Posted on 12/28/2007 4:13:08 PM PST by jdm
Times Square is crammed with tourists, and not just for New Year's Eve. These days, they're eager to gawk at the glittering lights of Broadway and visit attractions like Madame Tussauds Wax Museum and the MTV studios.
But 15 years ago, the place was considered a cesspool, overrun with crime and home to sex shops and peep shows. Drug addicts shot up on the street. Locals avoided the neighborhood.
The man who has taken the credit for revitalizing Times Square is GOP presidential hopeful and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. He has made Times Square a symbol for how he tamed the evils of an out-of-control city and turned it into a tourist-friendly destination.
"It's called getting things done," he said at a fundraiser this year.
It's not that clear-cut, a closer examination of the Times Square renaissance shows.
While even his critics will say Giuliani deserves praise for his part in redevelopment of the area, the finished product was the culmination of decades of work that came before he was elected, according to lawmakers and urban planners.
"State agencies had plans in place to develop 42nd Street well before Giuliani," said Ethel Sheffer, an urban planning expert who led a quality-of-life study on Times Square during the redevelopment. Any large-scale redevelopment "takes a long time to unfold," she said.
The Times Square plan was in the works during the 1980s, when state officials and then-Mayor Ed Koch used eminent domain to condemn and take control of decrepit buildings.
But there was no legal way to control businesses until the City Council initiated a study during the administration of David Dinkins, who preceded Giuliani as mayor, that would allow them to pass rezoning laws if they could prove sex businesses were harming residential areas.
Walter McCaffrey, a former City Council member, said the idea to rezone wasn't even related to Times Square at first. It started with a neighborhood in Queens near the Queensboro Bridge that had suffered when topless bars and porn shops moved in. After the study, the City Council drew up stricter zoning laws that prohibited sex-oriented theaters, bookstores, massage parlors and dance clubs from operating within 500 feet of homes, houses of worship, schools or one another.
The law passed in 1995 - about two years after Giuliani took office.
By this time, the area was already changing, urban planning experts say. The paced quickened after the legal challenges to the zoning laws were defeated and Giuliani bore down.
Says Charles Millard, a former City Councilman and head of the city's Economic Development Corp: "I drafted the law that allowed us to do this constitutionally when David Dinkins was mayor, but until Rudy became mayor and pushed it through his planning commission, and pushed it through the city, not a thing had happened."
Others say Giuliani was in the right place at the right time, as the economy boomed in the 1990s and shifted toward tourism, real estate and Wall Street. The proliferation of Internet porn also made many sex shops obsolete.
"It was kind of like a perfect storm for him," said Arturo Ignacio Sanchez, a City and Regional Planning professor at Cornell University. The process started with Koch, picked up speed under Dinkins and really accelerated under Giuliani, he said, adding: "It fast forwards with warp speed under Bloomberg, and you have the city today."
Times Square has always lived a double life - even a century ago the 10-block stretch of busy Midtown streets was home to upscale splendor as well as hidden brothels and fetid hotels. With the invention of neon and the rise of Broadway shows, the area slowly became the entertainment center of the city.
But by the time Giuliani took office, the area had fallen into decline. In 1993, nearly 4,000 incidents of crime were reported in the area, according to the Times Square Alliance, a business group.
Part of the revival was the arrival of upscale hotels, theme stores and restaurants - businesses that Giuliani helped lure with a private-public team of developers.
Disney received a low-interest loan from the city to give a facelift to the New Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street, considered by some to be the crown jewel of the new Times Square. The renovated theater soon drew in other businesses, such as MTV, ESPN and other media companies.
Giuliani talks on the campaign trail about the eradication of porn shops from Times Square and about declining crime rates during his tenure.
"It didn't happen by accident, it didn't happen by wishing they went away," Giuliani said in a speech in October. "It happened based on a very well-organized campaign, a study demonstrating the impact of pornography on neighborhoods, an intense battle in court that nobody thought we would win, and we won. And most importantly, the pornographers lost and they were chased out of Times Square."
There are still some sex shops in Times Square, but the majority of them disappeared long ago. Some simply relocated.
