Street south to the Battery was demolished in the 1980s. (For the West Side Highway: Wikipedia, s.v. West Side Elevated Highway, accessed 8 19 2016.)

Not everything west of Broadway was pornographic, violent, collapsing, or anti-social. While parents may not have wanted their teen-aged sons to waste money on mechanical games, it was hard to keep the boys out of Playland at 228 West, where pinball machines and skee ball were among the attractions. There were also clothing shops, shoe stores, coffee shops, and fast food establishments, appealing to customers by price rather than by quality. It was true, however, that the street east of Broadway was calmer and better suited to bourgeois tastes.

In 1971, the Wurlitzer company moved its premises to the Bush Building, two doors west at 130 West Forty-second Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue. The musical instrument company had been pressured to relinquish its former space after its then landlord installed the first pornographic cinema on the block. It showed live sex acts, as part of a supposed film studio tour. (Gilfoyle, in Inventing Times Square, p. 342) Wurlitzer had sold its fifteen-story building in 1952 to the Tishman Realty and Construction Company which modernized the interior to some extent and then sold it in 1956 to Morris Furman & Associates as an investment. (NYT 2 2 1956, p. 42. Furman, in turn, sold it in 1964 to the First General Real Estate Trust. NYT 4 5 1964, p. 61)

The original Wurlitzer building was one of three buildings on Forty-second Street built between 1915 and 1925 that were bought and then demolished to provide space for a plaza required by the zoning rules that governed a prismatic building design for the telephone company at the southwest corner of Sixth Avenue. The Wurlitzer firm decided to stay as close to its familiar location as possible, which is why it rented the three floors in the Bush Building. (NYT 6 29 1971, p. 43) Jazz pianists performed at a week-long festival of music to celebrate the opening of the new premises. Classical music concerts continued, too, in a new 350-seat auditorium. The well-publicized music festival was part of a campaign sponsored by the West 42^nd Street Association which had hired lawyers to combat illicit activities. But the Wurlitzer firm and its new landlord in the Bush Building, the Great South Bay Company, had to expel another pornographic cinema, the Bryant Theater. Doing that required hiring lawyers to break the theater’s lease. Despite that, the Wurlitzer officials believed that the location was advantageous and expressed hopes that the environment would improve

(Stern et al., New York 1960, p. 465; http://www.nycago.org/Organs/NYC/html/WurlitzerStore.html)

The telephone company expected to move personnel into its property at the southwest corner of Sixth Avenue. Some staff evidently feared that it was too close to the blight west of Seventh Avenue, so the company provided security patrols. There were up-to-date security systems, too: efficient and reassuring.

1095 Sixth Avenue, the telephone company building, replaced three commercial buildings by a forty-story slab that held a switching station to improve service in midtown, and offices for telephone company employees. The building was variously named NYNEX, New York Telephone Company Building, and Verizon, all related to the same telecommunications entity.

(Fig.7 1095 Sixth Avenue, telephone company building, Kahn & Jacobs, 1974. Photo https://www.tumbex.com/vintagemanhattanskyline.tumblr/post/186502363813)

The design by Kahn & Jacobs was almost universally reviled upon its completion in 1974. It provided about ten feet of additional sidewalk, but that was not done for the sake of amenity. It was done to satisfy zoning requirements. The wider sidewalk, a mid-block plaza to the west with trees, a waterfall, and benches, and money to improve the Sixth Avenue subway station allowed the building to rise straight up for 630 feet. It had a concrete precast panel system clad in black and white, with aluminum framing the dark-tinted windows. The architects varied the dark façade by adding stripes of white marble, with a denser design toward the base, an intermediate area with less marble, and then just thin marble stripes to the top; the graduated design evoked the setbacks that the revised zoning rules of 1961 had eliminated.

(Emporis re 1095 Avenue of the Americas accessed 5 25 2021. Jerold S. Kayden, Privately Owned Public Spaces: The New York City Experience, New York, The Municipal Art Society of New York, p. 127; https://www.vidaris.com/project/1095-avenue-of-the-americas/ accessed 9 19 2021)

A mechanical floor was located at the top of the building. At the twenty-second floor, the architects placed a sky lobby with an additional mechanical floor below it. The other floors were of six different heights, ranging from about twelve-and-one-half to eighteen feet to accommodate switches and various types of required equipment. Retail establishments on the ground floor brought outside rental money, and in 1978 the telephone company itself opened a shop that sold phones shaped like Mickey Mouse, among other merchandise. The best thing about the project, apart from its complicated functional arrangement, was a contribution by the real estate broker, Joseph Bernstein, toward connecting the crosstown #7 subway line and the IND Sixth Avenue line. (NYT 2 2 1956, p. 42)

The W.R. Grace Building on the next block has been almost equally unloved. It, too, began construction in 1971 and opened its doors in 1974. It stands across Forty-second Street from Bryant Park on the site of the demolished Stern’s department store.

(Fig. 8. W. R. Grace Building, Gordon Bunshaft for Skidmore Owings & Merrill, 1972, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/W._R._Grace_Building%2C_New_York%2C_NY_10018%2C_USA_-_Jan_2013.jpg)

This is a skyscraper office building of almost 40,000 square feet, developed by Benjamin Swig and Jack Weiler It is distinctive among the buildings on Forty-second Street---though not unique in the city---for its form that slopes upward to the fourteenth floor and then continues as a rectangular slab to a forty-ninth floor terminus. The skyscraper stands on angled pilotis that form a porch in front of the entrance. A broad shelf to catch rainwater runoff intervenes between the pilotis and the upper floors.

