The Ithaca Journal from Ithaca, New York • 6

6 ITHACA JOURNAL Saturday, December 22, 1973 Times Saimre: Death Rumors True? "As depressing as 42nd Street is the whole area is god-dama exciting. It has true vitality and night life." Jacquelin T. Robertson, urban planner "What we want to do about Times Square is clean it up, shatter it to bits and rebuilt it." Robert Watt, president, the Broadway Association. of it too, the whole area is giddamn exciting. It has true vitality and night life." The lights are, of course.

Times Square. At the Minskoff you see them safely, at a distance, from behind glass. Few theatergoers stand around outside to admire the lights therese days. By 11 o'clock, the middle class has cleared out of the area, leaving it to the poor and the loiterers. The only way to get the right mix back to Times Square again, the planners say, is with the right sort of new buildings.

Well, new buildings are planned. But it will take a lot for both tem and Times Square to arise out of the adhes. For instance, there's the splashy new 56-story $150 million hotel that architect John Portman proposes to build on 45th Street with dramatic interior spaces and the kind of activities that have made his Peachtree Center in downtown Atlanta a tourist attraction in itself. Portman is having trouble raising funds for the building, but thanks to the status of another project, it is a little closer to realization than it was a few weeks ago. The project it depended on was the proposed $200 million New York Convention Center, which Mayor Lindsay pushed in the waning days of his administration.

The center, which is being designed by the high-style architects, Skidmore, Qwings Merrill, would include parks, tennis courts, ice skating rinks and restaurants on a Hudson River site between 44th and 47th Streets. Planner Robertson gives one of the arguments that caused the City Council and the Board of Estimate to approve initial funding for the project despite opposition from environmental and community groups: "Tourism is the major business of the city. Only through its growth is New York going to survive. Hotels, restaurants and entertainment are predicated on the fact that businessmen come here as a professional center, the way they always did to Paris." Economically, something certainly is missing. The four new buildings on Times Square are far from sparkling successes financially.

In fact, due to the glut of office space on the New York market, 1500 Broadway is only about 10 to 15 per cent rented. The most interesting building in the area, McGraw-Hill's green, art deco former headquarters at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue, has been for sale for more than a year. And far from needing new theaters, 19 of Broadway's 41 existing theaters were empty the last week in November. "The problem with urban desip," Robertson says, "is that once you start, it takes four or five years to do a building and another four or five years to see if it's working. So real results are 10 years down the line." I -r 'V? si i -4 A JO gZ I 'Modest Plan' for Times Square Tony Boyle, in wheelchair, is helped from the Washington County Court House Friday after being arraigned in the Yablonski family murders.

Murder Charges Denied by Boyle pern, a desiper for the office, tions of the new mayoral admin-calls the various plans the office istration, the courage and-or is working on a "modest pro- greed of real estate developers, posal." Eventually, it will be the health of the theater and the drawn together into a real pro- survival of the Office for Mid-posal for submission to the zon- town Planning, ing board, as "something we In the meantime, Times Squre will hope the new mayor will be limps along with a potpourri of sympathetic with," says Wil- stopgap measures and a few liam Bardel, director of the of- significant improvements to the Calder. However, planners say that building is in a "vulnerable position." "It (Times Square) is a very rundown area," says John Port-man, the Atlanta architect-developer who proposes to build a $150 million hotel at 45th Street and Broadway that could become the star attraction in the area. "It needs a totally different approach. Get rid of cars, get some open spaces for people. None of the buildings are worth saving." The brochure introducing Portman's plans for "a great new Western International Hotel," calls Times Square "the best-known address in the world." But Portman thinks the ice, existing landscape.

There is the Allied Chemical Tower, sold recently to developer Alex Parker, who plans to turn it into "Expo: America," an exposition center that will cost $12 million (including purchase price) and benefit from the services of psychedelic commercial artist Peter Max. At the moment, Mayor-elect Abraham Beame is inclined to look kindly on Midtown Plan-ning's past efforts. "I think they've done good work, and I have a favorable opinion of them," he says. Here are some of the ideas in the upcoming "modest In other planning office stop- area is tar trom what its Since Broadway and Sev- cracked up to be. "I think enth Avenue come together in a aP 'Project is the Times Square Ticket tenter, a mobile con bottleneck at 43rd Street, traffic from testifying before a federal pand jury investigating alleged UMW financial irrepla-rities.

