Brendan Sexton remembers what Times Square used to be like, when all the cinemas on 42nd Street were showing X-rated movies like Deep Throat, starring Linda Lovelace, and Broadway theatregoers were so terrified of being mugged that their feet barely touched the sidewalk between limo and foyer.
Sexton, whose grandfather came from Co Wexford, is president of the Times Square BID (Business Improvement District) and has overseen a remarkable change in the area's fortunes. The pennants on the streetlamps say it all: "Times Square - there's nothing square about it." Sexton wants to keep it that way.
Earlier this summer, he met a delegation from the Dublin City Centre Business Association, which sees BIDs as a vehicle to turn O'Connell Street around. Now, with the backing of Dublin Corporation, legislation is being drafted to provide a framework for introducing the concept here.
Gone are the dark days when 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues - "The Deuce", as it's known - was infested by muggers, pickpockets, heroin dealers and prostitutes. Though some critics say it's been "sanitised", the regeneration of 42nd Street, and of the whole Times Square area, has become an urban legend.
Sexton recalls watching "the cops and robbers chasing each other up and down the street" from the BID's eighth-floor office at 1560 Broadway eight years ago. "Sure, Times Square was sleazy, but what was worse was that it was dirty, dangerous, decrepit and increasingly derelict, with more and more vacancies as businesses failed," he says.
A "death spiral", as he calls it, had set in. "I lost count of the number of weapons stores in the area selling knives, brass knuckles and switchblades. They were all over the place. They created such a critical mass that they drove other businesses out, transforming a neighbourhood that was seedy with rough edges into a disaster zone."
It wasn't so much the seediness of Times Square that was killing it off as the drugs and crime. "On the most famous and busiest block of The Deuce, it was monstrous. In the mid-1980s, we were having seven or eight felonies a day - assault, battery, grand larceny, armed robbery and felonious drug sales. It was out of control," Sexton says.
"There were whole New York City neighbourhoods that didn't even have seven or eight felonies a month at the time. But in the 1970s, we used to have one or two homicides a month and the whole perception of the area was that it had become unsafe. Now, for three years in a row, we've had zero homicides, and just one the previous year."
At the height of the crimewave, Broadway even lost some of its theatres. Restaurants in the area were also doing badly because people would arrive just before a show and leave immediately afterwards. Sexton says the only "growth area" in terms of customers were criminal elements. That, in itself, developed "a self-reinforcing dynamic".
Some 20 years ago, the State of New York announced that it was going to "save" 42nd Street. "The first plan was dreadful, a whole lot of Philip Johnson glass curtain-wall stuff that looked like Sixth Avenue," Sexton recalls. "But the truth was that nobody comes to New York City to visit Sixth Avenue, whereas everyone wants to see Times Square."
For 10 years, the effect of the state's plan was to make things even worse.
"There were more vacancies and dereliction along The Deuce because nobody would invest there," says Sexton. "The uncertainty even pushed out theatrical suppliers, costumiers, film-makers and others. It caused nothing but further abandonment."
Eventually, the City of New York stepped in by offering tax incentives to the Marriott hotel group to build a 1,600-bedroom hotel on Broadway and 45th Street. And though it is an ugly, brutalist pile, it proved to be immensely successful, with an 85 per cent occupancy ratio and the highest profit levels of any of the group's 1,700 hotels.
What made the difference, according to Sexton, was that the Marriott could offer six Broadway theatres within 100 feet of its front door and 16 theatres within 400 feet. The fact that it was "making eight dollars a minute" woke up other investors to the prospect that they, too, could make loads of money by riding piggyback on the performing arts.
Now, he says, the Times Square BID - which stretches from 40th Street to 53rd Street and from Sixth Avenue to Eighth Avenue - has a new or refurbished hotel opening every six months or so, such is the power of theatre as an economic engine.
"Legally, there is no such thing as Times Square, except for the subway station. It is whatever we say it is - a psychological or social definition as much as a geographic one," says Sexton. His office overlooks little-known Duffy Square, where there is a long line of people queuing for discount tickets at the little white booth on Broadway.
Much as New York's outgoing Republican mayor, Rudy Giuliani, cast himself as the hero of a titanic struggle against crime and sleaze, Sexton says a lot of the credit for the turnaround in Times Square must go to the business community which "got fed up waiting for things to happen and decided to do something for themselves".
Setting up a BID seemed to offer the best prospect. The idea had been tried out elsewhere in the US and even in New York City, on a stretch of 14th Street. But trying it out in Times Square was also a gamble, as BIDs have to be established by agreement, though participation becomes compulsory later on.
"You have to run what amounts to a political campaign, going around door to door, having lunches, talking to all the business people in the area to persuade them to sign up," Sexton says. He agrees it's like having a referendum, although, in the case of a BID, "you're getting a programme and agreeing to pay for it".
