The Lure of Times Square

...Sister Salvation, "You have wished yourself a Scarsdale Galahad, a breakfast-eating Brooks Brothers type...

...What can have got these kids out of their clothes and put them on an embarrassing display...

...Remember the late 1960s graffito, SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE—BEAT YOURSELF UP...

...In this unrehearsed epigram, Koch affirmed our own very special vulgar ethnic moxie against the nutritious but sanitized "American" monoculture that feared and dreaded New York, and that, during our 19751976 fiscal crisis, led to the notorious headline: "Ford to City: Drop Dead...

...What business does our Mayor think MTV is in, or HBO, or some of those lush hotel chains he's been courting...

...the mayor is cozy with big sex businesses with big bottom lines...

...This vision can help us imagine a public space oriented toward the future, and democratic and inclusive enough to contain the whole world...

...And if it ever builds the hotels and clubs it intermittently talks about, it seems to have made a commitment to a terrific architectural firm...

...From the Park you enjoy a long view over or through the trees, where you can see the city take form beyond you...

...It featured the usual multiracial Benetton assortment of teenagers, only here they were totally, frontally nude...

...but Bakhtin knew that carnivals were dangerous, that they were places where people got killed...

...Long before, however, decisive popular support had shifted from dramas and musical comedies to motion pictures...

...However, the stock market crash of 1987 collapsed the market for commercial real estate...

...Ada Louise Huxtable (who by then had left the Times but remained forever linked with it in public imagination) combined brilliant analysis with a Hepburnesque acerbic hauteur...

...You could tell this art director not only had been to grad school, but had read Leo Steinberg's The Sexuality of Christ...

...Art empowers her—and ordinary people like FALL • 1997 • 77 Signs of the Times us, who identify with her—to do anything...

...Here is Hurstwood again, cold and hungry, looking longingly inside a Broadway restaurant: "Eat" he mumbled...

...before they know it, they are dumped by boyfriends and producers in favor of younger, fresher meat...

...Complaints about Times Square often blend fear of violence with revulsion for the lowest classes...

...Flush it out...

...but the problem may be not so much what Disney does to people as what the very mention of its name pushes people and institutions— like the 42nd Street Business Improvement District—to do to themselves...

...I've just read, in the Times of August 1, about a deal in the works to bring Reuters to Times Square...

...Ironically, disaster kept further disaster from happening, and the tower sites are still idle today...

...They certainly seemed to have learned something about 42nd Street and Times Square: they saw that the point of the Street and the Square was extravagant entertainment...

...There's got to be " 'Somewhere we can be alone,' he insisted...

...The candidate is startled at the violence of Travis's feelings, and so are we...

...The lovers are speaking now from within a closed coach...

...But we see an ominous undercurrent quite early in the film...

...That was the good news...

...alas, he can't...

...Yet she dances, though she can't...

...The foreshortened, vertiginous perspective was borrowed from Mantegna's "Dead Christ," the color scheme and religious aura from a dozen other Renaissance masterworks...

...Broadway in the 1900s developed a magical "look" that was supersaturated with mirrors, picture windows, and electric light...

...In 1978 Mayor Koch, announcing that 42nd Street was disgraceful and hopeless, entertained plans for what he called "an urban theme park" on 42nd Street, just west of the Square, with the New Amsterdam Theater as a primary focus...

...It says, "It doesn't matter what you wear, as long as you are there...

...and Katherine Hepburn is presented there as being above such things, so it's easy to miss— I missed it when I was a kid—but you can hear it in the wisecracks these girls make about each other (and sometimes about themselves), and you can see it in the way they wait for the phone to ring...

...In Alan Parker's Fame, fifty years later, the protagonist again dances on a moving cab, and once more it is a parable of democracy...

...I was going to write that Times Square quickly established itself as the most striking public space in New York...

...You can find it in the WPA Guide, circa 1939: [During the Depression] theaters closed one after another, and contract bridge games, chess tournaments and sideshows occupied the vacant stores...

...Heatherbloom established a Times Square tradition in which Calvin Klein, Benetton, and DKNY are still working today, capitalizing on the aura of "the capital of dangerous love...

...The next step came in 1992, when the city and state negotiated an "Interim Plan" with the developers...

...It recruited old vaudevilleans to sing old songs of the Broadway that seemed on the ropes...

...But if it does, then the only effective way for intellectuals to fight it is to strengthen our cultural ego, to learn to sing jazz and generate light, to make sure that our dear city won't beat itself up...

...Through bright windows, at every corner, might be seen gay companies in luxuriant restaurants...

...But that is in the 1880s...

...Disney's presence had an immediate impact in leveraging other huge conglomerates onto the Street: now HBO, MTV, AMC, Marriott, Tussaud, Conde Nast, Reuters, are all eager to be there, and to build on an enormous scale...

...Although Fame appeared in the 1980s, it grows out of a 1960s edition of Popular Front democracy, the kind of sensibility that rejoices in public spaces and public spectacles as media for bringing very different kinds of people together...

...Meyer Wolfsheim, the Jewish gambler in The Great Gatsby, gives a vivid account of one of these, "the night they shot Rosey Rosenthal," his dear friend, outside the old Metropole Hotel on Broadway and 45th...

...There were coaches and crowded cable cars...

...In American politics since 1980, fundamentalists of all faiths have learned how to work together, and know that they are closer in spirit to fundamentalists in other religions than they are to humanists within their own...

...To experience Central Park is to submerge yourself in nature—though a nature orchestrated by human beings...

