The old Hotel Astor.

As I look out my living room window eastward, down the block is the somewhat uninspired Minskoff Building, a tower recognizable for its fins at the top. But until as late as 1967, that view would have been of the second-empire Beaux-arts bubble of a building called the Hotel Astor, built in 1904, with its copper mansard roof dotted with rows of ox-eye windows, elaborately-themed ballrooms, rooftop gardens, and exotic restaurants, it brought elegance to the backwater that was once Longacre Square before it was Times Square, and built right out to the street side lending a bit of claustrophobia to the later years of its life in the growing neighborhood, in the neighborhood that fell down under its watch, and so, it had to go. It did have to go. It had nothing to do with what Times Square is today. That's ok. But it's fun to remember.