MIRACLE ON 42ND ST.

By BRUCE HANDY

Every New Yorker has a Times Square story. Rudolph Giuliani, the city's high-strung mayor, fondly recalls trips to see the comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis at the Paramount theater. "They were my favorite comedians as a youngster," Giuliani recalls. "The crowds would spill right out onto Times Square. It would almost be like a New Year's Eve celebration. Dean and Jerry would hang out the window of their dressing room and throw programs and things down to their fans." According to Giuliani, Times Square in those days was "the center of the world" --just the sort of boosterish hyperbole one expects from a New York City mayor. But Giuliani does have a point. Times Square probably has as great a hold on the nation's imagination as any piece of American real estate: The Great White Way! Bobby-soxers and Frank Sinatra! V-E day!

Ratso Rizzo! Porn! Human scum!

Here's another Times Square story, set a few decades after Giuliani's and told by Maria Alvarado, coordinator of tourism services for the Times Square Business Improvement District: "One summer, when I was about to give birth to my first child, I came down to have lunch with my husband, who worked on 43rd and Sixth. I took the E train, so I had to walk down 42nd. Here I was, eight months pregnant, and I was offered everything from sex to cocaine. Eight months pregnant, and they wouldn't leave me alone." She is referring, of course, not to Martin and Lewis but to the pimps, hustlers and drug dealers who by the 1970s had replaced sailors as perhaps the area's most emblematic denizens.

Decline and fall is a familiar urban arc. But out-of-towners whose lurid visions of Times Square have been formed by movies like Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver--or shocking discoveries made after taking a wrong turn on the way from the tour bus to Victor/Victoria--might be surprised by the extent to which the area is approaching the millennium in a clean and sober state. That is, if "sober" fairly applies to a cityscape that has become more enthusiastically garish than ever thanks to the capabilities of modern signage. Tourism is rising; crime is dropping, at an even faster clip than in the rest of the city. The area is bustling with new hotels, new office buildings--not to mention new chain stores and corny theme restaurants that would be at home in any suburban mall. Not that Times Square (which technically refers only to the triangle above 42nd Street where Broadway and Seventh Avenue meet but casually takes in the entire neighborhood) doesn't still retain some of its seedy, pre-Gap allure. Indeed, sailors still flock here during Fleet Week, but last year they were reportedly heard complaining that prostitutes had grown scarce.

This week the public will get its first look at the most spectacular fruit yet of the area's renaissance: the unveiling of the Walt Disney Co.'s $34 million restoration of the New Amsterdam theater. Originally built in 1903 and famously taken over by Florenz Ziegfeld 10 years later, it is, after its refurbishment, one of the grandest and most mind-bendingly ornate theaters in America, an eclectic melange of Art Nouveau and other turn-of-the-century ornamentation and a triumph of the restorer's art. Disney is hoping the New Amsterdam will be an economic triumph too, as home to a lucrative stream of wildly successful Disney stage shows. First up, in May, is a concert version of King David, a new musical by Alan Menken and Tim Rice.

The New Amsterdam--and more to the point, Disney's corporate presence and the vote of confidence it represents--is the anchor for an ambitious city and state plan to make over 42nd Street, long the area's most notorious thoroughfare. As the sleaziest strip in the sleaziest part of town, the stretch of 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues was from the late '60s until just a few years ago the ninth circle of Times Square. "You could buy anything you wanted, whether it was drugs or girls or boys or green cards or telephone cards. You really felt like you were walking through this hellish zone," says Cora Cahan, president of the New 42nd Street Inc., which is overseeing the restoration of seven of the strip's nine theaters. Back in 1978 more than twice as many street crimes were reported on the block as on any other block in the entire city. In 1984 the city- planning-commission chairman told New York magazine that 42nd "is the one street where the city has lost control."

Today the block is well on its way to becoming Manhattan's most chipper. On its east end a onetime porno palace--where Robert De Niro took Cybill Shepherd on an ill-fated date in Taxi Driver--is now a children's theater. Across the street, next to the New Amsterdam, is a big, bright Disney store--probably the only Disney store in the world that is just four doors away from an establishment that sells scary-looking swords and knives, boxing equipment and dusty copies of Bruce Lee videos. The latter retailer is one of two storefront businesses that remain from the street's previous incarnation. The other is a narrow little wedge of lunch counter; yellowed signs that read NO LOITERING and PLEASE PAY WHEN SERVED linger as warnings to a pre-urban renewal clientele.

The rest of the old establishments, largely porn emporiums and small shops selling cheap consumer goods, have been evicted. Gone too is the sick-sweet odor of mildew and disinfectant that used to permeate the block, a calling card for its unwholesome diversions. If all goes according to plan, their place will be taken by, among many other things, the Ford Center for the Performing Arts (a new megatheater for musicals combining two of the street's original stages), vast multiplex movie theaters and more tourist lures like Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum.