Former City Councilman Thomas Duane was among the few who voted against the rezoning laws in the 1990s, in part because he was not eager to see the sex shops simply switch neighborhoods.
"He didn't get rid of them from New York City, he dispersed them from Times Square, mostly to the industrial waterfront areas of the city," Duane said of Giuliani.
"And as Manhattan became a more attractive place to live, people started moving into those communities and now the same problem exists," he said. "It just doesn't exist much where the tourists go."
Rudy’s clean up of the Port Authority Bus Terminal was even more amazing than what happened at GCT.
The Port Authority was like Dante’s hell with thugs robbing people, homosexuals and prostitutes spreading AIDS with each other and their clients in the restrooms, drug dealers selling their wares in the open, crack addicts smoking in the corners and in the lower levels. It was a disgusting, vile pit that I never would have believed could have been made safe, ever.
I totally agree. I went to NYC in 1985 and Times Square was a scary hellhole, even for a group of my friends. I went back after Guiliani was mayor and it was place you could safely take kids.
Old Time Square
The new Time Square
Ok. I'm glad that you're not scoffing at someone who went through treatment for prostate cancer.
Regarding chemotherapy, um, post #102 points out that Rudy was put on Lupron. That is hormone therapy and perhaps whether it is "chemotherapy" depends on the definition of chemotherapy, but Lupron is a chemical and it was prescribed as part of his therapy....
If the underlying notion in peoples' minds here is that any cancer therapy that is chemotherapy is the "hard/bad" therapy whereas any radiation therapy is the "good/easy" therapy, I reject that. It depends.
Personally, I don't know why he dropped out of the race in 2000, and I'm not sure why it matters (?), and people here could be right that the affair/scandal was the "real reason", but I don't so easily or flippantly discount the possibility that the cancer had something to do with it. I don't know what the effect on him physically was and neither do you. If he "carried on his duties as mayor with full vigor" maybe that was him doing a good job of sucking it up and putting on a strong face while he was still mayor, and then going home in agony off camera. Do you know otherwise? Again, even if one's XRT treatment goes as well as your father's did, the overall experience still is likely to be an extremely stressful thing to go through. For crying out loud the man was diagnosed with cancer and spent nine months in hospitals and/or clinics dealing with it. Doctors poking and prodding, x-rays and CT scans, SEED IMPLANTS INTO HIS PROSTATE (would you like to see photos of this sort of procedure?), then putting on little robes and lying on a table underneath a linear accelerator that produces high-energy radiation every day for 5 weeks. Not knowing whether his cancer was responding or not - not knowing whether his remaining lifespan would now be measured in months.
"But he dropped out of the race and they had to draft Lazio, and radiation therapy isn't even that bad!!!!" just strikes me as a rather petty and spiteful complaint in light of this.
?
I think the "man at the top" has a large effect on things, of course. I'm just saying that the criticism of a leader's accomplishment that he didn't singlehandedly do the accomplishment is stupid. Do you disagree or what?
The "man at the top" is the one who sets the agenda and puts the policies in motion. He uses the "bully pulpit" to change public opinion.
And in Rudy's case, the results were very good for New York. That is what I'm saying. The article above attempts to say "but he didn't do it all by his lonesome" as if this counts as a criticism, and I am saying it doesn't. Do you think it does or what?
It's different because as is well documented (and as lefties complained bitterly about at the time) there were numerous of Rudy Giuliani's actual policies and actions that one can see had a direct effect on the improvement in question. Whereas no one can point to any single Bill Clinton policy or action which tangibly caused the improvement in the 1990s economy, except perhaps "welfare reform" which the Republican Congress passed. That's how it's different.
Take it from someone who knows and lived through it... Rudy deserves most of the credit, along with Bratton... He got rid of squeegee men, folks who committ smaller crimes, cleaned up the city, REFUSED to even meet that scumbag charlatan Sharpton - for 8 years...
Rudy was fantastic for NYC - a Godsend.M
This is nothing more than a hit piece on Rudy, and no doubt, his detractors will jump all over this... FR has become pathetic....
Blast Rudy for other things, but don’t pile on a bunch of leftist lies.
