TOURO TIMES SQUARE

By SERGEY KADINSKY
Forgotten NY correspondent

In Manhattan, open space is nearly nonexistent, with the sky as its frontier for growth. Universities on this island with vertical campuses include CUNY’s Baruch and Hunter colleges, and the towers of NYU and Pace University, among others. Touro University is no stranger to classrooms inside high-rises. It was founded by Dr. Bernard Lander in 1970, with its first class and library established at the old Yale Club at 30 W. 44th Street, to the east of Times Square. Since then, the college has grown exponentially and its main offices moved around Manhattan, as it opened campuses in Brooklyn, Queens, and beyond, becoming a global university.

In 2022, Touro secured a lease at 3 Times Square, the Thomson Reuters Building, an ideal spot for classes as it stands above a transportation hub and is close to many workplaces. I recently attended a faculty conference at this tower and used the opportunity to document the cityscape from this vertical campus.

Looking south, the Candler Building dominates the view. Designed in the Spanish Renaissance style in 1912, it was named for Coca-Cola executive Asa Griggs Candler. There is another Candler Building with a similar design in Atlanta, the company’s birthplace, and another one in Kansas City. In the first two decades of this century, the former theater on the street level hosted a 17,500 square-foot McDonald’s fast food restaurant, its largest in the city.

To the northwest, the Hudson River view is blocked by the long-troubled Carter Hotel with the post-millennial Westin New York tower behind it. Across the street is the historic 229 W. 43rd Street, the former office of the New York Times and later Yahoo! During my visit, it was unfortunately clad in scaffolding. As a designated landmark, it will always stand here even as the neighborhood continues to change.

Looking east, there’s hardly anything historic to see from my vantage point but on the street level one can peek into the Casablanca Hotel, the former Woodstock Hotel that’s now a senior center, and The Town Hall with its long history of cultural and political luminaries on stage. Undressed from its usual cover of billboards is One Times Square, the building that gave this neighborhood its name. This is where the ball drops to mark the new year, a tradition that began in 1907. Hardly worthy of Forgotten-NY as the entire world watches it followed by the voices of Frank Sinatra, Satchmo, and John Lennon.

Returning to the west view, there’s a rooftop sculpture of a boy inside a nest with wings. It can’t be seen from the street and was likely designed for the viewing pleasure of office workers, reminiscent of the rooftop display at 77 Water Street in the Financial District. This boy is here temporarily, promoting the musical adaptation of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child at the Lyric Theatre.

Looking north from the seventh floor, the view is dwarfed by the historic Paramount Building and One Astor Plaza. The former was built as a “temple of entertainment,” whose marquee introduced Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley to crowds of screaming girls. In this century, it hosts the very touristy Hard Rock Cafe and Bubba Gump Shrimp. My labor union has its office inside this tower, giving me a good reason to see its lobby, but I’ve never made it to the clocktower. The latter replaced the very beautiful Hotel Astor in 1967. If the design appears uninspiring, it’s the work of architect Der Scutt, who also built the Trump Tower on the site of Bonwit Teller.

A closer look at the Paramount building shows a device planted atop a lamppost. Is it for security, monitoring air quality? Leave your answer in the comments.

[Likely cell phone relay — Ed.]

Times Square is a visual feast of neon, LED, and lightbulbs advertising at the crossroads of the world. With so many distractions for students and faculty, it made sense to have the interiors with few decorations but for a portrait of Touro’s founder. One perk of an office in Times Square is the view on New Year’s Eve, when crowds of thousands freeze outside to see the ball drop.

Before my return home, I stopped by a bookshelf that pays tribute to Lander and his friend Mark Hasten, Touro’s Chairman of the Board. His life ought to be in movies, or at least on Wikipedia. When his Polish village was annexed by the Soviets in 1939, he was deported to Kazakhstan. He then joined the Red Army as an engineer, in which his unit liberated a death camp. After World War Two, he fled to British Palestine to fight for Jewish independence. In 1953, he immigrated to Indiana where he served as Chief Design Engineer for Corporate Engineering at General Mills. He kept kosher. I used to tell my students that when they purchased fake bacon chips invented by Hasten, they were supporting Touro University.