Boyle attempted suicide with a drug overdose after the initial murder charges were filed. Set New Stamp GENEVA. N.Y.(AP)-A commemorative first day of issue stamp will be offered here Jan. 23 in honor of the 125th anniversary of Elizabeth Black-well's graduation from Geneva College as America's first woman doctor. Other activities scheduled for Jan.

23 include presentation of the 18th Elizabeth blackwell award to Dr. Frances Harding, past president of the American Women's Medical Association. The presentation is scheduled at Hobart and William Smith colleges, the institutions from Geneva College is descended. Flip Lists Guests Anthony Newley, Jack Klugman, Roscoe Lee Browne and comedian Franklin. A jaye are pests on the Thursday, colorcast of NBC-TV's "The Flip Wilson Show" (8-9 p.m.).

WASHINGTON, Pa. (AP)-Deposed United Mine Workers President W.A. "Tony" Boyle pleaded innocent Friday to murder charges powing out of the 1969 Yablonski family killings. Boyle was arraigned on the charges before Washington County Judge Charles G. Sweet, who set Jan.

28 as the earliest possible trial date. The defendant, ashen-faced and clad in peen pajamas, slippers and a blue robe, listened silently from a wheelchair. Immediately afterward, U.S. marshals drove Boyle back to Pittsburgh, where a government-chartered plane was to take him to Springfield, Mo. Boyle was to begin serving a three-year sentence at the federal corrections facility in Springfield on a conviction of misusing union money in an unrelated case.

If convicted of murder in the Yablonski slay-ings, he could face life in prison. The Yablonskis Joseph 59, an outspoken Boyle foe; his wife Margaret, 57; and their 25-year-old daughter Charlotte were shot to death nearly four years ago to the day in Clarks-ville, 20 miles southeast of here. The slayings occurred Dec. 31, 1969, just three weeks after Yablonski lost to Boyle in a bitter election for the UMW's presidency. Boyle, 72, was charged with murder in the case three months ago on a government-claim that he ordered Yab-lonski's death to prevent him GNS Special By Amei wallach Newsday NEW YORK Times Square: Pimp heaven; porno haven.

Heart of the theater; mecca of Pop. Close to 40 blocks of the gaudiest, grandest, filthiest, most crime-infested playland in the country. For years, the rumors of its death have been abroad in the land. "I've heard about the decline and fall of Times Square all my life," says Vincent Sardi, of Sardi's Restaurant. "The only thing that's changed is the character of the outcry.

It's like the difference between a flea circus and burlesque." The death rumors draw their strength from two malignancies shared to a lesser degree by the rest of the country: illicit sex and violence. But in Times Square it's different. Bigger. Like everything else about Times Square. It is Thursday, Sept.

20. Louis Robbins is leaving the textile manufacturing company that he formed 35 years ago and still visits frequently, even though he has turned it over to his sons, now that he is 76. But there is someone waiting for him in the elevator of the building at 40th Street and Seventh Avenue, and by the time Robbins reaches the ground floor, he is dying from multiple stab wounds. Robbery was the motive, police say. There was no arrest.

In the first 11 months of the year there were 48 murders in the area and 11 arrests. "Every city has an area that's a center for criminal activity," says a spokesman for a company that made good its escape from the neighborhood a year ago. "It's better to have it contained in one area, so you know where it is." Many, however, are optimistic. The reason is the crime statistics that Mayor Lindsay's office has been releasing ever since he formed the Times Square Law Enforcement Coordinating Committee and two super police precincts to pour patrolmen into Midtown in a concentrated drive on crime. The drive includes camera surveillance in Times Square itself and periodic sweeps of patrolmen through office buildings in the neighborhood.

According to the latest figures, covering the first 11 months of the year, 13 of 17 "massage parlors" (which also go under the names of rap, yoga and sensitivity studios now that massage parlors have been declared illegal) have been cleaned up, but six new ones have also cropped up. Thirteen out of 14 prostitution hotels have been rehabilitated, but there are three new ones; the number of pornographic bookstores and peepshows has increased from seven to 21, and instead of 32 adult movies, there are now 33. However, there were 3,758 arrests of all types since the beginning of the year, compared with 3,120 for the same period last year. The upstanding business inhabitants of the area say the change is already happening. "It takes time to stop the downward trend," Sardi says.

"Most of the things Lindsay talked about eight years ago are beginning to come to fruition now. The downward trend stopped two years ago. A new one is just started with buildings coming in and plans for a convention center. There's no doubt about it; it's going up." However, words of upstanding businessmen frequently have to be taken with a grain of salt these days. Fred Carcone stays behind the counter in his Playland at 47th Street, where he has done business since 1945.

