The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (31 page)

Thus, by the fall of 2003, when productions opened in Sydney and Amsterdam, there were ten versions of
The Lion King
playing around the world. The initial cost of the play had already been absorbed; the road productions only had to earn more than they spent each week. This they did, with a vengeance. Although a ticket in New York generally costs more than a ticket elsewhere, the New Amsterdam has fewer seats than most of the other theaters where
The Lion King
will play. In 119 weeks, according to Schumacher, the show grossed $125 million in New York and $147 million in Los Angeles.
Beauty and the Beast
may be idiotic rather than ideographic, but the same economics apply. At its height, in fact,
Beauty
had eleven shows going at once.

Schumacher’s ability to attract gifted writers and actors, and his own ambitions, make it unlikely that
Beauty and the Beast
will happen on his watch. But even
The Lion King
is not
Oklahoma!;
the language and characterization were stamped out in the Disney tool-and-die factory. Disney is itself the limiting factor in a Disney musical. What’s more, the company’s other current long-running Broadway hit,
Aida,
is considered neither as hackneyed as
Beauty
nor as inventive as
Lion King.
Perhaps that perfectly acceptable middle is where Disney will come to dwell. The projects closest to completion when I spoke to Schumacher were
Tarzan, The Little
Mermaid, Mary Poppins
(a collaboration with Cameron Mackintosh), and a medley of songs from Disney films. Might they not turn out to be much of a muchness?

Calculations of profit do not determine everything on Broadway—not by a long shot. People have been pouring money into difficult and unlikely shows since O’Neill’s first hit, Beyond the Horizon, in 1920. Broadway backers will continue to delude themselves about a show’s merits, or its potential popularity, until the end of time. But giant corporations like Disney or Clear Channel face issues of scale that necessarily change their calculations; investments are not worth making if they can yield only a modest profit. And the imperative of mass appeal sharply limits one’s options, in theater as in every other art form. In fact, the dimensions of the theater audience mark out the borders both of corporate pandering and of corporate aspiration. Clear Channel will probably never dumb down theater as it has radio, because the theater audience is too small, too adult, and too variegated to make that strategy worthwhile. On the other hand, neither Clear Channel nor Disney is likely to nudge theatergoers very far from their comfort zone, because there’s simply not enough money in discomfort. The one thing one can safely predict that both companies will do is to keep Broadway, and for that matter Cincinnati and Dallas, knee-deep in lavish musicals for many years to come. That is, in the world of global entertainment companies, a fairly benign outcome.

18.

THE DURSTS HAVE SOME VERY UNUSUAL PROPERTIES

AN ORTHODOX MARXIST HISTORIAN would say that the story of Times Square is not the story of sex, or of theater, or of changing mores, but of real estate. Times Square, that is, was forged by investors making judgments about the profits to be realized from various potential uses of real estate. Oscar Hammerstein built his Olympia Theatre on 45th Street because land there was cheap. A few years later, the Shuberts began amassing theaters in Times Square because the great mass of citizens arriving there through the new modes of transportation made entertainment the most valuable use to which local real estate could be put. The theaters were converted to movie houses as movies became a more profitable use of space than plays. Those movie houses, in turn, became “grinders,” and then porn houses, and the trinket shops along 42nd Street became massage parlors and peep shows, for the same reason. And today’s office tower, and retail-tainment complex, represents only the latest turn in the great evolutionary wheel of real estate usage. Who can guess what tomorrow holds?

And yet, until the new age of massive redevelopment, Times Square held very little appeal for the great clans that have dominated New York real estate for close to a century. The buildings were too small, and thus the stakes too low. What’s more, the old clans tend to be extremely conventional and painfully respectable, Donald Trump notwithstanding. The culture of Times Square was just too raffish for the Rudins and the Tishmans and the other titans of development. Times Square real estate has instead been controlled largely by theater families, including the Shuberts and the Nederlanders. The only real exception to that rule has been the one real estate family eccentric enough to feel at home in Times Square: the Dursts.

