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."
> giuliani gets credit for brattons work in LA?
Exactly the way Bill Walsh gets partial credit for the success of Mike Holmgren.
Yeah, let's not bash Rudy but it's OK to bash Dr. Paul.
walsh taught holmgren everything he knows. did rudy teach bratton how to be a cop and a cop administrator and a researcher? no, rudy hired him to do a job and bratton did the job and rudy fired him because people caught on that bratton is smarter than rudy. my department has not recovered from the damage rudy did. but that is a story for another day.
His doctors said "Giuliani can do this therapy and campaign for this particular Senate seat at the same time"? In that case I think they too were being presumptuous. Whether or not someone can do treatment X and at the same time engage in a political campaign is not purely a medical question that doctors are qualified to definitively sound off on. Doctors are not experts nor, probably, are they particularly knowledgeable on what is required of a person engaging in a political campaign.
Presumably, Giuliani didn't think he could do both. Or maybe let's say he just didn't want to try, because he wanted to focus on the treatment. So he didn't.
What's your problem with that? You've got a problem with that? Why the heck would you have a problem with that?
Did Bratton do compstat before working for Rudy?
Why, of course not! No one, and I mean NO ONE, ever, ever thought of using something so sophisticated as computer statistics [aka "compstat"] to monitor crime before Rudy Giuliani rose to the office of Mayor. In fact, I don't think anyone used computer statistics for anything meaningful, except Rudy! Ever! Rudy is the man!
i suppose that's rudy's success because he had the god-given foresight to hire bratton? take your rudy-fest somewhere else.
You may not remember that 9/11/01 was the scheduled primary election in NYC. The City had adopted a term limit for its mayor. Rudy Giuliani could not run again. The pre-ordained next Mayor of New York City was the Democrat, Mark Green. That all changed on that day.
Giuliani’s term ended when Michael Bloomberg was sworn in as Mayor of the City of New York on January 1, 2002.
I don’t know how many NYC first responders you know personally. I am related to quite a few, and they do respect the former mayor not only for 9/11 but for his support generally throughout his terms. Do they want to see him as POTUS? I’m not sure, but that is quite a separate subject.
It’s the union leaders and others on the left who raise the views you are promoting. It never ceases to amaze me that FReepers, of all people, seem not to understand the difference between rank and file union members and their union leaders. The relationship is similar to the average citizen to his or her Congressman.
I feel like I’m playing an intellectual shell game with you guys.
First you say it is all Bratton/Compstat, and then you say that compstat is no big deal. Okay, then why did crime drop? And if compstat is no big deal, then why aren’t you saying that Bratton is over-rated? And what is Bratton doing in LA, then?
The main point is that it's just really tacky to take the line "awww, he could've done the treatment and campaigned too." I'm trying to understand what goes on in a person's head, why political obsessions twist someone's thinking so much, that they get to a place where their first instinct is to second-guess someone dealing with a cancer diagnosis and treatment regimen. Here is what Giuliani seems to have said at the time regarding his decision:
I've decided that what I should do is to put my health first and that I should devote the focus and attention that I should to be able to figure out the best treatment," he said.
Sounds 100%, eminently, and utterly plausible, reasonable, and intelligent to me. What earthly reason would one have to doubt Giuliani on this? And why does it matter in the first place?
Bizarre.
You didn’t answer my question about whether Bratton implemented compstat before working for Giuliani. If he did, then you would have a strong argument for why Giuliani should not get credit for Compstat. Otherwise, your argument immediately gets murky. BTW, did you sit in on the meetings where compstat was invented?
According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, annual violent crimes in the US fell by a total of 419,000 per year from 1994-2001 while Giuliani was mayor.
342,000 - 82% - of that reduction took place outside New York state.
These people are Democratic plants. The idea that cancer is not a life-changing event is silly. For starters, you don’t know what the treatment will be, whether you will get it with the first kind of treatment, the effects of the treatment, and many other things. Don’t waste your time arguing with them about this!!
Its also important to note that Carol Burnett played a role in cleaning up Time Square.
That makes no sense. So, if crime goes up in NY, it will automatically go up nationwide?
Do you have an actual quote, a source, anything? I think you're missing something in that summarization.
If he didn't want to run, fine. Just don't blame it on a physical impairment that didn't exist. As was evident in the news from 2000 and 2001, Rudy didn't miss a beat.
What's your problem with that? You've got a problem with that? Why the heck would you have a problem with that?
I have a problem with lies and mistruths, particularly from people who want to become public officials. And why the heck do you have a problem with that?
But they're not, that's what's so strange. At least if they were Democratic plants I would understand what was making them tick, where they were coming from. Their kooky statements would have a rational explanation.
But I simply can't fathom how someone's political obsessions get them to a place where they sincerely feel the need to dismiss a fricking cancer diagnosis/treatment as somehow a minor matter just so they can have a "knock" against Giuliani whom they hate that much for reasons that never seem to add up. ("he wore a dress! a DRESS!")
If I appear to waste time engaging/arguing with these people, it's really only because I'm fascinated by their thought process & want to understand it better :)
It didn't stop him from marching in the Gay Pride Parade or launching his campaign against gun manufacturers.
Priorities, I guess.
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