With so much wall space in these hallways, perhaps they could host images of what stood here before Touro’s main campus. On the 43rd Street side, Strand Hotel hosted tourists and Republic Restaurant offered chop suey, a made up term describing Americanized Chinese food. The term has become as antiquated as luncheonette, you rarely see such words on today’s storefronts. The Seventh Avenue first floor of this Republic Restaurant hosted a Child’s Restaurant and later a pinball arcade during the seedy 1980s, as seen in this documentary video.

Exiting Touro at the corner of 43rd street, I walked one block down past Thomson Reuters and noticed the rounded corner hosting Chase Bank. When the firm Fox Fowle designed this tower, it had to demolish the Rialto Theater. Originally built in 1916, it received an art deco makeover in 1935 but then descended into pornography by the 1970s. The city sought to demolish Rialto as part of the Times Square cleanup.

The pointed windows and striped brickwork is Fox Fowle’s tribute to Rialto Theatre’s facade that was gone by 1998. Rialto’s history is described in detail at the Marabella family’s history blog.

A closeup of the brickwork reveals the year when this photograph was taken. In 1940, the Three Stooges starred in You Nazty Spy, a film that satirized Hitler’s dictatorship. In the same year, Charlie Chaplin produced and starred in The Great Dictator. But most Americans at the time were isolationist, in no mood to stop fascism and the holocaust, until this country was drawn into the war by the bombing of Pearl Harbor a year later. The top billing here was Hell’s Angels, a 1930 epic film about World War One starring Jean Harlow. It was about two fighter pilots fighting over a blond bombshell. Tragically, the actress died of an illness at age 26. Her look inspired Marilyn Monroe, who appeared in the following generation. If you want to have a piece of the Rialto’s bricks, you can order them at Olde Good Things, which also has relics from Brooklyn’s Grand Prospect Hall, among other places.

The city first proposed redeveloping this property in 1981 and many prominent architects submitted their designs for the northwest corner of Seventh Avenue and Broadway. Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s design sought uniformity for this crossroads with a postmodern design reminiscent of Worldwide Plaza and the AT&T Tower.

[Editor’s note: I hated the old dangerous, porno-ridden Times Square, but we avoided a mess when this vaportechture was never built]

Civic activists argued that Johnson and Burgee’s design had no character, which for Times Square meant bright lights and diversity of styles. The 1993 sketch by architect Robert AM Stern, Paul Whalen and graphic designer Tibor Kalman envisioned the Rialto surviving in a revitalized Times Square. Fuji film, MTV, a record shop, Seinfeld and Schwarzenegger, all of them symbolic of that decade.

Prior to the Rialto, this corner hosted Hammerstein’s Victoria Theater from 1899 to 1915. It was one of many entertainment venues that had a rooftop garden had a rooftop garden, an amenity that is popular again in this century. Prior to its glory, this crossroads was known as Long Acre Square, a district of horse stables as seen on this 1857 map. At this point, I descended into the subway for my long commute home. The underground history of Times Square is documented in numerous essays by Kevin. This is where his Forgotten-NY story began back in 1998.

My work as a historian also began here. In high school, I stood in the crowds during MTV’s Total Request Live, while sampling music across the street at the Virgin Megastore. I paid my way through college as a licensed and unionized guide atop Gray Line double-decker buses, entertaining tourists when I wasn’t in class. I also attended CUNY’s Newmark School a couple of blocks south of Times Square while interning at the Daily News, my father’s newspaper of choice. Times Square may appear touristy, but for Kevin and me, it is a defining element of our lives as New Yorkers.

You can learn more about the history around Times Square by visiting each of the hyperlinks posted in the essay above.

Sergey Kadinsky is the author of Hidden Waters of New York City: A History and Guide to 101 Forgotten Lakes, Ponds, Creeks, and Streams in the Five Boroughs (2016, Countryman Press), adjunct history professor at Touro University and the webmaster of Hidden Waters Blog. 

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11/17/24