Cityscape

Fat City

Four Times Square is the first major project built by the Durst Organization under the leadership of 55-year-old Douglas Durst. Angered by the subsidies the state was offering developers, Douglas's late father, Seymour, spent most of the eighties unsuccessfully suing to stop George Klein and the Prudential Insurance Company of America from building the four Burgee-and-Johnson-designed towers in Times Square. Douglas simply bought in (and enjoyed those very subsidies). In 1996, he purchased the biggest of the properties for $75 million. "Unlike the developers who came before him," Robertson recalls, Durst understood that the building had to be bright and flashy. "He embraced it."

While I'm all for dressing corporate towers in neon drag, something about 4 Times Square bothers me. I can't put my finger on it until Fowle and I make our way down from the roof, back out to the sidewalk.

As we gaze upward, Fowle tells me the tower is "way beyond the F.A.R. of normal New York City building." F.A.R. stands for floor area ratio, the amount of square footage that may be built on a property. The Times Square towers, built under the auspices of the state and not subject to city zoning regulations, turned out -- surprise! -- much taller and fatter than city zoning allows. Suddenly I had the feeling that if you stripped away the neon, the glass, and the Sports Kebab, what you'd have is one of those four nasty Burgee-Johnson buildings, circa 1984.

This feeling is not entirely baseless. The four towers that Klein planned to build in the eighties represented nearly 4.1 million square feet of office space. A tract published at the time warned, "Times Square's current F.A.R. of 18 is considered to be high. But the Project enables an F.A.R. of 45 for its tallest tower -- an exceptional density that will darken Times Square."

That "tallest tower" is, of course, 4 Times Square. It sits on a somewhat larger property than the eighties tower would have, because Durst added adjacent sites to the package. But though it's only 48 stories (not counting the satellite farm on top) instead of the 56 originally planned for the site, the new building takes up 1.6 million square feet -- more than the 1.54 million square feet projected for the Burgee-Johnson tower. Fowle estimates that it has an F.A.R. of 35. The Reuters tower, at 30 stories and 855,000 square feet (F.A.R. of 31, says Fowle), will be slightly larger than the 29-story, 705,000-square-foot tower planned in the eighties.

The state is now evaluating two towers proposed by Mortimer Zuckerman's Boston Properties, which gained custody of the last two Prudential sites. One has been designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill for the property where the Times Square Brewery now stands, on the south side of 42nd Street and Broadway; the other, next door to the New Amsterdam Theatre, by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. The designs have not yet been made public.

The Kohn Pedersen Fox tower could be as large as 892,000 square feet; the Burgee-Johnson tower intended for that spot was going to be roughly 858,000 square feet. The state requires nearly 18,000 square feet of advertising and retail signage on the KPF-designed tower, along with multiple setbacks and "dynamic juxtaposition of major building masses" and "façades that fit the glitzy character of Times Square."

The guidelines are supposed to minimize the impact made by these bulky buildings, and judging by 4 Times Square, the illusion works reasonably well. But the point is that the architects have to minimize the bulk because there's so much bulk to minimize. What happens when the crossroads of the world is finally ringed by these four huge -- albeit glitzy -- towers? When E-Walk and Madame Tussaud's open, along with 42nd Street's dozens of multiplex screens?

The picture I have in my head is the overbuilt streetscape of Hong Kong, where pedestrian gridlock is commonplace. I refused to believe, back in the eighties, that this project would ever be realized. I'm still incredulous. Okay, maybe one or two of these buildings are not so bad. But the whole oversize quartet, even with the shiny packaging, is going to be oppressive. Thanks to the advertising signs, Times Square will not be "darkened" (except, of course, in the daytime). But these towers still represent the transformation of the entertainment district into a denser, albeit wackier, version of midtown.