“First a disclaimer.... Rudy is NOT my choice. He’s not even 2nd 3rd or 4th...
Take it from someone who knows and lived through it... Rudy deserves most of the credit, along with Bratton... He got rid of squeegee men, folks who committ smaller crimes, cleaned up the city, REFUSED to even meet that scumbag charlatan Sharpton - for 8 years...
Rudy was fantastic for NYC - a Godsend.M
This is nothing more than a hit piece on Rudy, and no doubt, his detractors will jump all over this... FR has become pathetic....
Blast Rudy for other things, but don’t pile on a bunch of leftist lies.”
Rudy is about my last or second from last choice. (None of the Dems are considered a choice).
That said, urban development only makes the damage more expensive, unless the crime is cleaned up. Someone cleaned up the crime and the only one taking credit is Rudy. Unless I get some evidence that he was not the one to clean up the crime, I have to give him credit for cleaning up NYC.
That does not mean I will vote for him in the primary, I won’t. But I won’t bash him either.
> That’s how it’s different.
Excellent reply. That someone doesn’t understand this basic point makes me wonder how they became a Republican in the first place.
I think that FreeRepublic has been taken over by Democratic plants who have worked up others into a frenzy over Giuliani. It only takes one or two to get the others on board.
Giuliani as president would transform the US the way he transformed NY.
You're being way too logical and mature. Don't you realize that to be a good Freeper you're supposed to viciously bash whoever you're against in the primary, whether it makes any sense or not, and no matter how much it might damage them should they eventually win and go on to face Hillary Clinton in the general election? ;-)
even so, rudy had little to do with the crime decline. PC Bratton was the architect of the broken windows strategy implementation as well as COMPSTAT.
rudy fired bratton when bratton got the cover of time magazine. rudy does not like competition for publicity. rudy's solution for gun crime in NYC: confiscate lawful guns that would have never been used in a crime. bratton's solution: let the cops be cops and get the illegal guns off the streets.
Your statement is filled with ridiculous allegations. For starters, much of the nationwide decline in crime was because of what happened in NY.
Of course, Bratton was helpful on crime. You’d have to have been there to know who did what. Also, Giuliani did not fire Bratton because of competition for publicity. That is the liberal talking point, similar to the ones which say that Cheney runs the White House. And Bratton didn’t fix welfare, lower taxes or cut spending.
The same people here who say Giuliani did a bad job for hiring Kerik give him no credit for putting Bratton in place. The illogic abounds.
if so, that's ridiculous.
but let's say that it was true. then the crime reduction nationwide is all due to bratton. broken windows and COMPSTAT was all bratton. sure rudy hired him and gave him the go ahead. bratton has had incredible results wherever he goes. currently in LA. are you saying that rudy is responsible for LA too?
Lupron is female hormones, not chemotherapy--at least under any common modern definition.
But, if you want to use the broadest of historical definitions, taking aspirin could be considered chemotherapy.
The point remains--he had no physical limitations requiring him to drop out of the Senate race.
My point remains--I think it is presumptuous of you to claim to know that.
But, if that's your opinion you're entitled to it. I'm still not sure why it's so important to pin down why he dropped out of the Senate race in the first place.
Oh, Goody! You mean he can ban guns nationwide, sponsor gay parades in all the major (and minor) cities, appoint liberal judges, and place his corrupt cronies in every niche of government? Wow! And he'll probably do away with those silly little FOIA laws, too. I am really inspired to vote for him now! Thanks!
How do you know what Bratton did and what Giuliani did? Do you have actual facts, or are you just repeating what you heard from other people? (Lots of people say Cheney runs the White House. Do you think it is true?) Did Bratton use compstat before working for Giuliani?
So, yes, Giuliani gets credit for Bratton implementing the same program in LA that the did in NY.
Let me get this straight. Because of what Rudy and Bratton did in NYC, it then caused crime to decline nationwide? So Rudy now should get credit for the nationwide reduction in crime, too?
btw, i'm a new york city cop.
That is what his doctors said at the time.
I'm still not sure why it's so important to pin down why he dropped out of the Senate race in the first place.
I'm not sure why it's so important to you to try to perpetuate myths.
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