How the power of glitz (and some topless ladies) helped Times Square emerge as a genuine public space.

Back in August, there was a classic New York City dust-up: dozens of scantily clad women with their breasts painted, generally in patriotic colors, were posing for photos with Times Square tourists in exchange for tips. “What happened was there’s five days in a row of naked ladies on the cover of The Daily News,” recalls Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance, a nonprofit that is a tireless booster for the area. Whether or not this latest panhandling scheme—a bawdy offshoot of Times Square panhandlers dressed as Sesame Street’s Elmo or Sanrio’s Hello Kitty—merited its own media blitz is hard to say, but it was clearly making money for the tabloids.

1 Times Square when it opened in 1908
1 Times Square when it opened in 1908

The irony of the desnudas controversy is two-fold. First, the reason that the police couldn’t somehow make the naked women go away is that Times Square isn’t a public place in the normal sense of the term. Broadway, pedestrianized or not, is still a street, not a park or a plaza, and streets, it seems, are a gray area, subject to “legal ambiguities,” according to the alliance.

The other twist is that much of Times Square as it existed prior to the late 1990s was, in fact, condemned and bulldozed to rid the area of all manner of vulgarity. A premier entertainment destination that, by the 1970s, was overrun with peep shows, porn theaters, massage parlors, and other disreputable enterprises, Times Square was reconceived, tabula rasa, as just another midtown office district with a few nice venues on 42nd Street for, say, Shakespeare.

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A 1980s Times Square rendering by Johnson and Burgee (apple designed by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates)
A 1980s Times Square rendering by Johnson and Burgee (apple designed by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates) - The real beauty of the plan was its pragmatism. It called for placeholder businesses to keep the major development sites active until it was time to build. A brew pub (with a rooftop mock-up of a Concorde, a British Airways ad) opened on the plan’s Site 1, where a 50-story tower by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was competed in 2002, and Disney opened a store in a one-story building where Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates’ 5 Times Square stands today. A couple of ornate historic theaters, like the New Amsterdam (leased by Disney) and the Victory, were preserved and restored. One, the 1912 Empire Theater, a one-time burlesque house, was moved 170 feet on steel rollers down a stretch of 42nd Street entirely devoid of buildings, to serve as the entryway to a soon-to-be-built 25-screen multiplex.
The red steps of the TKTS booth
The red steps of the TKTS booth - So Times Square—or a strategically amped up version of itself—was saved, but it was still not exactly a public place. There were no café tables under Cinzano umbrellas, no park benches, no fountains. But that began to change under Mayor Bloomberg. Back in the bleakest moment of New York City’s modern history, the 1970s, there was one successful small-scale attempt at revitalizing Times Square: the TKTS booth, a trailer, supposedly temporary, dispensing half-priced Broadway tickets. In 1999, when the Van Alen Institute finally staged a competition to design a permanent booth, the winner was a bold scheme by an Australian firm, Choi Ropiha (now called Chrofi), that housed ticket sales in a box office situated beneath a set of bright red structural glass steps, south-facing bleachers where people could sit, relax, and take in the spectacle. © Rob Young
Snøhetta rendering of Times Square
Snøhetta rendering of Times Square - Snøhetta, based in Oslo but well established in New York (it designed the National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion), realized that it was madness to try and compete with Times Square. Instead, the firm came up with a restrained arrangement of charcoal colored pre-cast concrete pavers, embedded with “nickel-sized steel discs that will capture the neon glow from the signs above and playfully scatter it across the paving surface.” Their design also involves a series of 10 minimalist granite benches variously configured for sitting, leaning, or reclining—the first one was installed in November (the project will be completed sometime next year)—plus things like conduits to supply power for outdoor performances in locations along Broadway’s path. The concept, according to Snøhetta, is “uncluttered pedestrian zones and a cohesive surface from building front to building front.” The firm is doing something that seems almost as alien to Times Square as those Philip Johnson towers were; it is employing subtlety and refined taste. “When we think about public space we think a lot about generosity,” says Claire Fellman, a Snøhetta director and landscape architect. “Like how to make a space that feels welcoming, that invites people in to occupying a space in their own way.” © Snøhetta