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This week the public will get its first look at the most spectacular fruit yet of the area's renaissance: the unveiling of the Walt Disney Co.'s $34 million restoration of the New Amsterdam theater. Originally built in 1903 and famously taken over by Florenz Ziegfeld 10 years later, it is, after its refurbishment, one of the grandest and most mind-bendingly ornate theaters in America, an eclectic melange of Art Nouveau and other turn-of-the-century ornamentation and a triumph of the restorer's art. Disney is hoping the New Amsterdam will be an economic triumph too, as home to a lucrative stream of wildly successful Disney stage shows. First up, in May, is a concert version of King David, a new musical by Alan Menken and Tim Rice.
The New Amsterdam--and more to the point, Disney's corporate presence and the vote of confidence it represents--is the anchor for an ambitious city and state plan to make over 42nd Street, long the area's most notorious thoroughfare. As the sleaziest strip in the sleaziest part of town, the stretch of 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues was from the late '60s until just a few years ago the ninth circle of Times Square. "You could buy anything you wanted, whether it was drugs or girls or boys or green cards or telephone cards. You really felt like you were walking through this hellish zone," says Cora Cahan, president of the New 42nd Street Inc., which is overseeing the restoration of seven of the strip's nine theaters. Back in 1978 more than twice as many street crimes were reported on the block as on any other block in the entire city. In 1984 the city- planning-commission chairman told New York magazine that 42nd "is the one street where the city has lost control."
Today the block is well on its way to becoming Manhattan's most chipper. On its east end a onetime porno palace--where Robert De Niro took Cybill Shepherd on an ill-fated date in Taxi Driver--is now a children's theater. Across the street, next to the New Amsterdam, is a big, bright Disney store--probably the only Disney store in the world that is just four doors away from an establishment that sells scary-looking swords and knives, boxing equipment and dusty copies of Bruce Lee videos. The latter retailer is one of two storefront businesses that remain from the street's previous incarnation. The other is a narrow little wedge of lunch counter; yellowed signs that read NO LOITERING and PLEASE PAY WHEN SERVED linger as warnings to a pre-urban renewal clientele.
The rest of the old establishments, largely porn emporiums and small shops selling cheap consumer goods, have been evicted. Gone too is the sick-sweet odor of mildew and disinfectant that used to permeate the block, a calling card for its unwholesome diversions. If all goes according to plan, their place will be taken by, among many other things, the Ford Center for the Performing Arts (a new megatheater for musicals combining two of the street's original stages), vast multiplex movie theaters and more tourist lures like Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum.