"The Center of the World: Playwrights Horizons and 42nd Street" by May Treuhaft-Ali

The newly-dubbed Times Square in 1905. The New York Times Building can be seen at the center of the image. From the Library of Congress. 

I.

In 1974, Playwrights Horizons lost its home. Located on 51st Street and Eighth Avenue, the building was a residential branch of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), which also hosted a dance school called the Clark Center for the Performing Arts on its second floor. Louise Roberts, director of the school, had one room that was too small for dance classes. In the summer of 1971, she had given this room to Bob Moss to produce workshops of new plays. It was in this building that Moss named his new-play series “Playwrights Horizons,” cultivated an audience, and presented 12 free performances a week. Moss had secured a grant of $22,000 from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) for Playwrights Horizons’ 1974/1975 season, but before this season could even begin, the YWCA was evicted from the building, and Playwrights Horizons with it. Moss suddenly found himself without a theater. 

In December of that year, after months of looking for a new venue all over the city with no luck, Moss received a call from Ellen Rudolph at NYSCA, saying that, since he hadn’t yet found a space, she intended to postpone his grant until the following year.

“No, no, no, can you wait five minutes?” Moss said into the phone.

To which she replied, “Don’t do something crazy.”

Moss hung up and walked to 42nd Street.

Despite the fact that 42nd Street was lined with vacant theaters, Moss had never considered it a viable location for Playwrights Horizons. The infamously seedy Times Square district had a reputation as the epicenter of crime in New York. Most of the elegant theater houses built in the 1910s and 1920s had fallen out of use by the 1950s and were now burlesque theaters or pornographic cinemas. Desperate to find a space in a hurry, Moss called the realtor (or in his words, the “slumlord”) who owned all the theaters on 42nd Street and asked to rent 422 West 42nd Street for six months. He then called Ellen Rudolph back and announced that he had a space. 

Broadway at night from Times Square, 1915. Published by the Detroit Publishing Co. From the Library of Congress.

Playwrights Horizons moved into 422 West 42nd Street on January 1, 1975 and opened its first show there on February 1. To Moss’s surprise, the theater’s new location didn’t deter his audience. As he stood at the door of his new building on opening night and greeted a stream of familiar faces, he remembers thinking: “Wait a minute, the only person that’s embarrassed about this block is you, Mr. Conservative. Nobody else seems to give a damn. Got prostitutes everywhere, people calling ‘Check it out.’ And the audience is coming through, they’re New Yorkers! We’re on 42nd Street, it’s the middle of New York City, which is for all intents and purposes the center of the world. We’ve got great transportation. Why don’t we fucking stay here?” The next day, he went to his astonished landlord and signed a five-year lease on the building.

It is odd for me to think of Moss cautiously walking down 42nd Street in December 1974, because this is the route I walked to my Literary Fellowship every day without a second thought — or at least, I did before the pandemic. As I made my way from the subway to my desk at Playwrights Horizons, I dodged between tourists and Elmos, but I didn’t fear for my safety. I have lived my whole life in New York City, but I was born in 1995, after local officials molded 42nd Street into the family-friendly tourist attraction it is today. As I walked past familiar logos from global franchises, the 42nd Street Moss describes contrasted starkly with my lived experience. In writing this essay, I was curious about how Playwrights Horizons’ origin story fits into the larger history of its surroundings. How did such a night-and-day transformation take place in the Times Square district? And what was Playwrights Horizons’ role in it? This is the story of how Playwrights Horizons and 42nd Street changed each other over time.

An aerial view of West 42nd Street in 1952. Photo by Angelo Rizzuto. From the Library of Congress. 

II.

The prominence of petty crime in Times Square predates Times Square itself. In the nineteenth century, when it was still known as Longacre Square, its nickname was Thieves’ Lair. Back then, the area was barren save for a few horse stables, and was considered well north of the city proper. In 1905, The New York Times established its new headquarters on the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Broadway, and the intersection was dubbed Times Square in its honor. That same year, the first subway line was built, and it traveled from City Hall to Grand Central to Times Square and north through the Upper West Side. 

Thanks to The New York Times and the subway, Times Square instantly became an attractive destination for New Yorkers and visitors alike. By 1910, the theater district, which had been slowly inching its way up Broadway from Madison Square Park, formed a cluster around 42nd Street. Restaurants and hotels opened up around the theaters, including gaudy lobster palaces where theater-goers could catch a late dinner and live cabaret performance after seeing a Broadway show. As the lobster palaces competed to offer the flashiest entertainment, many of their performances began to feature risqué dance numbers. Prohibition forced many lobster palaces to close in the 1920s, but some transformed into speakeasies and nightclubs on the side streets of Times Square. Many of these clubs were owned by mobsters who paid the police to turn a blind eye. 