The architect’s governing idea was that of a single form, not the setback design that zoning rules had mandated for the earlier buildings on the block. The unifying idea is more fully realized at 9 West Fifty-seventh Street, where the floors are hidden behind dark glass, but the Grace Building allows people to understand more clearly that this is an office building. Travertine bands mark each level, revealing individual floors of a size normal at the time. The architect, Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore Owings & Merrill, thought that the clients at Forty-seventh Street were timid, and praised the client of the Fifty-seventh Street building, Sheldon Solow, for the all-glass facade, but Swig and Weiler thought their design was logical because it was more explicit. The façade was not the problem for most critics; the interruption of the street fronts was. But Bunshaft countered criticism by asserting that future buildings would not all be like the existing ones and defended his design as both dramatic and related to the zoning rules. This, for the clients, outweighed the need for special window-washing apparatus, the potential for dirt to accumulate at the base of the slope, the need for custom window blinds rather than normal vertical ones, the need to treat a travertine sidewalk area to prevent people from slipping in rainy weather, and even the greater expense of construction.

Near the northwest corner of the block, the Grace building extends to Forty-third Street, where there is a parking garage. A broad plaza of 30,000 square feet provides open space extending to Sixth Avenue, as required by the zoning rules. While the plaza remained empty except for benches on its south side, there was a commanding view to the curved sloping wall of the building’s west wall. While some found this open space to be bleak, others found it grand and elegant, a surprise in the otherwise dense streetscape. The open space was later interrupted by a glass kiosk for the International Center of Photography, erected in 2001 by Gwathmey-Siegel, architects, and years later, by furniture for the STK restaurant farther east. In 2020, new owners, Brookfield Properties and the Swig interests, proposed to install benches, trees, plants, and tables with umbrellas, along with shops where the original benches had been. The owners also modernized the Grace Building’s lobby, the elevator cabs, and mechanical installations. Work halted for a time during the Covid-19 pandemic but later resumed.

.(https://gizmostorageprod.blob.core.windows.net/files/BP%20Large%20PDFs/Grace_LeasingPres_PreBuilt_012221.pdf; Carol H. Krinsky, Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore Owings & Merrill, New York and Cambridge, Architectural History Foundation and MIT Press, 1988, p 248 ; Author’s conversations with the architect, 1983. Nicholas Adams, Gordon Bunshaft and SOM, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2019, p. 87 where Sherwood Smith is noted as senior designer, pp. 224-25. NYT 3 26 1972, pp. R1, R6. Critic Ada Louise Huxtable, no admirer of the building, said that its plaza had prompted city officials to change zoning rules for plazas, forcing them to provide public amenities; NYT 10 27 1974, Arts pp. 33, 35)

Across the street, Bryant Park was still a problem. It was occupied by homeless people, drug dealers, runaway youths who knew nowhere safer to go, dice game players, and people who had been freed from mental hospitals without adequate provisions for their well-being. Office workers, graduate students, and readers at the Library who ate lunch there tended not to linger. Richard M. Clurman, a journalist named Commissioner of Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Affairs, even threatened to close the park, without suggesting anywhere else for its denizens to go. (NYT 9 13 1973, p. 37; 10 29 1973, p. 39) He enlisted the police to institute a 9 PM curfew and to patrol the park day and night. Perhaps the police were also equipped with the Vice Map produced by the new Office of Midtown Planning and Development, locating all the sex businesses on the next block.

The park closing worked well enough to encourage local business and civic groups to sponsor events that could attract people with more respectable interests. A study led by Professor William Kornblum of the City University confirmed the idea of using the virtuous to drive away vice, but the Bryant Park Community Fund, the entity that staged free concerts, ran out of money.

(Wikipedia s.v. Bryant Park, accessed 5 31 2021; William Kornblum, West 42nd Street. The Bright Light Zone, NY, Graduate School and University. Center of the City University of New York, 1978).

A murder in the park spurred the improvers to persist. They sponsored book and flower sales, wholesome entertainment, and modifications to the landscaping. (For one example: NYT 11 8 1981, p. 40). In 1979, after the elegant philanthropist, Brooke Astor, was importuned by a drug dealer, the encounter stimulated even more improvement. Mrs. Astor contacted David Rockefeller who helped to find financial support to clean the park and deter the drug vendors and addicts. At the same moment, sociologist William H. Whyte concluded his decade-long Street Life Project that led to a book, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, and a companion film that showed how the good could drive out the bad. The actual effects on Bryant Park had to await the financial sponsors of the clean-up effort, but Henry J. Stern, who had become Commissioner of Parks and Recreation in 1978, was supportive in the meantime. At the end of the decade, the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation took form, thanks to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Its directors included business leaders, the head of the Graduate Center, officials of the Public Library, and Daniel Biederman, a management expert who already had a reputation for innovation. As of 2024, he was still active in this Business Improvement District and with the 34^th Street Partnership established in 1989. The Bryant Park Restoration Corporation replaced the Bryant Park Steering Committee, a less effective partnership between the City University and area businesses initiated two years earlier.

