99% Invisible - New Year, New Neighborhood

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

The story of New Year's Eve in Times Square, and how a quiet group of unelected Manhattan property owners used the holiday — and their own undemocratic municipal power — to transform the neighborhood from its porn-theater-and-vice-rich past to its flashy, family-friendly present.New Year, New Neighborhood Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. New Year's Eve is just around the corner, and whether you love it or hate it, you are probably putting more thought into what you'll be doing that night than any other night of the year. I'm not much of a New Year's Eve person myself. Best reporter Katie Thornton. Listen, I like parties. I like dancing. But there's just too much pressure on New Year's Eve. You want me to set the tone for my whole year in one night of obligatory fun? And yet, despite my crankiness, I do have one New Year's guilty pleasure. Something about it that I do love.

And it is the most New Year's's Eve of all New Year's rituals. The massive, confetti-filled extravaganza that is New Year's Eve in Times Square. Every year I see footage of the celebration and almost despite myself I end up tearing up. There's all these people piled together, smiling, waving, full of hope for the future, and inexplicably stoked about a glorified disco ball getting slowly impaled on the spit of One Times Square, and inexplicably stoked about a glorified disco ball getting slowly impaled on the spit of one Times Square, and then everybody makes out and Ryan Seacrest is there? Bonus.

But one of the most iconic parts of the whole celebration happens after the clock strikes midnight and the fireworks go off. When the massive crowd bursts into New York, New York. I think this is the big reason it hits me so hard, despite not being a New Year's Eve fan. It's that Times Square, especially on New Year's, is almost mythologically New York. Times Square is the neighborhood of brilliant signs, skyscrapers, and hot dog carts. It's got cavalier office workers breezing past ambling tourists without breaking their important sounding phone conversations. Basically, it's a caricature, the movie version of New York.

Over 100 million people come to Times Square every year to take a bite out of the Big Apple. And the neighborhood is consistently one of the top tourist destinations in the world. But the Times Square we know today didn't just happen. In the late 80s and early 90s, much of the neighborhood was seized by the government and reshaped by a powerful group of business owners. It's a transformation that saw a neighborhood emptied out, and it raises questions about how private money should shape public space. The land we now call Times Square was, for about 3,000 years, home to the indigenous Lenape people. But since Manhattan was colonized by Europeans,

the neighborhood has lived many lives. Before it was Times Square, it was a place called Longacre Square, which was a place for the carriage trade, all kinds of livery, stables and the like. This is Lynn Segalen, a professor emerita at Columbia Business School, who has written books on the many faces of Times Square.

She says that in the late 19th century, Longacre Square was the part of town with more horses than people, situated just north of the more bustling parts of Manhattan. It was in no man's land, okay? There barely had streetlights on Broadway at that point. But what happened next is exactly what you'd expect. New York kept growing and growing. And speculators, as they do, pulled some of the city's money and energy north onto the cheap land of Longacre Square.

By the early 1900s, a handful of theaters were doing decent business in the neighborhood. Not long after that, a subway stop opened at Longacre, connecting the fledgling area to the rest of the city. But what really brought the neighborhood into its own was the arrival of its most famous resident. In 1903, the New York Times broke ground in Longacre Square, and a year later, they petitioned the city for a name change.

The neighborhood has been called Times Square ever since. This was the beginning of a new era for Times Square. Thanks to the theaters and the subway and the vote of confidence from the paper of record, the neighborhood was happening. In just a few years, it went from a tentatively hip part of town to a thunderous triumphant hotspot for celebrations, for work, and for nightlife. More and more theaters cropped up, turning New York into the country's leading theater city. thunderous triumphant hotspot for celebrations, for work, and for nightlife.

