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It's a new day for Manhattan's traditional entertainment district.
It's close to midnight on a warm spring evening, yet barely a soul is stirring on "the Deuce." This famous block of New York's West 42nd Streetonce the heart of the city's theater district but more recently a market for sex and drugs-sits silent, the theater marquees dark, waiting for a better day.
Looks are deceiving, though. Behind those blank marquees, two large theaters are being built, one of them a rehab by the Walt Disney Company. A small nonprofit theater, restaurants, and shops have already opened near Seventh Avenue, just around the corner from Times Square. Developers are lining up financing for a new hotel and seeking tenants for two entertainment complexes that will include two multiscreen movie theaters and a Madame Tussaud's wax museum. And ground has been broken for a 1.6-millionsquare-foot office tower, the first to be built in Manhattan since 1992.
Local officials say these projects, which represent $1.7 billion in private investment, will generate hundreds of millions in taxes and reestablish the Times Square area as the nation's top urban entertainment district-all for a direct public investment of $75 million.
To some observers, this state-sponsored redevelopment project shows the virtue of planning and persistence. That's why APA's New York Metro Chapter gave its top award this year to officials and civic groups that backed it. Meanwhile, skeptics say that the project has hung on despite itself, propped up by billions in tax breaks and real estate write-downs-and blessed with plain good luck.
Long slide
West 42nd Street began its run as New York's premier theater district in the early 1900s, when more than a dozen stages opened between Seventh and Eighth avenues. But in the late 1920s, producers began building glitzy new theaters farther north and hiking ticket prices just as radio and film were siphoning off the mass audience. The 42nd Street theaters began staging burlesque shows, later turning to films, and finally grinding out Xrated and action movies around the clock.
By the 1970s, the Times Square area had become known as a haven for sex, crime, and drugs. It "shaped an image of the entire city as an ugly, dangerous, sleazy place," Gregory Gilmartin wrote in his...