(Mrs. Astor: NYT 4 7 2017, p. A 26) https://bryantpark.org/blog/history; https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/PDF/President/50TH_ANNIVERSARY_BOOK.pdf?ext=.pdf pp. 63-65 accessed 6 27 2021)

At the adjacent Public Library, a modest remodeling occurred in the Berg Collection Room, and the staff began the electronic cataloguing that it had been studying, but the Library’s financial situation was so dire that the Science and Technology service closed temporarily in 1971. Fortunately, room for new books became available when the circulating materials moved across Fifth Avenue to the new Mid-Manhattan branch at Fortieth Street in the former Arnold Constable department store, using funds allocated earlier. Interest in the Library’s holdings of national and local history and genealogy increased significantly as a collateral effect of the Bicentennial celebrations in 1976 and because of the popularity of Alex Haley’s “Roots” telecasts in the following year about Black Americans’ African ancestry. (http://archives.nypl.org/nypla/5553 accessed 5 29 2021).

In 1967, railroad officials had proposed a money-making skyscraper to rise over Grand Central Terminal. The earlier proposal for a skyscraper designed by I. M. Pei over the original baggage-handling area had been abandoned, but the commercial appeal of an office building immediately above the transportation facilities still tempted the railroad’s directors. They had watched revenue fall as corporations moved out of town and as commuters switched to buses and private cars. Tourists also arrived in their own cars, as the motor hotels on West Forty-second Street demonstrated. The railroad’s finances were in desperate straits, but service had to be maintained for the commuters who staffed offices and contributed in other ways to the city’s economy. A new office building right on top of the Terminal might be an even greater money-maker than the Pan Am Building just north of the Terminal.

After failing in the 1960s to build over the Terminal, the railroad filed a lawsuit against the City of which the Landmarks Preservation Commission is a part. A memorandum came to the attention of the Municipal Art Society, in which a legal advisor to the mayor said that the railroad would drop its claim for damages against the City if the City agreed not to appeal. The Society in 1975 quickly organized a Citizens’ Committee to Save Grand Central Terminal, so as to embarrass Mayor Beame into appealing. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Bess Myerson, a Bronx native who was a former Miss America, and other luminaries joined the effort. The group staged a rally in favor of preserving the Terminal as it was, with participants including the appropriately embarrassed Mayor Beame and the previous mayor, Robert F. Wagner, Jr. (https://www.nypap.org/oral-history/kent-barwick/ Interview with Kent Barwick, New York Preservation Archives Project, accessed 7 13 2021) . A judge ruled in favor of the railroad, which had argued that the City was not offering fair value as compensation for prohibiting development. An appellate court, however, upheld the Landmarks ruling, leading the Penn Central to appeal the case to the Supreme Court in 1977, only to see the designation upheld.

(Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City 438 US 104 (1978) decided 6 26 1978. See Jerrold S. Kayden’s judicious analysis, “Penn Central: ten years after ‘high noon’, “Preservation News, October 1988, pp. 3, 20.)

The stakes were higher than damage just to the Terminal; the legitimacy of all landmarking was under threat. The validity of this and by implication other landmark designation was upheld in Penn Central Transportation Company v. City of New York, by a 6-3 majority, which ruled that the City had exercised a reasonable restriction related to public welfare. There had been governmental and societal investment in the railroad’s buildings, and that warranted consideration by the court. The railroad could have obtained income from the transfer of air rights above its low-rise buildings, said the courts. The majority saw no obstacle to the Penn Central’s ability to do its work of running trains and trying to obtain a reasonable return on its investment. The decision made it possible for localities to designate landmarks on reasonable grounds, without fear of having the designation overturned by local courts.

(Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City, 438 U.S. 104 (1978); NYT 6 24 1977, p. 43; rally: 4 22 1977, p. 26. Roberts, Grand Central, pp. 162-174; Schlichting, Grand Central, pp. 201-204. The Penn Central company resulted from the merger in 1968 of the Pennsylvania and New York Central Railroad companies; the merged firm declared bankruptcy in 1970. Belle and Leighton, op. cit., pp. 4-5; NYT 9 8 1954, pp 1, 38)

Neighboring buildings were also in difficulty. The Chrysler Building had been owned since 1960 by Wellington Associates, headed by Sol Goldman and Alexander DiLorenzo, Jr., who had borrowed heavily to buy the skyscraper. DiLorenzo’s death in 1975 caused further distress to the management operation, such as it was. Tenants moved to other office buildings, not just to the suburban locations favored by many corporations at the time. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance foreclosed and then paid for repairs and improvements, especially to the heating and ventilating systems and the outdated elevators while keeping the decorated cabs. Jack Kent Cooke, owner of the Washington Redskins football team, bought the building in 1978, the year in which it was declared a city landmark against the owner’s wishes. He closed the Cloud Club lunch restaurant and cocktail lounge on floors 66 through 68, leaving them the wreck that dated to the Goldman-DiLorenzo era, but after 1998 the Tishman Realty Company made some repairs. Mr. Cooke’s achievements were the lobby restoration in 1979--after he abandoned a proposal to alter it--and the installation in 1981 of new bright but harsh neon tube lighting in the crown. The expense of changing a multitude of 50-watt incandescent bulbs had become evident, and the owner surely knew that the present lighting is more prominent in the skyline than a subtler and warmer one would have been.

