A face lift on 42nd Street

Author: By Fred Kaplan, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, September 29, 1996

Page: M1

Section: Travel

Once known chiefly for its sex shops, drug havens and a lurking ambience of murk and sleaze, the place is now turning into a merry urban theme park, a movieland version of New York, dizzy with flashing lights, swirling logos, big signs and, yes, even family values.

On the southside corner of 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue, where Peep Land once thrived, now towers a Disney Superstore hoisting an enormous poster of Mickey Mouse. A half-block to the west, where a male-hooker hostel called The Barracks once stood (till it was shut down in the '80s and has, ever since, remained abandoned), there now looms a huge picture of the Cat in the Hat. Next year, the picture will be gone, and the building will house a Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum.

A mere half-year ago, if you had let it be known that you often take your children to see a show on 42nd Street and then go to a novelty shop afterward, you could count on a visit from Social Services. The only shows on that street were rated X-X-X, and ``novelty shop'' was a euphemism for purveyors of sex supplies.

These days, however, such a declaration would mean only that you take your kids to the New Victory children's theater -- a gorgeous renovation of the street's very first legitimate playhouse, built 100 years ago -- and then go next door to DAPY or Magic Max to buy fun gadgets, party paraphernalia or magician's tricks.

There are no more sex shops or porno theaters anywhere along the span of 42nd Street west of Broadway -- one of those facts about ``the new New York'' that out-of-towners have a hard time grasping. (Another: There is no more graffiti on the subways.) The sex industry's properties were condemned by the state, the tenants booted out, and new broad-based commercial enterprises welcomed aboard. (Three porno shops still exist along the drab monochrome block between Sixth and Seventhavenues, and quite a large number dot the drearily lurid stretch of 8th Avenue above 42nd Street; but zoning regulations slated to go into effect in November will eliminate nearly all of them, too.)

For nearly a decade, talk circulated of ``cleaning up'' Times Square. Plans were drawn, blueprints unscrolled, but nothing happened; the milieu was just too grim, the prospects on the horizon too distant and fanciful. Then, a year ago, the Walt Disney Co. negotiated a deal to set up a retail store smack on 42nd Street and to turn the long-dormant New Amsterdam Theater, a block south, into a showcase for stage versions of Disney movie-musicals.

It was as if a canary had flown into the mineshaft. If a company as moral, prudent and, above all, profitable as Disney could bring itself to set up shop in Sin Central, then what could be so wrong? Suddenly, developers, hoteliers, cinema chains, restaurants, high-tech thrill rides, megastores and merchandisers of all sort rushed into the vacuum.

``A retail broker told us in 1992 that Times Square was the most unexplored retail market in New York City,'' recalls Rebecca Robertson, head of the 42nd Street Development Project, a state-run organization that has coordinated the refurbishment. ``We interviewed a lot of people on the street, conducted focus groups, and I remember one guy who said, `You know, you deliver 200,000 people a day out of Port Authority bus terminal [on the western edge of Times Square], and you give them nothing to do.' ''

That certainly isn't the problem anymore.

As you head east, toward Seventh Avenue, after coming out of the New Victory Theater, DAPY and Magic Max, you can stop on the corner at Ferrara's, a new branch of a classic Little Italy restaurant, and down a scrumptious focaccia sandwich (I like the smoked turkey breast with fontina cheese and pesto), a chocolate gelati egg cream and dreamy cannoli.

Or head a block north to Ellen's Stardust Diner, a kitschy replica of a 1940s automat (the walls are decorated with period advertising, the waiters wear World War II Army khakis) serving lean burgers, outsized milkshakes and Mom's apple pie.

In between the two, on Seventh Avenue, is CineRide, a ``virtual reality'' plaza where you watch a movie screen while wearing 3-D glasses and sitting on a chair mounted to a moving hydraulic pump. The effect is to make you feel like you're riding a roller coaster, deep-sea diving, waging an intergalactic battle and dashing through a haunted graveyard.

Afterward, you'll need an energy boost. Head next door for a bag of malted milkballs at the Candy Factory.

If you're a grown-up, head around the corner, on 43rd Street to O'Lunney's Irish Pub, a kick-'em-back that looks vintage but, in fact, was just constructed a couple months ago. Or, for more trendy drinking, go the opposite direction, to Hansen's Microbrewery, an immense, brightly lit structure on 42nd and Broadway that serves well-tempered beer (stored in spanking-clean tanks that you can examine yourself) and various beer-dipped snacks.

Much of this new landscape was designed explicitly to lure tourists, who have, understandably, avoided Times Square except in passing to and from the bus station or Broadway theaters. The 42nd Street Development Project requires those leasing the land to dedicate at least 50 percent of their space for entertainment or tourism; the rest can be devoted to retail, but even then, only of the sort that would have appeal to tourists (in other words, no banks, drugstores or groceries).

For the same reason that most tourists are delighted by Times Square's new glitter, some natives view the scene with scorn. They resent its transplanted artifice, its violation of New York's fundamental identity as a city of many neighborhood villages, each with its own naturally evolved patterns and landmarks. In this view, there's something unreal about the shops and restaurants of the new Times Square; it's a tinseltown. Go to Nostalgia-Land at Ellen's Stardust Diner! Go to Little Italy-Land at Ferraro's! Go to (there's no getting around this one) Disneyland at the Disney Superstore!

And yet, Times Square -- at least in its various heydays, at the turn of the century and in the 1920s and '30s -- has always been a hodgepodge, a rave of artifice, teeming with theaters, moviehouses, burlesques and flea circuses. In this sense, the new Times Square is not so different from that of decades past, except for today's unprecedented emphasis on wholesomeness (though that, too, can be seen as reflecting the tenor of our times as much as the lewdness of earlier eras expressed theirs).

Still, even Robertson concedes, Times Square cannot be for the tourists alone. ``You've got to have New Yorkers coming here, otherwise it won't work,'' she says. This is one reason why, over the next two years, Sony and AMC will be building multiplexes across the street from each other -- Sony's with 13 screens, AMC's with a staggering 26 (including some for second-run, artsy and foreign films, including such otherwise rarely seen fare as Indian, Chinese and Dominican movies). ``We are going to be the place to see movies in New York,'' Robertson boasts.

The architectural plans for these cinema palaces reveal bold, angular strokes against the skyline. Like many of the new places on Times Square, they sport enormous windows that create a unity between the inside and the outside, the consumerist haven and its surrounding space.

Combined with the cafes and restaurants, the Broadway theaters a few blocks up and the new Virgin Megastore -- the world's largest record store, open till 1 a.m. on 45th and Broadway -- Robertson and the other city planners hope the streets of Times Square will once more be hip and hopping, the ``in'' place to be, the crossroads of the world.