A BUILDING ‘Miracle on 42nd Street’ tells story of complex

A few years after she moved into Manhattan Plaza, Mary Jo Slater watched a man die.

“We were sitting in the Curtain Up restaurant and in front of us we see a body come flying down one of the apartments and we see a guy with a machete chopping the guy’s head and arms off,” Slater, an Emmy-nominated casting director, told the Daily News.

“Everyone thought it was a movie stunt.”

Slater, who raised sons Christian (yes, that one) and Ryan at Manhattan Plaza, knows the story is dark. But it’s one, she said, that best represents the iconic building.

The 46-floor apartment complex was built blocks away from Times Square in the mid-1970s, when no one wanted to live in Hell’s Kitchen. The building, with its health club and parking garage and tennis courts, sat empty. So the city and the developers finally came up with a solution: fill its 1,689 units with performers and charge them only what they could afford.

Thus birthed Manhattan Plaza and, decades later, “Miracle on 42nd Street,” the documentary tracing the socialist experiment that succeeded against all odds — and continues to this day.

Slater, who created the documentary, was one of the original tenants at Manhattan Plaza. A single mother of two, she paid $200 a month for a two-bedroom, twobathroom apartment with a terrace overlooking the water.

Next door was Larry David.

“I didn’t pay much attention to him,” she told The News.

David wrote the pilot of “Seinfeld” at Manhattan Plaza and became best friends with comedian Kenny Kramer, who became the inspiration for Michael Richards’ iconic character.

Alicia Keys wrote her first song at Manhattan Plaza. Samuel L. Jackson served as a security guard. Donald Faison ran lines for his final “Clueless” audition in the stairwell.

“That building raised me,” Faison says in “Miracle on 42nd Street.”

It’s a common refrain; Keys calls herself a “Manhattan Plaza baby” in the documentary. By all accounts, residents who otherwise couldn’t have afforded to live in New York felt they owed their careers to the building and were happy to pay it back.

Performers living at Manhattan Plaza only pay onequarter of their salary in rent. The sliding scale means the struggling artists can afford to live without work and those who make it big balance the costs.

“Once I got a really good job and I could pay the retail market, I was so proud of myself,” Slater told The News.

“Maybe it’s a socialist attitude, but it’s socialism working at its best. It was an amazing experiment that worked.”

Alice Elliott, an NYU professor and director of “Miracle on 42nd Street,” almost moved into Manhattan Plaza when she first came to New York but was too scared to walk down 43rd St. So she moved in with her boyfriend instead and watched the building fill up (she married the boyfriend, so she said she probably made the right decision anyway).

“It was not a place that people would choose to live unless they were working on Broadway,” Elliott told The

News. “That’s why it was so important that [building manager Richard Hunnings] brought Angela Lansbury in. She did it to help bring people into the building. Her father was a socialist and he really believed in egalitarian life choices and she had picked up enough of that that she got it, she knew this building could be a great opportunity.”

Lansbury, who moved into