Before reading the street as it is, it is worth remembering what it took to get here. The 42nd Street Development Project ran across four mayors and two real estate cycles. Lynne Sagalyn’s Times Square Roulette is the account of it.
A human sinkhole, a civic disgrace, a place where no decent person would willingly go and where the only helpful thing would be to blow it all away.
I get off the bus from Detroit without a penny in my pocket. I walk up to the blood bank on 42nd Street, where I sell a pint of my blood… I’ve been in town less than an hour and I’m already in business.
Male turf. Sex shops, action movies, retail built around one appetite. The street was read nationally as the icon of urban distress, and the press and the film industry kept it that way.
Sagalyn’s point is that the redemption was assembled, not discovered. Condemnation, subsidy, negotiated deals, and a coalition that had to be held together for two decades while the market and the mayors turned over.
Dates are the standard public chronology of the 42nd Street Development Project and should be checked against Sagalyn before this is published.
Each view keeps the same 82 lots and changes only the question. Use the arrow keys to move between them.
Ranked by floor area that zoning already permits and nobody has built. Hover to find it on the map, click to fly there.
Every lot fronting the street, sorted by who owns it. The lots that are not private can change without anyone buying anything first.
Sagalyn lists the levers a mayor actually held in the Koch era. They still exist. This is each one set against the ground it can still reach on 42nd Street today.
Capacity figures are the unbuilt floor area on the lots each instrument can reach. A lot can be reachable by more than one, so these do not sum to the street total.
The headline figure came out of the zoning data before anyone checked what actually governs these lots. Here is what happened when someone did. This section stays on the page.
Every tax lot in NYC PLUTO whose centre falls within 125 feet of the 42nd Street centreline, plus any lot addressed on 42nd Street within 230 feet. 82 lots. The rule is mine, and section 06 says what that costs.
Pulled from OpenStreetMap rather than interpolated. Measured at 10,411 feet, 1.97 miles, from 12th Avenue to 1st Avenue.
The greater of the residential, commercial and community facility allowance, minus what is built, times lot area. This is a screening figure. Ninety per cent of it sits on lots where a special district or a landmark designation overrides the base rule.
Sidewalk width, truck volumes and bus reliability are observations, not yet data. Sidewalk polygons, DOT truck routes and MTA bus speeds would close that gap.