More and more theaters cropped up, turning New York into the country's leading theater city. So it became the most famous theater street in the world. It was a lot of nighttime gaiety and restaurants were on rooftops because this was an era before you had air conditioning. And in the summer it was quite hot. And so you had a lot of really elegant rooftop palaces where people would go for dinner and drinks. It was during this period of rapid growth

that Times Square also got a new tradition. On New Year's Eve in 1907, the Times sponsored the first ball drop to welcome in 1908. The falling ball was paid for by Adolf Ochs, sponsored the first ball drop to welcome in 1908. The falling ball was paid for by Adolf Ochs, then publisher and owner of the New York Times. Ochs borrowed the idea from an old Navy ritual that started in England in the 19th century. Every day at 1300 hours, Greenwich Mean Time,

a ball would drop on the top of England's royal observatory so that sailors could set their clocks and navigation equipment. Times Square was the perfect location for a big display like a ball drop. That's because the square lies at a diagonal intersection, unlike most of Manhattan, which is built on a grid. Big, wide streets come together at Times Square, creating these long urban vistas, meaning from almost anywhere in the neighborhood, you could see the ball. So in 1907, Ox rigged a ball to the top of One Times Square, where the Times was headquartered.

And that was the start of an annual tradition that became the biggest celebration in a neighborhood built for celebrating. Over the following years, Times Square just kept getting bigger and more glamorous. But the neighborhood only had a few glorious decades as New York's hottest club because in 1929, everything changed when the stock market crashed. Then you have the crash, and then people don't have as much money to go out, and if they do, they're going to movie theaters, going to see motion pictures less expensive than live theater. Playhouses shuttered.

Restaurants closed too. And then you had the war. Times Square never really had a chance to recover. With World War II came blackouts and electricity rations that shut off its neon lights. Then after the war, people fled to the suburbs. A lot of industry left the area. And by the late 1940s, the neighborhood's businesses were mainly scraping by on cheap movies and carnival games.

You have all sorts of rides and games and shooting galleries to win prizes. All sorts of circus-like entertainment. You had a kind of Coney Island Times Square. At this point, Times Square was busy, but kind of broke. Property owners needed a way to bring in real money, and carnival games just weren't cutting it. The problem was that Times Square was built largely as a theater district, and it was hard to turn a theater into a shoe store, for instance, or a tailor. There was, however, one type of show that could consistently pull in a crowd. I can't tell you the exact date that the sex shows started, but they were there before

the 60s. There had always been raunchier shows in Times Square, with opera and vaudeville operating side by side. But in the mid-20th century, sexy shows like Burlesque weren't the exception. They were the norm. Smaller shops got in on the action too, complimenting the big theaters. So in the back of bookstores, you had the adult books, okay?

And in 1966, you had the first Peeps, 25 cent Peep shows introduced. And as they would say, 25 cents for a peep machine in a private booth was a rare bargain in an expensive city. White-collar workers, mostly male, would trickle in from their offices, disparaging the neighborhood by day while quietly patronizing it at night. It was common knowledge what was for sale in Times Square, but these transactions were largely taking place out of sight in back rooms.

That is until the early 70s, when a Supreme Court case called Miller v. California really opened up possibilities for smuts in Times Square. The interpretation of obscenity changes, and then it all breaks open. In Miller v. California, the court basically said that what was obscene depended on local norms. So in a big coastal city like New York, all bets were off. Suddenly, showing pornography, explicit books, movies, or live shows, was completely legal.

And Times Square stepped onto the scene as the definitive porn capital of New York City. So sex became an industry. I mean, you had massage parlors, you had live nude shows, you had peeps, you had topless bars, you had hardcore sex films, you had porn emporiums, you had adult bookstores, you had, I mean, it was a cornucopia of commercial sex. You had everything you could possibly imagine. The result of all this—the big, struggling theaters, the pornography, the sex trade—all of it contributed to a version of Times Square that was a far cry from the glamorous theater

district it had once been. By the 70s, Times Square was a gritty, tough place. I was a teenager, and for a woman, it was just not a place you wanted to be. It was dicey. Add to this the fact that New York City nearly went bankrupt in the 1970s and cut back on vital services like sanitation. So it wasn't just dicey, it was divey and a bit dirty. Rolling Stone would come to crown a stretch of Times Square, the sleaziest block in America.