Once the home of John Barrymore, Eddie Cantor and Fanny Brice, 42nd Street began to decline with the Crash of 1929, which bankrupted a number of the theater owners, turning legitimate stages into burlesque houses and movie theaters. Even in Giuliani's youth questionable entertainments were a staple (the future mayor could have paid to see a man eat live mice at Hubert's Museum and Flea Circus). The postwar exodus of the city's middle class continued the block's slow skid into porndom.

It's a neat irony, then, that the crash of 1987 is in great part responsible for 42nd Street's rebirth as a middle-class destination. Earlier in the decade the city and state agreed on an ambitious $2.5 billion redevelopment plan for 42nd Street and Times Square, the driving force of which was to be four mammoth, nearly identical office towers designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee as a kind of chilly Rockefeller Center South. Fortunately for fans of Times Square's higgledy-piggledy aesthetic, the late-'80s economic downturn pulled the rug out from under that plan. And there was this added benefit: the developers were obligated to cough up $241 million to the city and state whether or not they ever built. That kitty allowed planners to start condemning properties and evicting what they saw as undesirable tenants. Developers still have the right to erect their office towers--ground has already been broken on a building that will house the Conde Nast magazine empire--but the Johnson-Burgee designs have been chucked.

By 1993 most of the old theaters and porn shops were boarded up. Despite a building boom in the rest of the Times Square area, 42nd Street's caretakers were having a hard time interesting new tenants because a figurative stench still lingered. Of the few serious inquiries about the old theaters, one came from a mud-wrestling entrepreneur, another from Michael Eisner. Disney's chairman became interested in owning a theater in New York because the company's theatrical version of Beauty and the Beast was imminent on Broadway. As it happens, the architect Robert A.M. Stern, who had devised post-Johnson-Burgee guidelines for 42nd Street, is a member of Disney's board. Stern told Eisner about the New Amsterdam. On a grim winter day, Stern and Cora Cahan took Eisner, his wife and son on a tour of the theater, shuttered since 1983.

The group stumbled into a magnificent wreck. Water poured through a hole in the roof, mushrooms grew on the floor. "The theater was almost impassable," Stern recalls. "Plaster was all over the stairs, like an alpine slag heap. We each carried giant flashlights and wore hard hats. Birds were flying through, dropping their stuff as we passed. It was a mess, but of course a very romantic mess. Michael was quick to see not only the romance but the potential." What Eisner also came to see, after two years of tough negotiations, was a deal that included low-interest loans from the city and state to cover 75% of the restoration--a good deal for both sides, since Disney's involvement proved to be 42nd Street's turning point, encouraging other corporations to sign up.

Today water no longer pours through the New Amsterdam's ceiling dome, once again surrounded by a thick garland of red berries and hydrangea wreaths, blue-glazed peacocks and 10-ft.-long angels. The work involved many subtle calibrations. The architect, Hugh Hardy, aimed for a final product that would return the theater to its original state yet allow it to look as if it had been gently lived in for 30 years or so. "There is," he observes, "an inherent conflict in preservation between conservation, which means you keep everything that's original and try not to have it deteriorate further, and restoration, which is the other extreme. If you restore everything and make it look brand-new, you rob the place of a sense of history. You have to be careful not to get stuck at either extreme. It's all about memory, and memory is not science."

He's referring to the theater, but he could just as easily be talking about the block as a whole--which begs the question of whose memories you take as your signpost. Rudolph Giuliani's? Those of the kids who used to watch kung-fu movies in the old New Amsterdam? John Barrymore's? With the mix of live and canned entertainment, shopping, restaurants and tourist attractions, and with the hoped-for blend of high, middle and low brow, 42nd Street's caretakers are aiming to re-create the traditional ambiance and uses of 42nd Street in a late-'90s context. Since 42nd Street's traditional ambiance is chaotic, the city and state are in the odd position of planning something that is supposed to appear unplanned. Conundrum or not, they so far seem to have succeeded, despite critics' fears that the block would become an 800-ft.-long Disney World. "This is 42nd Street," Cahan reminds us. "It rains. Big trucks go across it. There is no climate control here. It smells. This is not City Walk at Universal City. This is a very real street. It is going to be more of what it once was than ever."

One hopes that will include at least a little room for organic, noncorporate funk. "I would like them to leave a little of New York for the old-timers, for New Yorkers," says Fred Hakim, who owns the aforementioned lunch counter and has been working in the area for 56 years. He is still waiting to find out if he will be able to continue operating in his space.

--With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/New York

With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/New York