The Meridian Archive
MER
July 1995
The Lease on 42nd Street

The Lease on 42nd Street

Closed mid-June 1995 · On stands late June 1995

The Front

Index of June

Downtown storefront vacancy rates nationwide, theater and arena lease terms in three cities, helicopter-tour hours logged over national parks this spring — and the six-figure sum a celebrity chef's new flagship restaurant reportedly cost to build out

The Essay

The Long Lease

A house essay on what a forty-nine-year commitment signals about a company's confidence in a city's future, drawn from lease deals in three downtowns — the boldest of them signed by a company betting a forty-nine-year lease looks cheap once the theater seats a hit

The Foreign File

Amsterdam's Quiet Experiment

Furniture on European drug policy, filed without urgency

The Feature Well

The Restaurant That Ate the Block

A profile of a celebrity-chef group's expansion into a mid-sized downtown, told through the rents it could suddenly afford to pay

The City

The Lease on 42nd Street

Disney Theatrical signs its 49-year lease on the New Amsterdam Theatre

Order Restored on Thirteenth Street

Riot police, a helicopter, and an armored vehicle clear two squatted buildings on East Thirteenth Street, filed as municipal order returning to a block

The Back

Books: Review of a new history of American downtown redevelopment · Art: June's regional auction circuit, briefly, with a line on the surprising price a talk-show host's private collection fetched at a benefit sale · Film: Summer preview, house style, with a note on the studio comedy already tracking for the summer's biggest opening weekend