You had assault, you had battery, you had fights, you know. You basically had a range of activity from minor crime to serious crime, meaning murder and rape, that was part of the territory in those decades. This was pretty much rock bottom for Times Square, at least according to the government. By this point, city and state officials saw Times Square as a sort of emblem of the city's decline. The city also saw that it was losing out on tourism dollars. Times Square was no longer a top destination for visitors. One indicator, by the late 70s, attendance at the neighborhood's annual New Year's Eve fanfare had dropped by 95% from mid-century. This at a time when

tourism to the rest of the city was booming. The city was desperate to clean up the neighborhood and convinced residents and tourists alike that Times Square was a place worth visiting. And it's this desperation that set off a pair of events that would push Times Square out of its seedy past and into its bright, family-friendly future. That's after the break. We're back with reporter Katie Thornton. By the start of the 80s, New York officials were sick of their once premier destination

for all things glamorous being a laughing stock, a den of vice and danger. So in 1981, they announced a plan to clean up the neighborhood. New York would use eminent domain to condemn much of Times Square. Eminent domain allows the government to seize private land for public use. It has a long history of being used to dispossess black and brown communities. Owners are compensated for their property, but they don't have any choice but to sell.

In New York, Eminent Domain had been used before to build Central Park, expand New York's drinking water reservoir, build Lincoln Center. And now, the city and state were partnering with private developers to empty out Times Square so it could be filled back up with more desirable businesses. There's a big significant, complicated, complex plan to change all the uses, to wipe out the bad uses and put in place good uses. Bad was all the commercial sex and porn, and good uses were office, return of live theater, and other forms of entertainment.

Cleaning up the city was a euphemism for a lot of things you probably already know about New York in the 80s and 90s. Urban renewal, Mayor Giuliani, broken windows, policing, and we'll get into that. But in Times Square specifically, the cleanup was also motivated by homophobia. Remember, this was in the middle of the AIDS crisis.

And Times Square wasn't just home to the sex industry. It was also one of the few places in the city with a thriving gay scene. People, straight and queer, made their living in Times Square. They made their life there. They went out, screwed around, fell in love. For a lot of people, it was home. But these were not the people that the city and state wanted representing New York.

So in 1990, New York condemned multiple blocks of Times Square, kicking out hundreds of businesses, as well as poor and elderly residents. At the time, it was the largest redevelopment project in the country. But around the same time the plan went into effect, the real estate market tanked. Some tenants who had promised to move in pulled out,

and other prospective buyers weren't biting. Much of Times Square was emptied out, but there were very few businesses willing to fill it back up. This became a problem for all the businesses that stuck it out, a handful of hotels and theaters who made it through the bad times, and of course, the New York Times.

And that brings us to the second ingredient in Times Square's transformation, from den of vice to big, bright tourist hub. Arthur O. Solzberger Jr., son of the paper's publisher and heir to the title, had a vested interest in making the neighborhood shine again. Some people were turning down jobs at the paper because they didn't wanna work in the neighborhood. And so Sulzberger led the charge for some of the area's property owners to take matters into their own hands.

He set his sights on an urban planning tool that had been gaining popularity among the country's business leaders. It was a tool that could let a group of unelected property owners generate enough money to transform their neighborhood, all while skirting some of democracy's red tape. The tool was called a business improvement district, or a BID. These are kind of like private organizations that are managing urban space. This is Daniel Kudla, a sociologist who has written a lot about BIDs.

Essentially they're a group of business and or property owners within a designated geographical area who end up paying an annual tax to supplement local services to their commercial district. The concept of a bid first popped up in Toronto in 1970, when a group of downtown merchants had lost a lot of customers to nearby malls. To remedy this classic suburban era story, they asked the council to make it mandatory for all downtown shops to pay into some local beautification projects in an attempt to bring people back. They put up some extra streetlights, some nice signs and banners, and they saw a bump in

customers. From there, bids spread across North America. The rules around them varied from city to city and state to state. But in New York, for example, all you needed was a simple majority of property owners to vote to approve a bid. And then every property owner in the area had to pay in. The owners could then pass the cost on to renters. It was like a tax. There was no opting out. The bid would then pool all that money and spend it on what they or their chosen staff thought would help the neighborhood. So this can be anything from hiring private security, doing beautification upgrades, to street furniture, lighting, or even just marketing, promoting, branding the neighborhood.