"Oh, yes, it's changed," he says. "You used to get lots of different kinds of people. Today they're all hippies or out of Harlem. Some of them are very hard to get along with. But it's improved in the past few months.

There are a lot more cops on the street." But it's not just more police that is the real hope for the area. Itis, as Sardi says, more buildings. "What we want to do about Times Square is clean it up, shatter it to bits and rebuild it," says Robert Watt, president of the Broadway Association. The architects, designers and lawyers in the Mayor's Office of Midtown Plannning and Development don't wat the new and better Times Square to be Howard Johnson's. They don't want another sterile Sixth Avenue.

They want flashing lights, soaring spaces, tiny shops, outdoor cafes, browsing places and tourist centers. Their office smack in the middle of 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues, one of the sleaziest blocks in the whole area. It is also one of the most vital. It is 3:55 on a gray fall afternoon. A crowd mostly male and mostly black has gathered at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street to watch one of those imprompty street entertainments that Times Square does best.

In the center of the crowd, two men one very young and very handsome, wearing an afro and a University of Hawaii T-shirt; the other older, shabbier, closer cropped in flowered black, goatee and beads of sweat are doing improbable things with a basketball. They roll it up arms, down backsides, flick and jostle and bounce it, all the time keeping up a running line of patter to the appreciative laughter of the crowd. The cap at their feet fills up quickly with coins. Most of the controversy about what to do about Times Square centers on just this problem: How to retain of off-the-cuff vitality of the street and still get rid of the filth and the terror. "As depressing as 42nd Street is," says planner Jaquelin T.

Robertson, "and in many ways it is the resting place for the flotsam of the city despite that, or maybe because reopie are still hung up on the goddamn corny image of what's there on Times Square, and yet Times Square is horrible. There's not one thing great about it. JOHN Portman, architect By AMEIWALLACH Newsday NEW YORK Times Square has always been a land of make-believe. At the moment the make-believe is built on somewhat squalid dreams. But urban planners, real estate developers and the businessmen in the area are hoping that the government funding and free enterprise will magically transform Times Square from a bizaare slum into the next great area of development in the city.

City approval of initial funding for a new convention center to rise above the banks of the Hudson River has lately given some hope of the dream coming true. It's still only a dream, but the planners already know what they'd like the area to look like. In large part it depends on whether the $200 million New York Convention Center, instead of becoming the environmentally unsound white elephant its detractors claim it will be, ac-tuall does come to the economic aid of Times Square and the city with the 20,000 jobs and $315 million in new business that Mayor LKINDSAY is staking the prestige of the last days of his term on. But suppose it all happens. What would Times Square be like then? You probably wouldn't recognize it.

If all the current plans go through, hardly any building now standing will remain along the main drag of Seventh Avenue and Broadway between 40th and 50th Streets. The exceptions would be the Allied Chemical To wee (once the Times tower, after which Times Square was named) stripped to the skin and renovated in 1963, and three new buildings: the Minskoff, the Uris and 1500 Brodway. The only other buildings with a chance for survival are a handful of old side-street theaters, including the Lyceum, which may get historic landmark status, and possibly the art deco McGraw-Hill building, with its bkg green towers at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue. The neighborhood does have one other interesting structure, the I. Miller building at 46th Street and Seventh Avenue.

On the facade are busts of famous actresses carved by the father of modern sculptor Alexander Times square should be more than signboards and flashing lights," he says. "There should be things to do the way there are in (Copenhagen's) Tivoli Gardens, not just signboards and people looking at them. People are still hung up with the goddamn corny image of what's there, and yet Times Square is horrible. There's not one thing peat about it." So this hotel will be a building that relies on dramatic spaces, soaring heights, hanging-garden balconies, glass-enclosed elevators, multilevel ballrooms and street-level cafes for excitement. There will be shops, restaurants, a new theater, seven cocktail lounges, a lobby atrium and staggered levels of space interspersed with skylights.

