A Private Times Square?

We live, my more literary minded friends tell me, in an age when irony is highly valued. So I suppose I should not be surprised that the continuing overbuilding of midtown Manhattan has taken a distinctly ironic twist. Still, there is something downright unsettling about the latest chapter in the ongoing assault on the theater district: the plan to build a suburban style shopping mall based on a “Times Square” theme—on the real Times Square!

This plan was announced on February 23, 1989, by the developers of “One Broadway Place,” the oxymoronically named skyscraper now under construction on the site of the old Loew’s State Theater at Broadway and 45th Street. The six-level mall, to be housed in an at...