(NYT 6 3 1979, p. R1; Mitchell Pacelle, “Feuding DiLorenzos Wasted a Vast Real Estate Fortune” Wall Street Journal April 29, 1997: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB862260738878541500 accessed 2 15 2022; “Sol Goldman and Alex DiLorenzo Manhattan Real Estate Holdings” exhibition by Hans Haacke, London Tate Gallery, 1971, accessed 5 29 21; NYT 1 20 1977, pp. R1, R6; 8 30 1975, p. 23.; Dan Klein, “The Chrysler Building,” Connoisseur 185 #746, 4 l974, pp. 294-301. For the Cloud Club: NYT 4 11 2000, p. B1; the site was emptied again in 2005. The Wikipedia entry for Chrysler Building includes resources for various stages of restoration. C.H. Krinsky, “The Chrysler Preserved,” Art in America 67, July-August 1979, pp. 80-87).

The Penn Central Company—that is, the railroad--- which owned the Commodore Hotel just east of Grand Central Terminal, declared bankruptcy in 1970. (NYT 12 23 1977, p. 42). After that, the City received no real estate taxes on the hotel but was owed $6 million in back taxes. According to Donald Trump, quoted in The Art of the Deal, (Co-author Tony Schwartz, New York, Random House, 1987,pp. 62-76) the building was dirty outside, and had a flea market, empty shop premises on the ground floor, and people lying in the doorways---even after the railroad had spent about two million dollars on temporary improvements in 1973 and early 1974. The hotel did manage to attract respectable guests and even conventions such as the sixth annual New York Comic Convention held in July of 1973, (NYT 7 4 1972, p. 6) but not the largest and most eminent ones. A rumor placed a massage parlor in the hotel lobby. The last guest moved out in May 1977 (NYT 12 23 1977, p. 42), leaving only ground floor commercial tenants. Fred Trump, Donald’s father, gloated that even the Chrysler Building was in receivership at this time of business and civic stress. (Art of the Deal, p. 62). But Donald Trump was eager to work in Manhattan instead of continuing his father’s apartment house building practice in Brooklyn and Queens and saw his opportunity at this site next to busy Grand Central Terminal. Like many others in the real estate industry, the Trumps had made political contributions to the mayor and his associates.

The young entrepreneur spoke with lawyer Michael C. Bailkin, at the time still in the mayor’s office, who became General Counsel to some of the City’s economic development arms, notably the Redevelopment Corporation. This lawyer had considerable freedom to arrange solutions to the City’s perilous financial situation. Mayor Abraham Beame named him the City’s principal negotiator on the project to redevelop the Commodore. (https://www.fox.temple.edu/about-fox/directory/michael-caretnay-bailkin/ accessed 10 24 2021). Mr. Bailkin later claimed that the city could deal only with Trump who had an option on the site. Donald Trump had no option but told everyone that he had one before the Board of Estimate voted on the deal. From later reports, it appears that no one checked to find out what was true.

(Wayne Barrett, ‘How a Young Donald Trump Forced His Way From Avenue Z to Manhattan, Village Voice, January 15, 1979 and https://www.villagevoice.com/2019/02/28/the-dirty-deal-that-helped-make-donald-trump/ New York City Archives accessed 10 24 2021. This site contains several of Mr. Barrett’s articles that present the origins of Mr. Trump’s success at the Commodore site.)

The Art of the Deal records the obstacles to success. To open a hotel, Trump needed loans, a tax abatement, and a large, experienced hospitality operator that could attract high-class customers to repair the hotel’s diminished reputation. A prestigious hotel corporation would also reassure the banks that were needed to finance a young entrepreneur from the outer boroughs. He approached the Hyatt Corporation which was eager to have a major hotel in Manhattan and got along well with Jay Pritzker who succeeded his father, A. N. Pritzker as the top man at the Hyatt company. They arranged an equal partnership in which Trump would build the hotel, and the Hyatt interests would operate it.

To obtain financing and tax abatement, the partners presented their case, along with expensive-looking renderings by the architect Der Scutt that would make the project seem more than a dream. With the aid of Henry Pearce, an intermediary skilled in real estate deals, the partners secured from the Board of Estimate a forty-year graduated tax abatement in the spring of 1976. Since many buildings have a life of about thirty years before they need renovation, the City might not have reaped benefits from the hotel in its post-abatement condition, but that was a subject seldom raised. The tax abatement helped the partners to obtain financing despite objections from other hotel operators who saw the abatement terms as overly generous, or who, like the Carter Hotels Corporation officials, also submitted bids for the site. (NYT 4 10 1976, p. 16) Just before the Board of Estimate voted, Victor Palmieri, the assets manager then working for the railroad that was eager to unload the property, publicized the hotel’s losses and plans to close. Also before the vote. Alfred E. Eisenpreis, head of the Economic Development Administration endorsed the proposal, and so did Deputy Mayor John Zuccotti, and Paul O’Dwyer, President of the City Council. Eisenpreis focused on jobs that a viable hotel would create but reminded lawmakers to ascertain other benefits to the City although by that time, the deal was essentially done. This was the first tax abatement obtained through the city’s Business Investment Policy.

