Posted on 12/28/2007 4:13:08 PM PST by jdm
Times Square is crammed with tourists, and not just for New Year's Eve. These days, they're eager to gawk at the glittering lights of Broadway and visit attractions like Madame Tussauds Wax Museum and the MTV studios.
But 15 years ago, the place was considered a cesspool, overrun with crime and home to sex shops and peep shows. Drug addicts shot up on the street. Locals avoided the neighborhood.
The man who has taken the credit for revitalizing Times Square is GOP presidential hopeful and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. He has made Times Square a symbol for how he tamed the evils of an out-of-control city and turned it into a tourist-friendly destination.
"It's called getting things done," he said at a fundraiser this year.
It's not that clear-cut, a closer examination of the Times Square renaissance shows.
While even his critics will say Giuliani deserves praise for his part in redevelopment of the area, the finished product was the culmination of decades of work that came before he was elected, according to lawmakers and urban planners.
"State agencies had plans in place to develop 42nd Street well before Giuliani," said Ethel Sheffer, an urban planning expert who led a quality-of-life study on Times Square during the redevelopment. Any large-scale redevelopment "takes a long time to unfold," she said.
The Times Square plan was in the works during the 1980s, when state officials and then-Mayor Ed Koch used eminent domain to condemn and take control of decrepit buildings.
But there was no legal way to control businesses until the City Council initiated a study during the administration of David Dinkins, who preceded Giuliani as mayor, that would allow them to pass rezoning laws if they could prove sex businesses were harming residential areas.
Walter McCaffrey, a former City Council member, said the idea to rezone wasn't even related to Times Square at first. It started with a neighborhood in Queens near the Queensboro Bridge that had suffered when topless bars and porn shops moved in. After the study, the City Council drew up stricter zoning laws that prohibited sex-oriented theaters, bookstores, massage parlors and dance clubs from operating within 500 feet of homes, houses of worship, schools or one another.
The law passed in 1995 - about two years after Giuliani took office.
By this time, the area was already changing, urban planning experts say. The paced quickened after the legal challenges to the zoning laws were defeated and Giuliani bore down.
Says Charles Millard, a former City Councilman and head of the city's Economic Development Corp: "I drafted the law that allowed us to do this constitutionally when David Dinkins was mayor, but until Rudy became mayor and pushed it through his planning commission, and pushed it through the city, not a thing had happened."
Others say Giuliani was in the right place at the right time, as the economy boomed in the 1990s and shifted toward tourism, real estate and Wall Street. The proliferation of Internet porn also made many sex shops obsolete.
"It was kind of like a perfect storm for him," said Arturo Ignacio Sanchez, a City and Regional Planning professor at Cornell University. The process started with Koch, picked up speed under Dinkins and really accelerated under Giuliani, he said, adding: "It fast forwards with warp speed under Bloomberg, and you have the city today."
Times Square has always lived a double life - even a century ago the 10-block stretch of busy Midtown streets was home to upscale splendor as well as hidden brothels and fetid hotels. With the invention of neon and the rise of Broadway shows, the area slowly became the entertainment center of the city.
But by the time Giuliani took office, the area had fallen into decline. In 1993, nearly 4,000 incidents of crime were reported in the area, according to the Times Square Alliance, a business group.
Part of the revival was the arrival of upscale hotels, theme stores and restaurants - businesses that Giuliani helped lure with a private-public team of developers.
Disney received a low-interest loan from the city to give a facelift to the New Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street, considered by some to be the crown jewel of the new Times Square. The renovated theater soon drew in other businesses, such as MTV, ESPN and other media companies.
Giuliani talks on the campaign trail about the eradication of porn shops from Times Square and about declining crime rates during his tenure.
"It didn't happen by accident, it didn't happen by wishing they went away," Giuliani said in a speech in October. "It happened based on a very well-organized campaign, a study demonstrating the impact of pornography on neighborhoods, an intense battle in court that nobody thought we would win, and we won. And most importantly, the pornographers lost and they were chased out of Times Square."
There are still some sex shops in Times Square, but the majority of them disappeared long ago. Some simply relocated.
Former City Councilman Thomas Duane was among the few who voted against the rezoning laws in the 1990s, in part because he was not eager to see the sex shops simply switch neighborhoods.
"He didn't get rid of them from New York City, he dispersed them from Times Square, mostly to the industrial waterfront areas of the city," Duane said of Giuliani.
"And as Manhattan became a more attractive place to live, people started moving into those communities and now the same problem exists," he said. "It just doesn't exist much where the tourists go."
The piles of garbage at the entrance to the George Washington Bridge, once thigh-high, had been swept away. The aggressive squeegee-men and hookers at the tunnel entrances were gone. The area around Times Square and up and down 42nd Street had been magically transformed from Gomorrah back into Gotham. Graffitti, that ubiquitous sign of urban rot, was greatly subdued, if not invisible. Whatever else you might want to say about Mr. Guiliani, he deserves credit for restoring the luster to a great city that had been given over to rust and decay.