It will, in Portman's words, be "multidimensional, not one-dimensional. Not skin deep." He comes down hard on his arpment, because it is central in any consideration of the rebuilding of Times Square. The planners and architects in the Mayor's Office of Midtown Planning, who are trying to get through zoning replations that will help them steer the area in the direction they want it to go, are sure of one thing. They do not want Times Square to become another bloodless glass -and steel wonder, like Park Avenue and Sixth Avenue, could be diverted off Broadway to Seventh at about 48th Street, opening up a plaza that could in fact be turned into a Times "Square." At the northern end of the new plaza, which would stretch from 45th to 48th Streets, there would be a major tourist center, the way there is most European cities, topped by a three-dimensional tower for lights and signs. At present in that site is a dilapidated two-story building that houses a Castro convertible showroom and is topped by what at night looks like 15-story tower of light, but in the daytime turns out to be a cat's cradle of billboards, Facilities now in trailers, including a police booth, an armed forces recruiting station and the cut-rate ticket center, would move under one roof, possibly the tourist center.

Buildings would have to have pound floor shops, not banks, that sell the kinds of things tourists and audiences like to buy, and large signs, lights and advertising billboards on their facades. Developers would be encouraged, if not required, to replace any theaters they tear down with new ones in their new buildings. Some sort of order might be struction that has received two desip awards and sells half-price theater tickets. Studies of those who stand in line for the half-price tickets indicate that they are about nine years younger than the average theater goer and tend to be students or teachers who never went to the theater before. They seem to be, in fact, a totally new audience.

On 42nd Street, Grants, a bar that had been, in the words of Midtown Planning's Bardel, "a center for intense criminal activity," is being replaced by a Kentucky Fried Chicken shop, with a national image to maintain. No other plans are being made for the uplift of 52nd Street itself. That's where all the cheap movie houses are, both porno and legit, and the theory is that people need a place to see a $1.25 double feature somewhere, and anyway if everything else improves, 42nd Street will, too. If it improves? It already has a little. But the big, knock 'em down improvements depend on solmuch like Portman's financing and the convention center's success and are so fraught with danger.

Bardel and his office has a problem on their hands, and they know it. "Times Square always has been a place with phony, gimmicky things as well as shiny ones," Bardel says. "How do you go about making it a safe, attractive environment and at the same time not sterilize (SUB GCQCZE0D Give a long lasting Poinsettia Plant imposed on the sips and lights. Earlybird Farms jg 806ElmiraRd. Open Daily 9 to 5 if.

which turns intl glittering ghost The office has approached light towns after 5 p.m. sculptor Gyorgy Kepesh to draw They want to find a way to up some kind of lighting desip, make it into an updated version which would retain the cur-of the Regards to Broadway rently exciting anarchy and also Great White Way it was in its add something else for inst-prime. And they think big bill- ance, at one point in the eve-boards and flashing lights are ning, all the lights on might be part of the answer. red, then blue, then yellow. Those flashy surfaces are an Whether these proposals be- important part of the Office of come reality depends on cur- Midtown Planning's future pro- rently incalculable forces the posals for the area.

Ken Hal- economic climate, the predilec- immamaHSE AS ON' GREETING booooooooouoooa -Mi bi THOUSANDS OF CASES ALREADY SOLD PAC27V (SB.UB from ft BURRIS PLUMBING HEATING AMBITION '63 to FRUSTRATION '73 Ten years is a long time a long time from a storage garage and a- one man operation to a group of remodeled buildings, to a crew of 17 at our zenith, ir 12 or so now. Yes, one would think this is a time for us to rejoice after ten long 8 hard years but how does one rejoice when each new day brings 8 another crisis, another letter with price increases and new material delays. When long-standing, good-paying accounts must be stalled off day after day, week after week with bonafide honest excuses. We feel so helpless and so ridiculous in the present turmoil, we honestly don't know where to turn or where the road leads. Many of you have been faithful customers and friends, with many new customers added each year.

We wish to and will try to deliver the same cheerful and prompt service as in the past, yet with every passing month it becomes more difficult to deliver on time. Where will it all end? Why are we all in this mess? Can it all be devaluation? Can it all be Arab oil? Can it all be Watergate? What the answers are we don't know. All we do know is that we come to work 8 every day as we have for the past ten years and try to do the best we can. There have been rough days before but nothing to compare with the frustration we face today. So forgive us if there are no cartoon picture Christmas cards as in previous years: or dancing in the street for our tenth I am sure you understand.

Let us all hope and pray at this Holiday Season that our nation leaders find the answer and if this group of leaders can not, then we must find a new group of leaders that can lift us out of I this slump and set us back on the road again. To all our friends we wish to thank you all for your patience and understanding, past and future patronage, and may you and your families enjoy a Healthy Happy Holiday. Thank You. 86 proof 6 yrs. Many Bourbon lovers are amazed at the smoothness and good balance of this fine 6 year old Bourbon.

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