The Times Square BID organisers needed to get 60 per cent of the local business community to establish it on a legal footing; they got 84 per cent. Next January, the BID will mark its first 10 years, strengthened by a recent renewal of its mandate by over 86 per cent of the 399 property owners and occupiers in its multi-block functional area.
They are all still contributing a quarter of 1 per cent of rateable valuation to support its activities - the big, ugly Marriott's contribution would be around $200,000 a year - and know they're getting value for money. Because the BID's annual revenue of $5.5 million, plus $2 million in sponsorship for special events, is being invested well.
Of its 120 employees, about 100 are on the streets every day, half of them on "sanitation duties" (cleaning, sweeping, emptying litter bins, removing grafitti, and so on) and the other half working as unarmed "public safety officers" in recognisable uniforms, liaising with the police by radio and simply providing a reassuring presence. Crime in the area has dropped by 60 per cent over the past eight years. "We've had a little bump in the last couple of quarters, when there's been a small increase in total crime," Sexton concedes. "But this has been driven entirely by a larger increase in grand larcenies - laptops taken from offices, or hotel room thefts."
However, crimes against the person - assaults, muggings - have "virtually disappeared", he says. "I don't want to tempt fate, but when people talk to me about Times Square, its problems and its future, whether they're visitors or New Yorkers, crime doesn't come up in conversation. It's no longer even mentioned as an issue."
With an estimated 1.5 million people visiting the area every day - up to 10,000 per hour on the busiest blocks - congestion on the sidewalks is now a more serious concern. The place has become so popular that it's a victim of its own success.
The sidewalks, however, are noticeably cleaner as a result of the BID's relentless efforts. Property values in the area have soared, generating a boom in the construction of prestige office-blocks, hotels and other facilities. As a result, rateable valuations have shot up by 47 per cent over the past two years and should show a further increase after the next assessment. Confidence in Times Square has clearly been restored.
"What BIDs are able to do is to devote an intense effort to a small place that the city itself could never afford," Sexton says. "It's a way of localising much of the functions of government and concentrating your community effort. And in that respect, I think it speaks to something very important - the idea of neighbourhood in a big city. I love big cities, but they can be alienating and mystifying, crowded and difficult to comprehend. That's why the neighbourhood is so important. A BID is a more formalised version of the neighbourhood, community or block association and, because the resources it draws on are guaranteed, it has a little bit more backbone."
The money just rolls in, much to Sexton's relief. "Anyone running a BID are among the few directors of not-for-profit organisations in America that don't have to spend 80 per cent of their time raising money or cultivating prospective donors. And because we don't have to worry about the money, we can get on with the job," he says.
He denies that the Times Square BID's agenda has been to purge "adult uses" from the area. Zoning changes by the city restricted the density of such uses to one every two blocks, with none at all allowed in the vicinity of churches or schools. In any case, a restaurant or souvenir shop would be more profitable than an adult video store.
CRITICS say that Disney, for which 42nd Street has been made so safe to show The Lion King continuously at one of its premier cinemas, "made us do that". But Sexton points out that the area still has the Gaiety Burlesque, the Lace strip club and other similar attractions in its mix of all-round entertainment.
He knows about Dublin too, and believes that O'Connell Street, in particular, would benefit from a BID. Last time he was in Dublin, after talking to Waterford Glass about making a huge crystal ball for the Millennium New Year's Eve party, he stayed at the Morrison Hotel on Ormond Quay; he found its dΘcor "very Manhattan-esque".
"I do hope that, in the reconstruction of Dublin, as much of the old is saved as possible. I know that the Temple Bar area has largely come back, based on valuing and respecting what was already there, and that's important," he says. For him, Dublin and other European capitals - Paris is his favourite - are "the flowers of civilisation".
One of the main reasons why New York and other US cities went through "such a nightmare period" in the 1970s and1980s, he says, was that the federal government had spent "trillions of dollars" on highway programmes that promoted suburban living, with the inevitable result that inner-city areas became "destabilised and depopulated".
Sexton becomes quite heated when he talks about this drive to undermine urban centres and deeply regrets the fact that, as an exercise in social engineering, it has largely succeeded. Even in New York, a world capital city, it has resulted in "the loss of the Bronx and large parts of Brooklyn"; Manhattan was always going to survive.
"The federal government did nothing and still does nothing to help the cities," he complains. And this reflects, in public policy terms, "the American disaffection with cities, which stems at least in part from the perception that they had unsolvable problems and, therefore, there was a question-mark over their role as social or economic entities".
One thing he gives credit to Rudy Giuliani for doing is showing that New York City was not ungovernable, that it was possible to do something with it. By focusing so single-mindedly on crime, with dramatic results, he made it possible for people to believe that things could be changed for the better.
As for the Times Square BID, which has played such a key role in changing one of the most important parts of town, Sexton says that barring the emergence of "some revolutionary conclave" staging a coup at one of its quarterly board meetings or the public meeting it holds every year, he expects it will be around for a long time to come.