(NYT 3 3 1976, p.40; 5 19 1976, p.1 ff. ;9 18 2016, pp. 1, 17; https://www.newsweek.com/2016/08/12/donald-trumps-business-failures-election-2016-486091.html).

The Commodore’s derelict state in a prominent location, and the lack of other approved potential developers helped to explain why the City was willing to grant tax abatements. The final arrangements for it were made in December 1977 through the state’s Urban (later: Empire State) Development Corporation which had rights of review. The city’s Comptroller, Harrison Goldin, had raised objections to a leaseback from the city but he could not stop the same idea set up through the UDC which was under state jurisdiction. (Wayne Barrett “Donald Trump Cuts the Cards: The Deals of a Young Power Broker, “Village Voice, 1 22, 1979.)

The Trump organization wanted to obtain not only the Commodore, owned by the railroad, but also its site, the latter to be sold to the city for one dollar to remove it from the tax rolls. Trump would then lease the building from the UDC for ninety-nine years and restore the hotel. A clause required Trump to pay “an amount equivalent to the real estate taxes that would be paid on construction materials” to clean and improve Grand Central Terminal. This was a nominal amount considering all the required costs. No information is available about whether the bills for construction materials were audited.

(NYT 3 3 1976, p. 40; NYT 1 11 1978, p. C20; Reed Ide, “Board of Estimate Hears Trump” Our Town 4 16 1976, pp. 1, 8)

Financing remained a problem until loans were secured. Thirty-five million dollars came from the Equitable Life Assurance Society’s real estate arm which said that the deal would benefit the city, and forty-five million from the Bowery Savings Bank opposite the hotel, which expressed fear for the health of its neighborhood if no repairs were made.

(For the unexplained similarities between letters sent to the city by the UDC and the bank, see Barrett, “The Bowery and the UDC: Letter Perfect,” Village Voice, Feb. 26, 1979, p. 18.)

After the Trump-Hyatt partnership received the required approvals for the renovation of the hotel, the Times on December 23 announced that the remodeled hotel would have 1407 rooms, five restaurants, a shopping plaza, and a long glass-enclosed bar on the second floor projecting over Forty-second Street. Work began in early 1978. The new glass façade would just be overlaid on the original structure and its exterior brick masonry wall, which is visible under some lighting conditions. Brick is a good insulator while glass is not, and replacing one masonry wall with a newer one would have been costly. Donald Trump favors glass facades, but economizes when he can, and here he could. The glass surface reflects brick buildings near and opposite it, diminishing the hotel’s presence. At street level, shops that nestled between robust metal-clad columns provided extra income.

The public saw little benefit from all this. The Terminal was cleaned only after the late 1980s and not obviously related to the Commodore deal. Trump gave the city $6 million to pay for the already missing taxes (Further taxes in the absence of this deal had been estimated at $111,125.250 over fifty years, in 1976 dollars: NYT 3 3 1976, p. 40), and the Hyatt Corporation paid the Penn Central railroad $3.5 million.

Architecture critic Paul Goldberger described the project as “a new building inside an old building surrounded by a new building.” The interior was almost entirely remodeled except the foyer leading to the grand ballroom, where elaborate classical decoration appealed to the new owner. Hyatt Regency hotels are known for their architectural bravura and for being the work of prominent architects who understand business needs. This time, the result was aesthetically mixed, the outside less appealing than the broad horizontal lobby inside. Der Scutt, addressing the local American Institute of Architects chapter, later characterized the design as “a block long extravaganza providing an interior urban fantasy. The …water fountains, sculptured levels, and changing volumetric manipulations entertain the guest with excitement.” (Der Scutt, “Letter to the Editor, Oculus 42 #5, Feb. 1981 p. 3) ---at least, guests with similar taste.

The renovated building was warmly received by both Goldberger and Ada Louise Huxtable who was senior architecture critic at the New York Times. She understood that Donald Trump liked “things that glisten extravagantly and that he also believes that a street as grimy as 42d can use a little glitter.” She also knew that the Hyatt corporation had made a reputation in part by providing spectacular interior atriums in its major earlier hotels. Here, a tall one was impossible, given the pre-existence of the structure, but the architects could open a four-story space 275 feet long, to create a horizontal atrium covered in bronze and mirrors. The principal architects were Gruzen Samton, experienced in working with the Hyatt Corporation. Scutt helped to interpret the Trump aesthetic, working with interior designers Dale Keller & Associates, and fabricators GKR. They created three levels in the atrium, the entrance with its water feature, the lobby proper---then with lavish planting--- and a cantilevered glass-enclosed bar that benefited from a zoning variance.

(Fig. 9. Hyatt hotel, lobby, eastern half. Gruzen Samton, Dale Keller, et al. 1980 for the spatial configuration, and later, Bentel & Bentel for the furnishing, ca. 2011. Condition in August 2025. Marble head by Jaume Plensa 2011. Photo: Author August 2025)

(Fig. 10. Hyatt hotel, lobby, from street door at bottom to the overhanging floor of a bar with chairs, the window to 42nd Street, and sculpture by Peter V. Lobello, 1980. Photo: Author, August 2025.)

These became Scutt’s sculptured levels and volumetric manipulations. The designers embellished the atrium with polished beige marble, brown carpets, flowering plants, a sheet of water, a collection of vertical bronze rods by sculptor Peter V. Lobello, brass elements, and sofas. Goldberger found it somewhat loud but energetic, and declared the fully remodeled guest rooms pleasant, with light woods and tweeds, probably reflecting Hyatt rather than Trump aesthetics.