On one wall of the conference room in the Durst family headquarters, which is located in a nondescript office tower on Sixth Avenue and 44th Street, is a “Contract-Partnership” drawn up between Joseph Durst and one Hyman Rubin, and dated October 20, 1905. Like most of the other patriarchs of the real estate clans, Joseph Durst was a Jewish immigrant who began buying a building or two in the early years of the century. Joseph focused almost exclusively on commercial real estate in the booming neighborhoods of midtown Manhattan, abjuring his sons to stay away from rental properties. In the 1940s, Joseph anointed one of his sons, Seymour, as his successor.

Seymour Durst was probably the most far-seeing developer of his generation, and one of the wealthiest and most successful. He had two enormous gifts: he saw the potential of underdeveloped neighborhoods before others did, and he had the massive patience required to assemble plots one by one until he had a parcel large enough to build on. In the forties and fifties, Seymour built along Third Avenue, then a commercial wilderness but soon to be one of the city’s great axes of commercial development. During the ensuing decade, he shifted to Sixth Avenue in the low Forties, another neglected area. And in the late sixties, he began buying the property between his Sixth Avenue holdings and Broadway. Seymour was a gentlemanly figure, soft-spoken and even withdrawn; but he was also a gambler. Not a single new building had been built in Times Square since the early thirties, and the area was beginning to take on its famously pathological character; but in the midst of the boom market of the sixties, Seymour was convinced that Times Square’s moment had come.

Times Square was Seymour’s greatest achievement in the field of assemblage. In a real-world version of Monopoly, he swapped his East Side properties for the West Side properties of Sol Goldman, a famous real estate troglodyte who still considered Times Square a wasteland. Seymour traded a Third Avenue building for fifteen or sixteen properties in the area owned by the real estate arm of Lazard Frères. It is hard to imagine, today, just how unprepossessing most of these parcels were; the Goldman property, especially, consisted mostly of empty storefronts, junk shops, rundown hotels, and the like. One of the properties, on 47th Street, was the Luxor Baths, a decrepit local landmark where Jack Dempsey and Walter Winchell used to soak their carcasses. By 1975, it was being used as a whorehouse. Seymour first tried to evict the operators, but then, when he failed, inexplicably decided to sell them the place instead. The new owners began chopping up the old baths into cubicles; the Luxor was well on its way to becoming the largest, and perhaps best-appointed, brothel in the city, if not the country. At the time, Seymour was serving, with no particular distinction, on a clean-up-Times-Square body called the Mayor’s Office of Midtown Enforcement. Mayor Abraham Beame was so outraged at Seymour’s laissez-faire attitude toward Times Square’s image that he had him kicked off the committee.

And yet Seymour had a vision for Times Square—and not just a Third Avenue–type vision but a great and sweeping plan worthy of the great dreamers of the past. He planned to amass all the land from 42nd to 47th Streets, and from Sixth to Broadway, and then build a single complex, just as the Rockefellers had, half a century before, in the area between Fifth and Sixth Avenues a few blocks farther north. Seymour even called his proposal “Rockefeller Center South.” But for once, he was too far ahead of his time: when the real estate market collapsed in the mid-1970s, Seymour lost several of his properties to the banks and was forced to abandon his plans. One of the parcels he had to surrender was the site of the decrepit New Criterion Theatre, which then made its way back to the Moss family. Seymour did, however, hold on to most of his properties, and the Durst organization later built a headquarters for U.S. Trust on West 47th Street, not far from the site of the Luxor Baths.

The model for Rockefeller Center South now sits on top of filing cabinets in an office in the Durst Organization: eight or nine black glass skyscrapers in two columns. Seymour never had much interest in fine architecture, and plainly he was thinking along the same lines that George Klein would pursue a few years later, though the Luxor Baths episode suggests that he lacked something of Klein’s high seriousness. If he had had his way, Seymour would have turned Times Square into a western annex of the city’s expanding corporate culture. “Maybe,” says Douglas Durst, who has a parched version of his father’s famously dry wit, “it’s just as well it never happened.”