The deals that clean up Times Square were in the works since Koch.
Well, he did take care of that so-called “low fat yogurt” scam!
(Sorry, that’s all I know about Rudy and NYC).
This writer forgot to add: “The Guliani era meant the end of clean windshields.”
You’re the type that makes FR almost a disaster zone. I was wondering when the likes of you would join the fray.
ML/NJ
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE3DA1F3AF93BA3575BC0A967958260
Flashback:
Gay Candidate for City Council Says He Has AIDS Virus
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: August 8, 1991
One of two gay candidates running for a seat on the New York City Council in lower Manhattan said yesterday that he has tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS and would make that part of his campaign.
The announcement by Thomas K. Duane is believed to be the first time a candidate seeking elected office in the state, and perhaps the nation, has openly admitted being infected with the virus that causes AIDS.
Times Square on TV looks huge. In person it looks like a gaudy little corner of lighted advertisements.
It was very disappointing.
In other words, Rudolph Giuliani the individual, all by himself, was not single-handedly responsible for every single positive change that happened vis-a-vis Times Square. He didn't do it with the help of zero other people in city government and bureaucracy. Some other people helped. He didn't roll up his sleeves, lift sex-shop owners over his head, carry them to the East River, and throw them in. He didn't pick up a sledgehammer and singlehandedly demolish decredpit buildings.
I'm glad we got that cleared up. That is an excellent, important, and totally fair criticism.
"He didn't get rid of them from New York City, he dispersed them from Times Square, mostly to the industrial waterfront areas of the city," Duane said of Giuliani.
Giuliani didn't conduct an extermination campaign of sex shop owners and people who frequent them. He didn't put them into concentration camps and then throw them into ovens so as to make them no longer exist. They still exist somewhere.
Another fascinating and important criticism. Clearly, if bad things still exist somewhere, then you can't give Rudy Giuliani any credit whatsoever for cleaning up Times Square.
This is a totally fair, objective, and most importantly - logical news article.
I was reading this thread before I got your ping and laughed right away when I read it, then saw your name and saw you pinged me to it. You're too much :)
I visited NYC for the first time in 1977 with three Navy buddies. Even though we were four young men in our mid-20's, we spent our time there looking over our shoulders not feeling very safe and being told we should not have walked in areas that we did.
It was urban armpit and I avoided the place for the next 30 years.
This year, after all the talk about how things had changed, I decided to take my teen-aged daughter there for 10 days this summer.
The subways were safe and filled with normal people as was Central Park. At night, the streets were filled with people out for dinner at countless restaurants.
It was great and my daughter loved it.
I know that New York City is the city we love to hate but I would highly recommend it now for a family vacation.
Rudy Giuliani is a liberal to his core, a self professed Rockefeller Republican and proud of it too!
You can take the boy outta Brooklyn, but you can’t take the Brooklyn outta this boy. I grew up with guys just like Rooty. He’ll take your taxes, take your guns and take take your babies -— laughing all the way.
Ghouliani is scum of the earth.
It's Rudy, not "Rooty." I'm not a Giuliani supporter by any means but why do those who don't support him insist on mutilating his name. Is it supposed to be funny? That goes for Rudy McRomey, Ron L. Paul, Duncan Donuts and all that other nonsense when referring to candidates.
It's stupid.
Rudy was fantastic for NYC - a Godsend.M
Absolutely agree ... lived in Fairfield County, CT (close in to NYC) during the Dinkins, and the early years of Rudy. Business took me into NYC frequently ... Dinkins was a complete no talent bust ... Guiliani was kick-butt, make it right, from the gitgo. His immediate predecessors, although aided and abetted by the liberal (read NY Times) media, were clueless in the extreme ... he (Rudy) made a significant difference.
Technically, its Rooty Toot!
I think its a joke for anyone on this great conservative forum to defend Giuliani.
Rooty is a low life scumbag!
Yes.
And every shithole in NYC. On the night he took office the NYPD raided a "welfare hotel" which was a crack den in my old neighborhood, which everyone avoided because of the awful crime (and this was a decent area near Grammercy). Within a month the area was completely dsafe again. I give Rudy 100% credit.
That doesn't mean I support him for the GOP nomination. I do not. But he was perhaps the best mayor in NYC history. Just can't take that away from him.
When Guiliani was Mayor every fare beater on the subway was arrested and brought to the precinct to be fingerprinted and to be checked as to whether they had outstanding arrest warrants.. The criminals began to leave their guns and knives at home...it was too risky to carry them.
Guiliani had every welfare recipient fingerprinted. The welfare roles dropped dramatically. I think the drop was from 1,300,000 to 600,000. There were lots of double-dippers collecting welfare apparently and also a lot of working people who lied about their status.
Without Bratton though it could never have been done. Bratton made the police be more productive than they had been.
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