The Mouse Takes Manhattan

Before Hollywood, there was New York's 42nd Street, birthplace of American mass-market entertainment. Beginning in 1899, a burst of construction on a single mid-Manhattan block created the greatest concentration of playhouses America has ever seen or likely will see again. No place has ever evoked the glamour of big-city nightlife as vividly as did "naughty, bawdy, gaudy" 42nd Street, stomping ground of legendary impresarios Oscar Hammerstein I and Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.

Starting in the 1930s, 42nd Street's fame gradually soured into infamy as the glitzy musicals of its golden age were supplanted by burlesque revues and B movies. XXX fare descended on 42nd Street with a vengeance in the late 1960s when a vending-machine salesman named Martin J. Hodas adapted the peep show machine to pornographic use. A conspicuous property-value sinkhole amid the world's costliest stand of skyscrapers, 42nd Street affronted the custodians of New York's economy no less than its guardians of public morality.

Many schemes to restore 42nd Street to "respectability" were floated over the next few decades, but redevelopment did not gain traction till the mid-1990s, when government officials struck a catalytic deal with the Walt Disney Co. (DIS ) to restore the New Amsterdam Theatre.

The willingness of Disney CEO Michael D. Eisner, a native New Yorker, to take a flyer on the New Amsterdam was rooted in his own nostalgic memories of 42nd Street. Here is an account of how the Disney deal was done, excerpted from

Ghosts of 42nd Street: A History of America's Most Infamous Block by BusinessWeek Senior Writer Anthony Bianco.

Fond Memories