A postcard of The New York Times building, circa 1905-1907. Published by J. Koehler. From the New York Public Library (The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection).

Not even the Great Depression or World War II could deter the nightlife of Times Square. In fact, Times Square was extremely popular among the countless soldiers who passed through New York during the war. The opulence of the area lent itself to sexual decadence. Times Square had been a hot spot for prostitution since the early 1900s — sex workers congregated here to pick up both New Yorkers and tourists, and tourists knew they could behave promiscuously here without anyone back home finding out — but, thanks to the high volume of soldiers partying in Times Square, prostitution skyrocketed in the area during World War II.

The advent of cars and televisions is responsible for Times Square’s downfall in the 1950s. Car culture prompted middle-class families to flock to the suburbs, emptying the city of its regular theater audiences and tax dollars. At the same time, television changed audiences’ relationship to theater-going. Compared with watching television, going to the theater was inconvenient and pricey, an occasional extravagance rather than a sustainable habit. Live theater had once been the go-to form of entertainment, and when film became popular, many Times Square theaters incorporated cinematic offerings into their programming. But these venues couldn’t compete with the television’s free, at-home entertainment, and dozens of them went out of business as a result. In the 1920s there were 70 to 80 Broadway theaters; by 1969, there were 36. The number of productions halved as well, and revivals became much more prevalent. Newly vacant theater venues were sometimes converted into offices or, more frequently, repurposed as pornographic cinemas and burlesque clubs.

It was during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s that the crime rate in Times Square exploded. Many viewed the intersection between Seventh Avenue and Broadway as a symbol for all of America’s social ills and moral flaws. Even so, plenty of cultural activity still flowed through the area. The annual ball drop on New Year’s Eve continued to happen each year, and Broadway saw countless hit musicals throughout these decades. Despite the fact that audiences had to walk past multiple porn theaters to reach any Broadway show, this era was a golden age for musical theater. The Theatre Development Fund opened the TKTS booth in 1973, and, in the late 1970s, John Portman of the Marriott franchise contacted Mayor Ed Koch about building a hotel on Broadway between 45th and 46th Streets. This hotel was deeply polarizing in the theater community, because its construction required the destruction of five beloved theaters. Still, many commercial producers supported the construction of the hotel, hoping it would improve the neighborhood and attract audiences to Broadway. This hotel, now the Marriott Marquis, is the most successful in the United States.

By the 1980s, 90% of people who walked through Times Square were adult men. In 1984 alone, there were 2,300 crimes on 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, 20% of which were violent crimes. In the mid-1980s, police inspector Ricard Mayronne was appointed to the area. Described by former colleague John Timoney as "a big tough guy, a cop's cop, and easily the most imposing police commander I've ever met," Mayronne played a major role in eliminating crime from Times Square. He invented new police tactics, and insisted that his precinct make arrests for low-level crimes like prostitution and drug dealing. Mayor Rudy Giuliani continued this trend by championing broken windows policing, the theory that police can minimize serious felonies by making frequent arrests for low-level crimes. Giuliani also offered tax abatements to big businesses who moved into the area, including Viacom and Morgan Stanley. Giuliani’s most pivotal deal, and his most surprising at the time, was with the Walt Disney Company.

In 1990, Mayor David Dinkins assembled New 42, an organization whose purpose was to wrest theaters from the sex industry and restore their status as respectable venues. When New 42 Chair Marian Heiskell and Disney CEO Michael Eisner met coincidentally on an airplane, Heiskell persuaded him to consider the New Amsterdam Theatre as a possible home for Disney musicals. After a successful New York run of Beauty and the Beast, which was performed in a rented venue, Disney was looking to purchase its own Broadway theater for future productions. The New Amsterdam, once home to the Ziegfeld Follies, had been out of use since 1937 and would cost $32 million to purchase and refurbish. Eisner negotiated a deal with Giuliani in April 1993: Disney would pay $8 million, and the city government would cover the other $24 million in the form of a low-interest loan. This deal was extraordinary for Disney in financial terms, but extremely risky for its reputation as a wholesome business. Eisner recalls expressing his concerns about the “adjacent nightlife” to Giuliani, and Giuliani responding, “Look me in the eye. They will be gone.” Disney signed a 49-year lease. 

