Course Description:  This will be an approximately 1¼ hour trip through the history of Times Square, New York. During its healthy decades of growth, Times Square drew people from around the world by featuring the best in live plays and musicals, excellent ethnic restaurants, movies, street entertainment and fun vibes. Its starry evolution and positive reputation caused it to be named “The Crossroads of the World”. But it began to decline around 1960. Its devolution turned it into a center for drugs and sexual crimes, seedy  bars, pornography, and many other illicit uses. People stopped coming to the theaters causing them to convert to low grade movie houses or to close completely. Workers became afraid to walk to, or from, their offices. Business declined noticeably and property taxes plummeted. How could this 13+ acre area in the center of Manhattan, which was too massive, and too compacted with offensive uses, ever be reversed? Private developers, even if they acted together, found this critical mass too much to touch. This class will tell the story of how it was done, and what has evolved.

Location: Pavilion

Dates/Times: Thursday Jan 30 from 11:00 am to 12:15 pm

Instructor: Martin E. Gold

Martin (Marty) Gold is a graduate of Cornell University, Harvard Law School, and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He served in the Koch administration as Director of Corporate Law for the City, supervising non-litigation lawyers and responsible for public/private development projects ranging from South Street Seaport to Times Square. He left government to become a founding real estate partner in a global law firm that now has 2300 lawyers. He spent 33 years at the firm during which time he became a fellow of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers (the highest honor in the field) and an adjunct professor in the Architecture School and the Law School at Columbia. He is the author of 20 articles and a book: Law and Social Change: A Study of Land Reform in Sri Lanka (foreword by Gunnar Myrdal). Marty lives in Manhattan with his wife and continues to teach at Columbia, work on his photography, and travel (50 states and 113 countries currently).