STORIES
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Basini
FSU GRAD GIVES US TIMES SQUARE MIRACLE
By Bayard Stern
If you love going to the theatre in New York, you might love Richard Basini, a 1964 Florida State graduate who gave 25 years to cleaning up Times Square, and succeeded.
In the 1970s and '80s, it was frightening to visit the center of neon billboards, theater marquees and New Year's Eve crowds. On the sidewalk level, the scene was dominated by crime and pornography.
But it's once again exciting and fun to walk across the square to a theater or movie, or just to soak up New York.
You can thank Basini, president of a public relations firm in Manhattan and Connecticut - and president of the Broadway Association for 21 years.
Basini grew up in New York, going to plays on Broadway in a very different era. When he was 16, he moved with his family to St. Petersburg, Fla.
"I ended up going to Florida State and majoring in hotel management and finance," Basini said. "I had a good time there. I was a Sigma Chi. Fraternity life is very important in the South. It's almost unheard of in New York."
After he graduated, he went to work for Marriott. A short time later, he left Marriott and started Basini/Conner & Co. in New York.
"Our second client was the city of New York, where I helped Mayor Lindsey as a speech writer on a pro bono basis. I more or less got hooked on cleaning up the city."
A few years later, he was president of the Broadway Association, which had been created in 1911.
"It's basically the business community speaking with a united voice, particularly to City Hall, and dramatizing those issues that without the collective voice of an organization would never be heard.
"The cumulative side is that for the past 25 years, I, along with many, many people, have been slowly working with the public sector to clean up the area.
"Real estate values were nil in the '70s. Many of the buildings in this area were closed and boarded up. Little by little, as we got the word out that going to the theater was a wonderful experience, more and more people came. The area started to build up. It took a long time to change the attitudes."
But the attitudes did change, and so did the property values.
"Broadway is now oversold," Basini said. "Corporations are moving here. ... This area has become not only a business center by day; it is also the entertainment capital of the world. We have enough entertainment here to keep you occupied for days. New restaurants open continually, and they stay open. So families are now coming to New York and literally not leaving the confines of Times Square and spending the entire weekend right here because it's all here."
Disney has been a major player.
"Disney is one of the companies responsible for the renovation of 42nd Street," Basini said. "The state let the word out that Disney was now going to be a new tenant and take over a theater. That was a signal that the area was secured....
"Now the job is pretty well done, and it has been a success."
Just the same, Basini looks back with some nostalgia to the Broadway of his childhood.
"I love the theater," he says. "I don't go as much as when I was a child, because the theater was very much different. Today there's the ongoing argument: Is the theater art or entertainment? The argument that the theater is art is losing. Theater is becoming more and more entertainment. As a child of seven, I went to "The King and I" with Yul Brynner, where there was no such thing as a microphone. I went to see Ethel Merman and all the other stars who belted out a song and gave you a show.
"Today we are in what I call the Disney Era, where many of the performers are miked... I don't know that there is anyone out there on stage today who gets out there and belts out a song eight performances a week the way Mary Martin did or Ethel Merman or any one of those stars. It's dramatically different I love to go to the 'real' Broadway shows and to what's called the straight plays and non-musicals which are filled with drama and excitement and good acting."
But the ever-vigilant public relations side brings Basini back to the positive.
"So Broadway is catering more towards the masses, which is fine," Basini explains. "It provides a good healthy atmosphere and keeps the economy going and keeps the engine turning, which then in turn provides enough steam to allow true theater to survive, meaning shows that are done as an art form and not as a form of entertainment."