6 minute read
Western Beachhead
AN AERIAL PHOTOGRAPH of midtown taken in February 1969 shows the excavated pits south of the Time & Life Building ready for XYZ Buildings development (left).
A RENDERING OF the Time & Life and XYZ Buildings site plan shows the precinct as a cohesive unit (top).
A WIDE-ANGLE PHOTO essay declares, “Rockefeller Center . . . has burst its boundaries and established a handsome 48-story bridgehead on the west side of Manhattan’s Avenue of the Americas.” Life, April 4, 1960 (above).
When Rockefeller Center and Time Inc. trumpeted plans to build their tower at 1271 Sixth Avenue in 1956, they touched off a construction explosion that was to reverberate up and down the avenue for decades. At the time, Architectural Forum magazine credited the proposed tower with establishing a “decisive beachhead across the avenue [that] clears the way . . . [and] opens a wide frontier for an expanding city.” In his book New York 1960, architect Robert A. M. Stern noted it had “profound repercussions on the westward expansion of midtown and the future of Sixth Avenue.” Today, Sixth Avenue alone boasts more acres of modern office space than do most entire American cities. Two years after Time & Life’s opening, the Equitable Life Assurance Society cut the ribbon on its new headquarters across West 51st Street to the north. Not to be outdone in its own backyard, Rockefeller Center upped the ante in 1963, uncorking plans to erect not one but a trio of pinstriped—two white, one pink—block-long towers, dubbed the XYZ Buildings, running south along Sixth Avenue from West 50th down to 47th Street. All were designed by Michael M. Harris of Harrison, Abramovitz & Harris. Site demolition work for the first and largest of these—the 54-story, 2.1-million-squarefoot Exxon Building—began in 1968. Following on its heels to the south came McGraw-Hill, opening in 1972, and Celanese a year later. To the north, both Sperry Rand and Burlington Industries built headquarters, and Hilton Hotels and Rockefeller Group erected a blue-glass behemoth with 2,200 rooms kitty-corner from “Black Rock,” CBS’s imposing new headquarters, which spanned the block along Sixth Avenue from West 52nd to West 53rd Street. Two decades after his company had touched off the land rush, Time Inc. chairman Andrew Heiskell reflected on those intervening years, noting: “This is a tough city that tests your character but offers unparalleled opportunities for individuals and corporations alike.” By then, Time had passed the test with flying colors, with new magazines, a cable TV outfit called Home Box Office, and other business arms all joining the Time Inc. fold, pushing the headquarters head count to nearly 2,500.
WITH THE WAY paved by pioneering Rock-Time Inc., the westward expansion of midtown continues with CBS’s headquarters at 51 West 52nd Street, known as “Black Rock” for its dark granite façade (left).
HERE COMES THE neighborhood! The western expansion continues with the Equitable Life Assurance Building (left of Black Rock), which was completed shortly after the Time & Life Building in 1960; in the background at right is the New York Hilton; and in the foreground at right, ABC TV’s headquarters is underway at 1330 Avenue of the Americas, October 20, 1964 (right).
Powerful as all that new development proved to be in boosting employment, tax revenues, and the city’s global zeitgeist, it still proved no match for the ebbs and flows of the U.S. economy or the vicissitudes of urban life. By the 1970s, New York City had hit its roughest patch in decades, as crime soared, public infrastructure—from bridges to subways to highways—crumbled, schools failed, and companies and citizens fled for leafier environs. Truth be told, Time Inc., McGraw-Hill, and many others had eyed the city’s exits as far back as the 1950s. Ultimately, they stayed put, but many others— including IBM, General Foods, and Reader’s Digest—decamped. The city officially plumbed bottom in 1978, when New York turned to Washington for emergency funding to stave off bankruptcy, only to be turned down flat by President Gerald Ford. The five-word headline in the next day’s Daily News told the story: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.”
TIMES SQUARE IN the 1970s was known for adult book shops and X-rated movie theaters, creating tension with New York leadership, which was desperate to keep commercial interests from fleeing the city (left).
MAYOR ABE BEAME holds up (and moments later tears up) the famous Daily News edition for November 3, 1976 (above).
New York took charge of its fate, cleaning up its fiscal act by leveraging assets and calling a halt to damaging short-term borrowing. The national economy emerged from the era of 1970s stagflation and the city came up along with it. The new prosperity was a thin veneer over racial tensions and, increasingly, a haves versus have-nots class struggle. In the late 1980s, another crisis hit town: crack cocaine and an attendant spike in crime. Tellingly, Time printed a brokenhearted twist on Milton Glaser’s famous “I Love NY” logo on its cover in September 1990, with the tagline “The Rotting of the Big Apple.” Back then, few places reeked of that decay quite like the neighborhood one block west of 1271 Avenue of the Americas. Times Square had become infamous for its proliferation of peep shows and porn shops. There, long-sputtering efforts at a cleanup finally began to yield results, most famously with Disney’s 1993 decision to make over the big New Amsterdam Theatre on West 42nd Street into, of all things, a family entertainment center. By decade’s end, blue-chip businesses including publisher Condé Nast, accounting giant Ernst & Young, law firm Skadden, Arps, and global news service Reuters had all announced plans to settle into new Times Square towers. And topping things off, Broadway attendance for the 1998–1999 season hit a record 11.6 million. Out on Sixth Avenue, the availability of office space slid to 3.8 percent of the total stock, the lowest in midtown.
THE WALT DISNEY Company’s investment in Times Square real estate in the 1990s was the commercial development boost city leaders were looking for, although many New Yorkers were ambivalent about the Disneyfication of their town.