(Huxtable: NYT 10 19 1980, pp. D33, D36; Goldberger: NYT 9 22 1980, pp. B1, B9. For the façade: http://archpaper.com/2016/06/donald-trump-architecture/ accessed 12 12 2019.)

When the hotel opened in 1980, the economy had improved, and Trump asserted that the occupancy rates were far higher than anticipated. (Art of the Deal, p. 72) The initially collegial partnership ended angrily in 1996 when the Hyatt’s owners bought the Trump interests following suits and countersuits.

(According to Oculus as in note above, 60,000 square feet of the building were sold to J.P. Morgan).

Seizing another albeit smaller opportunity at the end of the decade, Trump negotiated what City Councilman Henry J. Stern called a twenty-year “sweetheart contract” with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, paying $4 per square foot to operate the tennis facility in Grand Central Terminal. The young developer and his father had cultivated important politicians—earlier, Mayor Beame, and by the late 1970s, Governor Hugh Carey, among others. Although it was odd that Trump’s bid prevailed over another bid that would have produced higher revenue, his lawyer, Roy M. Cohn, said that his client “doesn’t try to get anything for [political donations]. He’s just doing what a lot of people in the real estate business try to do.” He asserted that his client denied any political influence that allowed his bid to win but said that “Donald wishes he didn’t have to give money to politicians, but he knows it’s part of the game.” Trump raised the rates for playing there to $155 per hour on weekdays, $25 less on weekends, so that only the wealthiest players would patronize the space. He accepted payment only in cash. The facility catered to the rich and famous until 2009 when the space was converted into a lounge for the Terminal’s staff. By September 2010, though, it was once again an expensive tennis club with another operator and renamed the Vanderbilt, offering a regulation court, a junior court, practice lanes with a ball retrieval mechanism, lockers, showers, and a fitness room.

(NYT 4 9 1979, p. B3; 2 1 1980, p. B3; NYT 2 2 1980, p. 25; Cohn quote: NYT 8 26 1980, pp. B1 and B4 the quotes from B4); 1 11 1978, p. C20; Dyja, New York, New York, New York, pp.38-39. Der Scutt, letter to the editor, Oculus 42 #5, Feb.,1981 p. 3.)

Across Forty-second Street, an anonymous German investor whose firm was based in the Netherlands Antilles bought the Pershing Square Building in 1977 from Prudential Life Insurance Company of America. On the same south side of the street, the Airlines Terminal building closed in 1978. Plans had already been announced for new headquarters for the Philip Morris tobacco company, and the Airlines Terminal was razed in 1979. Zoning changes to promote development would allow larger buildings than those permitted earlier, on the theory that construction might cure the City’s ongoing fiscal problems. Mrs. Huxtable expressed the attitude of the moment: “The kind of jockeying with city regulations in which the developer demonstrates his skill in taking the most and giving the least is a familiar New York process.” But the City was desperate for new construction and for tax-paying companies with many employees. (NYT 3 26 1978, p. D29). As she noted, the City was prepared to make concessions if a company threatened to leave town. The proposed Philip Morris building became larger for additional reasons: it provided sheltered public space at street level. The owners installed a cultural organization in the lobby, a branch of the Whitney Museum. They also added 75,000 square feet of air rights bought from Grand Central. The railroad building’s preservation without a building above it depended in part on selling the air rights in which it could not build.

(The Penn Central Corp. would have to use 5% of the revenue, $112,000, to maintain Grand Central at a level beyond the norm. George Arzt, “Philip Morris to build midtown high-rise,” New York Post 11 1 1978 online)

Ulrich Franzen was the architect for the new Philip Morris Research Center and Headquarters, with Morse-Diesel the contractor. The impression given by the 26-story building is that it is both tall and massive. It is a sober gray granite-faced box above the street level with no setbacks or inflections until near the top. Narrow porticoes—the sheltered public outdoor space—are framed by piers of varying heights that border the ground floor. Franzen designed individual elements of the blocklike, repetitive elevation to harmonize with some on the Pershing Square Building across the way although that is evident to few observers because the building styles and materials differ.

(Figs. 11 and 12. Philiip Morris now Altria Building. Ulrich Franzen. 1983. Photos: Author, 2023, 2025)

Philip Morris’ façade on Park Avenue emphasizes verticality, while those on Forty-second and Forty-first Streets emphasize horizontality. Critic Paul Goldberger found the differing façade designs to be graceless and clashing, but they were intended to be distinct. He did praise the interior spaces, calling them “handsome, relaxed, and elegant.”

The site was complicated because it comprised lots that had contained two different buildings---the Airlines Terminal, successor to the Belmont Hotel, and a five-story building at 80 East which had held two restaurants on most of the ground floor. The terrain slopes downward toward the rear of the building on Forty-first Street. Ordinarily, this would have presented no exceptional difficulties, but the Airlines Terminal and its predecessor had a service track of the shuttle to Times Square under one corner that had to be respected. These older buildings had also built deep basements of reinforced concrete that Franzen had to contend with. Five parking levels left over from the Airlines Terminal era had to be destroyed by machines with blunt steel hammers that crushed the concrete and cut the reinforcing bars. The new building has four basement levels in some areas and two over the tracks, including space for fifteen cars to park on the fourth underground level. The other basement levels were designed to contain essential facilities including the mail and stock rooms, lockers, a lounge, and showers for the cleaning staff, the company’s mail room, heating systems, and a cafeteria.

