In their place, he built the New York Coliseum, an ungainly slab of a convention center that reached from 58th to 60th. The biography of today’s Columbus Circle begins on the day in 1954 when demolition crews showed up to erase a block of 59th Street, taking with them hundreds of homes and stores that Robert Moses had summarily condemned as slums. The New York Coliseum, shortly after its completion in 1954. Every development saga also includes its unbuilt alternatives, and the Time Warner Center, with its cool urbanity and high-gloss prisms, and its street-width light well between the two towers, is an immense improvement on what might have been. After the first attempt to erect a Columbus Circle colossus failed, one of the gadflies acquired actual power, an MAS member was tapped to design the complex, and advocates helped write the rules for the next go-around. The Municipal Art Society, a sporadically influential urban-design association dating back to the Progressive Era, together with three adjoining community boards, deployed lawyers, celebrities, and sympathetic editorial writers to decry the project for years. In the course of its troubled gestation and complex birth, neighborhood naysayers hung in there so long that they learned to shape the development rather than just opposing it. ![]() If New Yorkers learned to ride escalators in order to buy a fancy shirt or spend too much on lunch (as they now can at Brookfield Place in Battery Park City) if a cultural venue became the ultimate deluxe amenity (as the Whitney Museum and the Shed have gladdened brokers at the High Line and Hudson Yards) if great glass walls came sweeping back into fashion, embodying the glamour of high-rise Manhattan living and if chefs have become drivers of real estate - all of that is because of the Time Warner Center, too.Īt the same time, the building’s story notched a high-water mark for urban activism. The twin-towered complex spawned the row of super-tall condos still popping up along the southern edge of Central Park. Such imperial prices dramatize the city’s inequities, but the building that some disdained as a fat cat’s bazaar has proven to be - for better or worse - the most influential construction project in New York. Within that one building rises a city of $10,000-per-night hotel rooms, $325 dinner menus, and $125,000-a-month rentals. The complex accelerated and symbolized New York’s metamorphosis into a high-end consumer product. The Time Warner Center represents the partial triumph of two opposite forces: big-money development and civic activism. Two decades in the making, the project spanned four mayoral administrations weathered a stock-market crash, a major recession, and the 9/11 attacks and involved an army of architects, deal-makers, functionaries, and lawyers, not to mention the protesters who hoped to stop, or at least shrink it. To Stephen Ross, the lanky, gravel-voiced real-estate mogul who founded Related Companies and shepherded the building into existence, the opening of the Time Warner Center was the vindication of a $1.7 billion gamble. A few guests seemed puzzled to find themselves toasting a shopping mall, even if it was a shopping mall–office building–condo tower–hotel–concert hall combo lording it over Columbus Circle. Cirque du Soleil aerialists writhed, Marc Anthony sashayed, and white-suited waiters distributed mini-BLTs (bacon, lettuce, and truffle). ![]() On a February night in 2004, some 6,000 of New York’s sparkliest turned out to fête the debut of a new celebrity: a 750-foot-tall, two-headed skyscraper clad in dusky glass. In celebration of New York Magazine’s 50th anniversary, this weekly series, which will continue through October 2018, tells the stories behind key moments that shaped the city’s culture.
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