Razzle Dazzle by Michael Riedel

Author:Michael Riedel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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I. It quickly became perverted, however. Instead of a place for creative people to develop a show, the workshop became a backers’ audition. “There are all these people watching to see whether they are going to put money in the show,” Breglio said. “Michael never intended that.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Civil War

In December 1978, Herb Sturz, a deputy mayor, received a phone call from his boss, Ed Koch. The mayor had on his schedule a meeting with Gerald Schoenfeld, chairman of the Shubert Organization. He wanted Sturz to sit in.

Sturz, an able and diplomatic civil servant, had never met Schoenfeld. His first impression of the Shubert chief was of a man whose head was about to explode. Schoenfeld was “up in arms,” Sturz said, over Father Bruce Ritter’s plan to expand his shelter for runaways and homeless kids in Times Square. The Under 21 shelter, which was part of Ritter’s Covenant House network of safe places in the city for homeless teenagers, was located on Forty-Fourth Street near Eighth Avenue, Shubert’s backyard. Ritter was trying to evict some merchants so he could expand his facility to keep pace with the growing number of runaways flooding New York City at the time. Schoenfeld had supported Ritter’s Under 21 shelter as part of the effort to make Times Square safer. But when he saw that it had become a crash pad for druggies who loitered in front of it day and night, he changed his mind. He wanted Ritter and the riffraff out of the neighborhood.1

At the meeting with Koch and Sturz, Schoenfeld angrily expounded that “the shelter, with all those drug addicts, is going to destroy our business. It will scare away our audiences.” Ritter had little time for Schoenfeld’s objections. Indeed, he seemed to delight in sticking it to the fancy Broadway types. He said he wanted to open a soup kitchen at the shelter for the homeless. “My heart rejoiced,” he wrote in a newspaper column, “at the thought of a couple hundred Times Square derelicts lined up in the lobby of the St. James Theatre.”2

Sturz thought Schoenfeld was overstating the case—“I think some of his anger was for show”—but he acknowledged the point. Ritter was running what he thought was a rehabilitation center, but not every drug addict cleans up overnight. In fact, there had been complaints from other merchants in the area about the number of teenagers loitering—and doing drugs—in front of the shelter. Carl Weisbrod, director of the mayor’s Midtown Enforcement Project, also had concerns about the expansion of the shelter. “These kids clearly need [its] services,” he told the New York Times. “But the city has been trying to attract legitmate commercial uses to Times Square.”3

Sturz and Weisbrod found another location for the shelter—Tenth Avenue and Fortieth Street, far away from the Shubert’s stomping ground—and persuaded Ritter to take it. Schoenfeld liked the solution. He became close to Sturz and Weisbrod, often meeting them for breakfast at the Pierre Hotel, or lunch at Orso, Joe Allen’s upscale Italian restaurant on West Forty-Sixth Street.

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