High above, executives occupied the twenty-second floor, enjoying offices with glass walls that slide open to balconies on three sides of the building. Windows opened, too, despite the taste of the time for air-conditioned and controlled environments. The most remarkable details from today’s perspective were the ceiling fans that accommodated smokers who were presumably using the company’s products.

Escalators provided convenient access to the subway. Visitors to the office floors could enter on Forty-first Street through the principal doorway to the corporate offices. They could also use a portal on Park Avenue, the longest but the least important side, where an entrance was inserted because as critic Carter Wiseman wrote, “the Park Avenue façade is…the official front of the building and the front of a building apparently demands a front door even if it doesn’t altogether need one.” The general public could enter, too, where a glass wall on Forty-second Street revealed the presence of a large lobby used to display sculpture--part of the permission for the building’s height and form.

That space initially accommodated a branch of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The chairman of Philip Morris, George Weissman, was a trustee of the museum.

(Fig.14. Atrium, Altria (formerly Philip Morris) Building, Ulrich Franzen & Associates, 1983. Photo: Author 2023)

The 5,200 square foot sculpture court and a thousand-square-foot gallery were open to the public at no cost for twenty-five years upon the building’s completion in 1983. Even those not interested in art could sit inside in the spacious 42-foot-high lobby or use partly hidden toilets----a public amenity rarely found in the city, but available in lobbies if the developer was granted extra height for the building. An espresso bar was another amenity, also part of the zoning negotiation. Important artists whose work was exhibited there include Shirin Neshat, Carrie Mae Weems, Alex Katz, Isamu Noguchi, Roy Lichtenstein, George Segal, and Romare Bearden, and many exhibitions were mounted of younger artists’ works.

The below-ground cafeteria for employees, in warm tones of brown, had a fountain near one end. To give the illusion that diners were actually at the top of the building, Richard Haas created murals of outdoor views with skyscrapers, the Hudson River, and other local features. Architect Françoise Bollack coordinated the handsome design.

(NYT 4 4 1983, p. C11, 4 7 1983, p. C17; https://whitneymedia.org/assets/generic_file/705/january_23_2009.pdf on the closing of the Whitney branch NYT 9 9 2008, retrieved 7 23 2021. Mrs. Huxtable’s column bore the headline: “Today the Cards Are All in the Builders' Hands.” NYT 3 26 1978, p. D 29. Architectural Record 167 #4, April 1980, pp. 98-100. 130-132. For air rights transfers, see Roberts Grand Central p. 272; Carter Wiseman, “Philip Morris’s Good Intentions,” New York, May 2, 1983, pp. 60, 64; https://apops.mas.org/pops/m050059/ . For Paul Goldberger’s opinion: NYT 12 14 1978, pp. B1, B10 and 4 7 1983, p. C 17 )

Nearby, buildings other than the Chrysler experienced some changes. The Chanin Building’s lobby ceiling was covered by apparatus for air-conditioning, as was the skylit main banking room at the Bowery Savings Bank. By the end of the 1970s, the Daily News building lobby had been stripped of some of its original fittings, perhaps under the misimpression that simplicity suggested modernity; what remained was designated an interior landmark only in 1989. United Press International had moved out by 1982.

(For astute remarks on both the McGraw-Hill and Daily News buildings as of 1973, see James D. Morgan, “A Tale of Two Towers,” Architecture Plus 1 #9, October 1973, pp. 42-53, 82-83).

Near Third Avenue in 1979, steel piles were being driven for the Harley Hotel at 212 East that replaced Central Commercial High School. This was a project of Harry Helmsley and his second wife, Leona, who owned nearby Tudor City and antagonized the tenants there by a failed plan to build on the enclave’s park land. That was not the only aborted proposal. At the end of the 1960s, the architectural firm of Mitchell-Giurgola had been asked to design a hotel for the playground site at the far east end of the street (Communication from Frances Halsband FAIA, in 2019), but everyone concerned must have realized the limited appeal of a hotel with close views of a power station, a tunnel ventilation building, and an expressway.

The Harley hotel opened in 1981, to a design by Emery Roth & Sons, and commanded rates toward the high end of the industry. It became the Helmsley after a remodeling in 1985 that was said to reflect Ms. Helmsley’s often-criticized taste. Since 2007, the hotel has been the Westin, as it came under new ownership; the formal name since 2012 has been Westin New York Grand Central, despite having been bought in 2019 by Davidson Kempner Capital Management. The interior aesthetic is now more restrained. More recent decoration on the adjacent alley wall adds a welcome jolly note to the otherwise prosaic building.

(Fig. 15. The former Harley, now Westin Grand Central, entrance and east side wall with later murals. Photo: Author, August 2025)

The porte-cochere leads to a large lobby below awkwardly-projecting event and banquet rooms, and then to a glass-covered rectangular tower with 774 guest rooms. The rooms fill thirty-eight floors, articulated by the verticals of the structural columns.