Similarly to The New York Times almost 90 years prior, Disney’s entry into the neighborhood flipped its commercial appeal and opened the floodgates for other businesses to move in. Meanwhile, New 42 restored eight historic Broadway theaters, including the Victory Theater, which had functioned for decades as a burlesque theater. The New Victory opened as a theater for young audiences in 1995, and The Lion King opened in 1997, cementing Times Square’s new family-friendly image. The remarkable success of The Lion King motivated Ford Motor Company to buy and refurbish the Lyric and Apollo Theatres and combine them into the Ford Center for the Performing Arts. This theater opened in 1998 with Ragtime. Roundabout Theatre Company, with the support of American Airlines, renovated what was once the Selwyn Theatre and added rehearsal spaces to create the American Airlines Theatre. In 1997 alone, Broadway had 10.6 million audience members attending 38 shows. 

Times Square in 1996. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith. From the Library of Congress.

It is worth noting that non-profit theater companies paved the way for New 42’s work and for the entry of companies like Disney, Ford, and American Airlines into the area. Following Playwrights Horizons’ lead, in 1990, En Garde Arts presented Mac Wellman’s Crowbar at what is now the New Victory Theatre. Andre Gregory's Uncle Vanya took place at the New Amsterdam shortly thereafter. The success of non-profit productions on these abandoned stages demonstrated to large commercial entities that the Times Square district could be a safe, convenient, and even lucrative location for their theatrical ventures.

III.

Moss was ahead of his time. Sixteen years before New 42’s existence, with no governmental support or corporate funding, Moss stood in front of a vacant pornographic cinema at 422 West 42nd Street. The plumbing had been pulled out, and the wood had been pulled off the walls to make little fires to keep squatters warm. Moss took a do-it-yourself approach to renovating this theater: “I called up everybody I knew and unfortunately none of them were carpenters or plumbers or electricians. They were just artists. And I said, ‘You have to help me. You have to come down and help me build the theater.’ And armies of people showed up. And we built the theater. I mean, people just did it. Because it was a good cause, in a way.” It was January, and the building had no plumbing or heat. But, in just three weeks, Moss and his friends built a stage, put in electricity and plumbing, and made 422 West 42nd Street a functioning theater.

A postcard representing the Broadway theater district, 1913. From the New York Public Library. 

Revitalizing 42nd Street became an integral part of Moss’s mission as an artistic director. If a small group of inexperienced artists could refurbish a building in three weeks, he reasoned, then it should be feasible to restore all the theaters on 42nd Street with some funding and professional expertise. He visited the city’s prominent philanthropic organizations with a proposal to renovate these theaters and thus transform 42nd Street. At the time, his pitch sounded preposterous. “Not one of them believed me,” he remembers, “but they loved hearing it. And, by the way, they would give me a little tip for Playwrights Horizons.” In this way, Moss’s vision for 42nd Street became intertwined with the theater’s livelihood. 

One day, Moss was at his desk when he saw three men in suits pointing at his building. He ran downstairs and asked what was going on. They tried to dismiss him at first, but he was insistent. Finally, one of them explained that, in an effort to revive 42nd Street, they planned to tear down the block between Ninth and Tenth Avenue. Moss responded, “Don’t tear it down, I have a better idea.” This man was Fred Papert, founder of the non-profit 42nd Street Development Corporation. Moss gave him his pitch, and Papert was the first person to believe his idea might work.

Papert had made a name for himself in advertising. Most notably, he designed the ads for John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign and was Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s personal publicist. He then transitioned into a four-decade career in urban planning and preservation. With support from Onassis and the Ford Foundation, he led the 42nd Street Development Corporation in saving Grand Central from demolition and cleaning up Times Square. He urged the city to shut down Times Square’s biggest pornography shop, and he helped build new stables for the local precinct’s horses. He is credited with transforming the block on which Playwrights Horizons stands from a string of empty buildings to a vibrant row of theaters. Papert took Moss with him to the offices of the city’s major funders and decision-makers. Together, they would present their vision to reinvigorate West 42nd Street through theater. By working closely with such an influential figure, Moss was able to leave his mark on Playwrights Horizons’ environs. In turn, Papert gave Moss direct access to some of the most powerful people in the city, which bolstered the growth of his young theater company. Meanwhile, the building next to Playwrights Horizons became vacant in 1976. It had been a burlesque club, but the owners never paid their electric bill. According to Moss, Con Edison “came up to 42nd Street with giant scissors and cut the cable to the building, which effectively closed the burlesque.” Moss jumped at the chance to move into a superior building, and persuaded his board of trustees to move the company next door. Playwrights Horizons has been at 416 West 42nd Street ever since. 

Whelan's Drug Store, 44th Street and Eighth Avenue, Manhattan, 1936. Photo by Berenice Abbott. From the New York Public Library.