The city technically had to approve bids formation and budgets, but after that, the bid would be in charge. Solzberger saw what bids had done for other cities and neighborhoods, and he figured that a bid might just finally be the solution to the city's drawn out cleanup efforts. So he rallied the property owners. Certainly going to be the New York Times. It's certainly going to be the theater owners. It's certainly going to be the New York Times. It's certainly going to be the theater owners. It's certainly going to be the retailers.

They want to have an impact and help shape the new Times Square. In 1992, the majority voted to create a bid. They got their approval from the city and it was official. The brand new Times Square bids started collecting their fees and began the work of making something from nothing. Remember, at this point, Times Square was pretty empty. So, the BID's first mission was to make sure their neighborhood was appealing enough to bring people back in for a wholesome brand of fun.

And it was really important to start sending the message of change, that Times Square was going to be a new place. It was cleared of porn. It was cleared of porn. It was cleared of the commercial sex. And so they needed to promote Times Square as a healthy place for people to come back to. Over the next year, the Business Improvement District got to work. They employed a brigade of unarmed security officers.

They hired street sweepers to pick up trash, stashing all their brooms in an empty theater. And they put on big public events, highlighting things Times Square was known for in its golden years. So from the bids formation, we tried to celebrate each one of those in a unique way. This is Tom Harris, the current president of Times Square's Business Improvement District, which is now called the Times Square Alliance. He wasn't part of the group at that time, but he knows a lot about its history. We started with a taste of Times Square,

inviting people into Times Square for a taste of some of these famous restaurants. The Times Square bid also put on an event called Broadway on Broadway, closing down the street and putting on a big show of famous songs from musical theater. And that was the symbol that Times Square is family friendly. But alongside all these efforts to reshape their neighborhood's image, the Times Square

bid had something even bigger planned. It was an event that was meant to convince the world that Times Square was exactly where they wanted to be. And what better way to do that than by harkening back to another famed local tradition and giving people the whole square. In the porn years, the annual event had been a bit underwhelming. People standing around in the cold, watching more or less the same old ball drop. But all that changed for New Year's 1993, when the Times Square bid overhauled the annual extravaganza. They take new images.

Times Square looking good. They had the ball redesigned. Listen to that crowd. They're watching the ball move. There's a big 300 watt bulb at the top and another one at the bottom. They made it a performance. They were presenting the essence of entertainment, of joy, of gathering together to celebrate in this iconic place.

You know, they made it even more than what it was to begin with. Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, happy new year! Woo! Jack, check it out! In the first moments of 1993, fireworks lit up Times Square, dazzling visitors. And there was confetti, hand-tossed invisibly from the buildings above by volunteers. Colorful paper saturated the sky, making the whole of Times Square this idyllic urban snow globe. Look, it's a confetti. Oh, brother. That's a new addition.

It's like we're in the middle of a snowstorm, but it's live in Times Square with a deluge of confetti. It might seem like an age-old tradition, but this was a first. Even Dick Clark gave a shout out to the bid and the scene they created. The business improvement district has dropped 500 balloons here. The bid made it magical, made it a spectacle. They spared no expense in doing that. And that was fine because the point of it wasn't to turn a profit. Here's Tom Harris again. It was important for the Alliance not to make this the most profitable event of the year.