(Fig. 16. The former Harley, now Westin Grand Central. Photo: Author, Sept. 1, 2025)

Inside, in its original Harley Hotel phase, the lobby featured a sweeping illuminated curve embracing most of the ceiling, supported by cylindrical pillars so thick that they evoked ancient Egyptian monuments. Warm brown wooden reception desks with inset black panels, and dark orange easy chairs formed the décor. Behind and above the receptionists, a pleated curtain rose at an angle, yet another bold shape to accompany those seen elsewhere in the lobby. Of course there was a potted tree. The remodeling as the Helmsley featured a new marquee, and inside, a long pale-colored front desk with flower vases at each end. Behind the clerks stretched a similarly pale-colored wall with a bold zigzag design. In the center were the owner’s illuminated initials, H H. The carpet, a deep red, had golden curlicues. Some room décor was executed in warm colors and floral patterns, while others featured leopard prints until after Leona Helmsley’s death in 2007. As of the 2020s, the Westin chain decoration is more muted in color and the furnishings look less exuberant and more like those of international hotels with clean lines and contemporary fittings.

(https://observer.com/2009/06/exorcising-leona-from-the-helmsley-hotel-she-made-famous/ https://sites.google.com/site/accommodationeye/general-manager-of-a-hotel-of-a-hotel accessed 4 18 2021; Wikipedia, s.v. The Westin New York Grand Central Hotel, accessed 7 3 2021; NYT 1 29 1979, p. B1; 7 6 1979, pp. R1, esp. R8. For the Tudor City controversy, see Samuel, Tudor City, pp.112-122)

At the end of the decade, Bartholomew Voorsanger and Edward Mills, architectural partners, designed dormitories for New York University in the East Village and premises for the University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies in the Salmon Tower at ll West. The latter building itself was substantially remodeled inside in 1978-79 by a partnership of Robert V. Tishman, Jerry I. Speyer, and Larry A. Silverstein. There had been complications of earlier ownership and conditions that led tenants to leave. The notorious Goldman-DiLorenzo partnership had owned part of its land for a while. An overhaul was due and accomplished, with new heating, ventilation, and lighting, helped by the City’s tax abatement for reconstruction.

New York University, usually called just NYU, had instituted a midtown base to capture improvement-hungry white-collar personnel after working hours. Ambition was expected to overcome the sorry sight of Bryant Park across the street. The building’s proximity to public transportation and its dignified neighbors---500 Fifth Avenue and the City University Graduate Center at 33 West, and the Public Library across the street—could compensate for the condition of the park.

Designs executed in 1979 showed NYU’s interior space divided by two main corridors, as if they were Fifth and Sixth Avenues. A few years earlier, Robert Venturi had designed pathways for Boston’s Copley Square and for Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC using elements of the street plans in those cities, but each architect’s project was specific to its location. At 11 West, one suite of rooms angled from the main grid as if to show that Greenwich Village, the University’s principal location, was not part of the street grid. Another less obvious angular path, Broadway, led to a staircase to the half floor above. Reprising his urban murals at the Philip Morris Building cafeteria, Richard Haas painted murals showing what people would see if they faced specific directions on the referenced streets. A cafeteria and a lounge represented Central and Gramercy Parks, the former with artificial turf on the floor and views to local architecture.

(Fig.17. NYU lounge. Photo by Nathaniel Lieberman. Courtesy of Voorsanger Architects P.C. (formerly Voorsanger & Mills) and the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul, MN)

Elsewhere, terrazzo paving laid in a grid pattern, and directional markers recalling old-fashioned street signs evoked the streets outside. The corridors had setbacks and benches, as if they were features of pleasant streets meant for strolling and chatting. At one end of the ensemble, with a window on the Public Library, a large conference room was called Washington Square, home of the main campus, and had a view of the Washington Square arch.

(Fig. 18. NYU large conference room. Photo by Nathaniel Lieberman. Courtesy of Voorsanger Architects P.C. (formerly Voorsanger & Mills) and the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul MN)

Paul Goldberger, by then the architecture critic for the New York Times, praised the design for breaking up the usual long boring office or university corridors. While the office building is distinguished outside only by its neo-medieval reliefs around the door, its tiled groin-vaulted lobby and the university’s premises contributed to the street’s aesthetics.

(For the remodeling on 11 West, see NYT 2 7 1979, p. D 17; voorsangerarchive.org/nyu-midtown center; for Goldberger: NYT 2 14 1980, p. C10. For Venturi’s proposals, see Andreea Mihalache, “Musings on Boredom, Midcentury Architecture, and Public Spaces, The Plan Journal 5, #1, 2020 http://www.theplanjournal.com/article/musings-boredom-midcentury-architecture-and-public-spaces accessed 7 4 2021)

By the end of the decade, the City was still under financial strain, the Library lacked funds, the area from Bryant Park to Ninth Avenue was partly in questionable health, the Chrysler Building and Grand Central Terminal needed rehabilitation, but at least the City had been saved from collapse. The improvements of this decade, particularly those of Manhattan Plaza, the expanded bus terminal, the Grand Hyatt, the start of the Philip Morris building, and the Harley Hotel presaged further development and refreshment during the 1980s. That explains why Carter B. Horsley, a real estate specialist at the New York Times, could write in late 1976 about a more positive future, under the headline “Signs of Life on 42^nd Street.” (NYT 11 21 1976, VIII pp. 1, 10).