Across the street from Playwrights Horizons sat an empty apartment complex. Constructed in 1974 by a private real estate firm, Manhattan Plaza consisted of two 45-story residential towers, a row of townhouses, a parking garage, and an elevated courtyard. It was originally intended as luxury housing for middle-class and affluent families, but, when a severe recession interrupted its construction, the developers needed federal funding to finish the project. The only way to obtain federal funding was to repurpose the complex as subsidized housing for low-income families, but at the same time, the real estate firm did not want to thwart the city’s efforts to make the area appealing to big businesses. The proximity of Playwrights Horizons and Papert’s burgeoning Theater Row inspired the developers to convert Manhattan Plaza into artist housing. Artists met the financial criteria to move into subsidized housing, but would also elevate the neighborhood’s social prestige. Manhattan Plaza for the Performing Arts opened in 1977, and is perhaps the most tangible example of how Off-Broadway theaters played a role in shaping the new 42nd Street. In 1995, Papert proclaimed that “the naughty, bawdy Times Square is a thing of the past,” referencing, of course, the title track from the musical 42nd Street. And indeed it was. 

IV.

On the surface, the comeback of Times Square is one of New York’s greatest success stories. And yet, this narrative is linked to more sinister currents in the city’s history, such as white flight and housing inequality. City officials bemoaned that Times Square had fallen into disarray, without acknowledging that they didn’t regulate the sex industry or invest in the area for decades; they only did so when white families began to return to (and gentrify) New York City in the 1990s. Mayors Koch, Dinkins, and Giuliani redesigned Times Square with the intention of attracting big businesses and affluent tourists, not making the area more pleasant for those who already lived and worked there. For over a century, Times Square has been a garish symbol of American consumer culture, geared toward visitors rather than New Yorkers. But as urban historians Tom Meyers and Greg Young note on their podcast The Bowery Boys, the new Times Square feels “plastic” and “orchestrated.” Its density of big franchises has repeatedly pushed out the beloved local spots that used to add character to a sea of chain restaurants and tourist traps. The area demonstrates a top-down approach to culture rather than an organic, grassroots, bottom-up one. Furthermore, we now know that broken windows policing had profoundly damaging ramifications for urban communities of color, including mass incarceration, police brutality, and racist policies like “Stop and Frisk.” Papert worked to get the Times Square police precinct more resources; in doing so, did he enable officers like Mayronne to treat locals with undue harshness? Many businesses that employed and catered to the city’s elite took a not-in-my-backyard approach to neighbors whom they deemed unsavory. The New York Times, for example, defended the sex industry’s right to exist in its pages, but tacitly supported broken windows policing around its own headquarters.  

McGraw Hill Building, from 42nd Street and Ninth Avenue looking east, Manhattan, 1936. Photo by Berenice Abbott. From the New York Public Library.

The city also took an approach of displacing homelessness and poverty rather than remedying it. Before Playwrights Horizons rented 422 West 42nd Street, a number of homeless people lived within. Vulnerable individuals had to resort to vacant theaters for shelter when a brand new apartment complex with 1,689 empty units stood across the street. This staggering irony speaks to the complex web of socio-economic and political factors that make living and working in New York City financially precarious for so many, including artists. When Manhattan Plaza opened, 70% of its units went to artists and their families, 15% to the elderly, and 15% to those living in substandard housing nearby. The developers of Manhattan Plaza never really entertained the possibility of allotting more than 15% of units to housing-insecure families, because they worried that low-income residents would appear unpalatable to the businesses moving into Times Square. Artists, on the other hand, would generate work that attracted middle-class audiences to the area, and small businesses with them. In this way, developers and city officials strategically capitalized on artists’ dire need for housing and workspace in order to justify the expulsion of homeless people. In return for the space they received, artists were expected to reform the neighborhood, not for their own benefit, but for the benefit of their corporate neighbors in the new Times Square. Though these franchises never migrated west toward Ninth Avenue, their proximity informed how the city distributed resources to artists in Hell’s Kitchen, and on what terms.

The last time I walked down 42nd Street was on the morning of March 12, 2020, a few hours before Playwrights Horizons shut down its offices. Though I don’t know when I’ll walk this street again, I do know that I won’t look at it the same way when I do. The street is a palimpsest that conceals its numerous past identities. Over the course of the last century, it has changed drastically in some ways and remained strikingly consistent in others. The history of how Playwrights Horizons found a home on 42nd Street, and how it grew and evolved with the street itself, is a true New York story.

A Broadway theater marquee, circa 1920. Photo by Bain News Service. From the Library of Congress.