It was to make this a civic event that we produce and deliver free to the entire world. After all the work they'd done all year, the street sweeping, the patrolling, the events, the Times Square bid wanted all eyes on the neighborhood. And they got what they wanted. On New Year's Eve, when we welcomed the world there, the world sees a cleaner, safer, family-friendly Times Square. This image of a more approachable Times Square stuck with the public. More people started coming into the neighborhood. Add to that some hefty tax breaks, and new restaurants, shops, offices, and theaters

moved into spaces that had been sitting empty. Even Disney opened a massive store and theater right in the middle of Times Square. By 1998, the neighborhood had been completely transformed, with the New York Times saying that Times Square was, arguably, the most sought-after 13 acres of commercial property in the world. The transformation of Times Square from its gritty past to its shiny new future was in large part thanks to the savvy and power of the Times Square bid. Within just a few years, the group managed to do what various mayors and politicians had been failing to do for decades.

It returned Times Square to something like its former glory. But what happened here wasn't a one-off. In the years since the Times Square bid through their first New Year's Eve party, the bid model has been used again and again to shape cities across the country. Even if you've never heard of a bid, you've almost certainly been inside one. These days, they're part and parcel for how U.S. cities are run. There are about 1000 bids in the U.S. today. New York City has 76. Los Angeles has 40.

Milwaukee has 32. Anytime you walk into a commercial district with nicely branded banners, cute flower pots, maybe a neon vested ambassador, you're almost certainly in a business improvement district. In Memphis, bids run historical walking tours. In South Philly, there is a Fall Fest, a Superior Wisconsin Farmers Market. You know, nice little things that, let's be honest, make a city more pleasant and enjoyable. But if bids look too good to be true, it's probably because they are.

Or at least, some people think so. Along with many other New Yorkers, I was outraged because not only would you have the clean up, the moral clean up of Times Square businesses, but you would also have a super controlled situation that was going to be operated by and for the private sector. Sharon Zuchin is a professor emerita of sociology at Brooklyn College and at the CUNY Graduate Center who writes about New York and urban sociology. She's lived in New York for most of her life. And while some people saw the transformation of Times Square as nothing short of a miracle,

Sharon had a different take. From the time bids first started cropping up in New York City several decades ago, Sharon had major concerns. And not just about Times Square. When the time square bid was formed, there were already about two dozen bids in New York City. I live near the first business improvement district that was created in New York City and noticed security guards. And I started to wonder, what is this organization? Where did it come from? And why are they doing this?

And I started to wonder, what is this organization, where did it come from and why are they taking charge of public space? Sharon says that from the beginning, bids weren't just planting beautiful flowers and sweeping the streets. They played a big role in New York's gentrification. Under Mayor Giuliani, for example, New York City started cracking down on petty crimes, disproportionately arresting New Yorkers of color. You probably know this as broken windows style policing,

and bids were a key part of enforcing it. They rousted homeless people from sleeping in various places in their territory, and some of them in midtown Manhattan hired homeless people like to chase other homeless people out of these spaces. And it wasn't a good situation. In the past 30 years, a lot of bids have dialed back some of their sketchiest security practices. But some haven't.

Bids operating around the country today have written exclusion orders to keep people out of certain neighborhoods and used high-tech surveillance to monitor public space, all with mixed results as to whether any of this actually yields a meaningful drop in violent crime. The tricky thing about bids is that they aren't forces for good or forces for bad. They are, above all, forces of capital. Most of the choices they make and the things they do come down to one question. How can we make this area nice enough that people want to spend their time and money here?

The problem is that this is a private group. These bids are responsible for keeping property values at the same level or even raising property values because that's what building owners are interested in. That means that the business improvement districts are not concerned if rents rise, if commercial rents rise. And while these higher commercial rents might benefit property owners, they can push out small local businesses. Small stores are forced out of business because they can't pay those rents. If you own a small barber shop or craft shop or gym yoga studio or something, the Business Improvement District is not that interested in you. Here's Daniel Kudla again.

There's definitely a tie between increased gentrification in a lot of mid-sized larger North American cities coinciding with the formation of bids. Officially bids report to the city, but recent audits show that some cities aren't keeping as close tabs on bids as they're supposed to. And if the public has any opinion on that, there's not much they can do. Because bids are private groups. Their members can't get voted out on election day. But of course, not everyone agrees with bid critics.