Seymour was a character, a gaunt and gray-haired figure who walked everywhere, cut his own hair, wore his clothes until they were threadbare, and generally lived like an anchorite. He was a kind of homespun philosopher who kept his pockets stuffed with folded-up papers upon which he had scribbled his thoughts on the great issues of the day, and which he would withdraw with a flourish as the conversation turned to the relevant topic. He sent an endless stream of letters to
The New York Times,
often on the subject of rent control, which he considered the root of all housing evils. Seymour often purchased tiny advertisements at the bottom of the front page—“bottom lines,” the family called them—in order to ensure that his views got the airing they deserved. Seymour could be extraordinarily creative in finding venues in which to ride his various hobbyhorses: in 1989 he mounted what he called the Debt Clock, on a building he owned just east of Times Square, in order to tick off the growing federal debt. He churned out immense “studies” and “reports” on housing problems that never saw the light of day, but toward the end of his life, in the mid-nineties, he found editorial fulfillment as the housing columnist of
Street News,
a newspaper distributed by the homeless.

Seymour knew the city, and perhaps even understood the city, as few men did. He had spent decades walking New York’s streets and studying its buildings and its history; he was a beguiling and encyclopedic source of New York lore. He had begun to collect books about New York in the 1960s, and the collection had swiftly turned into an all-consuming mania. In 1985, he moved out of a brownstone whose supports were about to collapse from the weight of his books, and into a nineteen-room mansion on East 61st Street. One room after another was incorporated into this ever-expanding, Borgesian library. There were books in the fridge and books in the bathroom. There were filing cabinets bulging with articles about New York he had clipped from the papers. Each room of the library was devoted to a theme, with a décor arranged by Seymour to evoke the subject: the Infrastructure Room, the Biography Room, the Press Room, the Fiction Room (which also served as the Duplicate Books Room). Seymour kept the rare books in his own room, which was across from the Times Square Room—the collection of
Playbill
s starting at the turn of the century, the books on theater, the nickelodeon with the nudie pictures, the posters for the live sex shows. Seymour devoted much of his life to amassing and cataloguing the collection; after his death, in 1995, it was moved to the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. It is now a matchless public resource, where the curious scholar may find
The
Cries of New York,
a children’s book from 1830 rendering the songs of street vendors as four-line poems, or Odell’s epic fifteen-volume
Annals of
the New York Stage,
detailing virtually every play mounted in New York up to 1894.

One of the curiosities of Seymour’s career is that it seems never to have occurred to him that his development plans, especially in Times Square, might be laying waste to the culture whose artifacts he had spent his life lovingly preserving. One has to wonder about the nature of this remote, scholarly, quietly calculating, sharp-trading man. As his daughter, Wendy Krieger, observes, “He never said, ‘I love New York.’ He said, ‘I have an interest in New York.’”

Seymour and his wife, Bernice, had four children. In 1950, when all of them were still quite young, Bernice jumped or fell to her death from the roof of the family house in Scarsdale, New York. Seymour never remarried, and he raised the children himself. He could be extremely charming, but in most settings he was cryptic and watchful, a sphinx in a world of backslapping bonhomie. His children absorbed a good deal of his social discomfort and his eccentricity. The oldest boy, Robert, grew up as a very confused rich kid in the sixties. He tried primal scream therapy; he studied with the Beatles’ guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Robert went to work for Seymour, quit, opened a health food store in Vermont, married, and ultimately returned to New York and to the family business. Robert had the classic family makeup in a more extreme form; he would later be described as “sullen” and “reluctant to enter into conversation.” In 1982, his wife, who allegedly had warned friends that he might do her harm, disappeared, and was never found. Robert remained with the family business until 1994, when Seymour, who had never chosen a successor as his father had with him, finally put Douglas, a younger brother, unequivocally in charge.

