ABSTRACT
In 1980, a team assembled by the real estate developer Fred S. Papert forwarded a massive and ambitious proposal for the redevelopment of several blighted blocks adjacent to New York’s Times Square. Titled The City at 42nd Street, the proposal contained multimedia environments, cinemas, theatres, cultural amenities, restaurants, hotels, three high-rise office towers, and more. The project team was led by prominent former-members of the Planning Commission within the John V. Lindsay mayoral administration in New York City (1966–1973). While the innovative Lindsay-era Planning Commission has many legacies, common to many of their policies is a tendency to understand the public’s engagement with the city in various ways that reflect esthetic and intellectual influences of visual media. Often, these policies entailed an understanding of the city as a vast urban ecology that interrelates the material city and its systems, urban economics, and the psychology of the urban public. Critically, media was often understood as a tool for influencing the public’s participation in the city-as-ecological-system. Proposed years after Lindsay’s tenure, The City at 42nd Street fully exemplifies the ecological blend of the city, media, and the urban public latent within many of the planning documents produced during the Lindsay administration. Indeed, The City at 42nd Street deployed media as a tool to inflect the behaviors of the urban public, all in service of repairing the urban ecology of a blighted Times Square that slipped into entropy.