Tom Harris of the Times Square Alliance bid says a lot of those critiques of policing, of minimal oversight, don't land anymore. I would say it's completely the opposite of do what these property owners say to do. The mayor has a rep on our board. The controller has a rep on our board. We have resident reps. And look, if you live in Times Square, you're not shy. And our residents tend to dominate our meetings because they care about their neighborhood the way everyone cares about their neighborhood.

The Times Square bid is actually known as one of New York's more inclusive creative bids. Unlike some of the more heavy-handed ones, the Times Square Alliance doesn't simply relocate unhoused people. Instead, they connect them with nearby resources, and they've done this more or less from the beginning. In the 90s, they helped open a supportive housing hotel for folks living on the street

in Times Square. Lauren Henry Tom also says that bids are able to take action on the needs of their specific neighborhood. Tom Biddle Bids are a little bit more nimble and can move quicker than the city government. We're sort of like a wave runner and the city is a cruise ship. So we can move a little bit more quickly and we can pilot things and see if they work a lot easier than the city can. Bids often get things done and fast.

Today, in addition to working with the city to host New Year's Eve, the Times Square Alliance puts on 80 live shows a year. They run a public art project where every night at midnight, 364 days a year, a local artist takes over all the billboards in Times Square. It's cool. And back in 2009, when the city wanted to turn the busiest stretch of Broadway into a pedestrian street for much of the day, they asked the Times Square bid to help spearhead that project.

And they did. Pedestrianizing Broadway has been probably one of the greatest things for public space in the last 40 years. Before that, Times Square was two streets that crossed and a lot of signs. Now it's a vibrant public space and we created a destination. In short, bids are a paradox. They exist ultimately to serve businesses and property owners. They're not democratic institutions.

And yet they are responsible for a lot of the special things that can make a city feel like home. I had that experience myself. One of my good friends, who's a poet in California was visiting. I walked with her through Bryant Park in Midtown. And I said, look at this. Isn't this awful? The business improvement district runs this public space as though it's their private

space. And she said, what's bad? There are lovely restaurants. People are sitting on the benches and Rita Dove, who was the US poet laureate at that time, was going to give a noonday poetry reading. So my friend said, what's wrong with you? This is great.

Who cares who's paying for it? Bids are addressing a failure of the system. A lot of things that bids do, public events, nice decorations, these are things that cities often can't or at least don't pay for. The question is whether private businesses with ill-defined authorities should be the ones filling in that gap. It's in a way fortunate that Mr. Moneybags comes in to pay for things

that we really need in public space. But I don't think we have a full democracy in a city if we allow private organizations to control who can use public space. We already have a way of paying into shared space. And that's taxation, a city government. If companies paid into the government instead of the bid, that money could go to amenities and neighborhoods all over the city. But bids have become so ingrained in our political process, that's unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Perhaps the thing that should make us the most squeamish about all this is just how much a bid looks like a mini-democracy. They vote, they tax themselves, and they decide how to use that money. But it's property owners who get the loudest say. In this country, we tried that before, having a democracy where the landowners were the only ones who had a voice. And we left it behind for a very good reason. Whatever you feel about bids, one thing they do show is that there is an appetite for exciting,

ambitious, and yes, sometimes costly, urban planning projects. I mean, just look at New Year's Eve in Times Square. Love it or hate it, it's nothing if not testimony to the fact that people want to come together. In celebration of the slow descent of the ball and a rocking display of confetti, sure. But also in celebration of urban space, where we can get together on the streets and sidewalks that we publicly share. 99% Invisible was reported this week by Katie Thornton, edited by Kelly Prime with help from Vivienne Leigh, mixed by Martín González, music by Swan Real, fact-checking by Graham Hayesha.

For more about the queer history of Times Square, check out the book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel Delaney. Cathy Tu is our executive producer, Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director, Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Lashma Dawn, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriella Gladney, Jacob Medina Gleason, me Roman Mars, and Nina Potuck. This is Nina's last episode with us.

She's been filling in for this year and just doing an amazing job. We were so lucky to have spent time with her. So thank you, Nina, and I'm sure we will be working together again very soon. The 99% of his logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building

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