Robert then began to drift away into a life of wandering. He moved to Galveston, Texas, where his behavior became increasingly strange and perhaps psychotic. He posed as a mute woman whose name he lifted from a high school classmate. One journalistic account later described him as wearing “large-frame glasses that were completely covered with tape except for a small triangular opening over one lens.” In late September 2001, several bags containing a human torso and a set of limbs, very professionally severed, washed up in Galveston Bay. The body belonged to Morris Black, a drifter who had lived next door to Durst. Evidence pointed to Durst, who had disappeared. After a nationwide manhunt, he was picked up when he stole a chicken salad sandwich from a supermarket in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Amid intense publicity, excruciatingly painful for this retiring family, Robert Durst was indicted for murder. In the trial, held in the fall of 2003, Durst admitted the killing but pled self-defense. To the amazement of many court experts and observers, he was acquitted. However, the investigation into his wife’s disappearance twenty years earlier was reopened, and Durst remained under a very dark cloud.

Douglas, by contrast, is entirely sane, and yet one can see in him something of the same hesitancy, the same self-discomfort, that pathologically afflicted his older brother. He is a famously taciturn and private figure, uncomfortable in conversation, much given to pauses, which seem to begin in reflection and end in melancholy silence. Though unfailingly polite, like his father, he is prone to answer lengthy questions with a single word, often yes or no. He seems not to enjoy the company of his peers. He does not socialize, attend galas or, with a few exceptions, join the boards to which his money would give him access.

As a young man, Douglas had no intention of following his father into the family business. “I was in trouble in school, and I had problems dealing with authority,” he says. Douglas enrolled at Berkeley in 1962, at the very moment when the cultural revolution of the sixties was getting under way. By the time he graduated, he looked like Jerry Garcia, with a great curly beard; he planned to work as a developmental economist in the Third World. It is hard to imagine any profession that would have been further from his aspirations than real estate. Then Douglas got married and had children, and suddenly he found his horizons closing in. He agreed to work for his father, and made an utter hash of the building he was given to manage. And so he lit out for the territory: with his wife and baby daughter, Anita, he moved up to Newfoundland, where he hoped to make a new life in a setting where he felt more comfortable. But this second attempt to escape the family orbit ended as suddenly and ineffectually as the first. Douglas had a serious accident when a wood-fired water heater blew up; he was dramatically rescued by Seymour and flown back to a hospital in New York. “I decided that New York was the safest place for me to be,” Douglas says ruefully. And so he rejoined the family business, this time for good. It was, all in all, a rather sad story—a story of poor decisions, thwarted hopes, and a reluctant acceptance of an unavoidable destiny. It was Robert’s story, without the catastrophic trajectory.

Douglas ultimately carved out a life for himself, satisfying his counter-cultural impulses by buying a farm in upstate New York that ultimately became the largest organic farm in the state. By the eighties, he was very much Seymour’s partner. The Dursts had never built on their Times Square properties, and when the 42nd Street Development Project came along, they did everything they could to stifle it. Seymour had a longstanding philosophical objection to publicly subsidized and guided projects, and to the politicking that goes with them, though he and Douglas also had every reason to fear that the four heavily subsidized office towers George Klein proposed to build would swamp the market and thus depress the value of their own property in the neighborhood. And so, starting in 1988, when Klein looked as if he might be ready to build, Seymour, who was then head of something called the Real Estate Board of New York, regularly blistered the project in public as a shameless boondoggle, while the family mounted lawsuits against it and quietly funded a “grass-roots” campaign. In 1989, the Dursts even purchased long-term leases to the derelict theaters on 42nd Street and commissioned a plan designed to prove that the private marketplace could bring them back to life more effectively and cheaply than the city could. It was widely believed that their actual motive was to sell the properties back to the city in the condemnation proceedings, and thus to net a huge profit.