...Note, too, that on matters of morality and culture, many black and Latin churches are as repressive and hypocritical as anybody...

...My mother, who saw Keeler perform many times, said she could dance up a storm, and was playing a klutz here only for drama's sake...

...In the 1930s, for instance, there seems to have been a consensus that the Square had hopelessly declined from what it was in the golden age of the 1910s and 1920s...

...He is probably mourning for the late 1970s: his piece accompanies a series of luminous photos by Langdon Clay (reproduced in Grand Street #57, Summer 1996) dated 1979, just before the age of AIDS...

...Here the light is always lurid, the textures grungy, the sound abrasive...

...Rem Koolhaas recently wrote a moving elegy for the golden age of hustling on the Square...

...There are several shots, taken from his cab, that focus on crowds of men and women around the Square...

...What do you think "Naughty, bawdy, gaudy, sporty 42nd Street" means...

...Some of it is rooted in a puritanical complex that intertwines fear of sex with fear of the city itself...

...This was an improvement, but the towers' size remained overpowering, and the developers escaped their original obligation to transform the 42nd Street subway station...

...From the very start, even when it was Longacre Square, Times Square seemed to exist to blur those lines...

...but even with vast subsidies and tax breaks, they themselves were the only ones willing to buy...

...The message is, the Square is big enough to hold them all...

...Some of these people could be prostitutes with their customers and pimps...

...In Pound's vision, "the great buildings lose reality and take on their magical powers...

...80 • DISSENT Signs of the Times How do we account for the obsessive, futile attempt, as old as Times Square itself, to create a Times Square without sex or sleaze...

...To be there, to even think about being there, is to be drenched in richness of meaning...

...The UDC brought in the Cooper-Ekstut planning firm to lay down design guidelines, which said that all new buildings must fit into the context of the Times Square environment as it was...

...adapted for film in 1969), we have had an image of the world of Times Square gay hustling...

...But remember the 1964 song "Dancing in the Streets...

...Travis can't sleep, and goes through the "emotional insomnia" that John Rechy (in City of Night, 1963) says is the true Times Square wavelength...

...My first fantasy was: drug raid on a disco, strip search in the lockup...

...Sometimes I can hardly take it...

...Ninety years ago, people were talking about that strip of Broadway as "the capital of dangerous love...

...It's full of filth and scum, scum and filth...

...Seltzer" was the Koch whom even political adversary Ruth Messinger admires (along with Messinger supporters like me), and whose prejudices and vanities and fears she shares...

...They pointed out a Calvin Klein male underwear ad that portrayed a headless body, dressed only in blindingly white Klein boxer shorts against a black background, with red intimations of sunrise (or traces of sunset...

...The Countess Olenska laughs sadly, and defies Newland Archer to find a place they can be...

...For instance, it has become a truism of the 1990s to blame the Disney Corporation for Mayor Giuliani's ongoing vendetta against the sex business...

...Suddenly a candidate for president gets into his cab...

...When God destroys her, the book says, all urban activities—trade, commerce, crafts, music—come to an abrupt end...

...It made a cassette using sophisticated computer simulations to show how the towers would blot out the sky, arguing that New York was being betrayed by its leaders' faith in FIRE...

...But they all exude sexuality, and this seems to make Travis seethe...

...People turned to look after him, so uncouth was his shambling figure...

...But he doesn't understand the emotions of the people who hate that old Times Square: they 78 • DISSENT Signs of the Times are just as passionately intense as Koolhaas, and a lot less controlled...

...He lives in a filthy room, cramped yet almost bare, just west of the Square...

...I'll fight for most of them, but they could stand some critical scrutiny...

...These works themselves have been "fire signs," shedding light not only on the Square and the people in it, but on each other...

...The scale, incandescence, and symbolic power of Times Square make everything here more urgent and intense...

...It became famous first for its hotels, restaurants, cafés, and cabarets, places where men and women could talk, smoke, drink, dance—to both new and old music—and have a good time together...

...Doesn't he see what business he's in now...

...These kids are from the former High School of the Performing Arts, now aufgehoben into La Guardia High uptown at Lincoln Center...

...what made it special was not the intimacy between murderers and police—that was a routine affair—but the fact that it got into the papers...

...As its main architect, Klein's company, Park Tower Realty, picked Philip Johnson, a man who has created some beautiful and imaginative buildings, but whose past as a Nazi sympathizer should have been a danger sign...

...FALL • 1997 • 83...

...Now, in place of FIRE, a new key word had gained power: entertainment...

...Here is our poetry," he proclaimed, "we have pulled down the stars to our will...

...There's The Jazz Singer, Al Jolson's boy from the ghetto seeing his name in lights...

...Then, too, many of us will feel aroused, and then feel guilty, at the sight of these naked kids—who could be our kids, who look as innocent and as vulnerable as any of our kids—and here, too, it's as if the Company is winking at us, implicitly promising not to tell, reassuring us we're all in this together...

...That murder really happened...

...Since Rechy's City of Night and Herlihy's Midnight Cowboy (1965...

...Bliet portrays a tourist, apparently tired but earnest, confronting a great array of signs in Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Arabic, Portuguese, Hungarian, Hebrew, Chinese, Greek, French, Korean, Persian, Urdu, Vietnamese, and other tongues I've missed...

...To experience Times Square is to utterly detach yourself from nature and submerge yourself in an environment that's totally artificial and created by human beings...

...Think of the novels, from Sister Carrie to The Great Gatsby to Damon Runyon's short stories to John Rechy's City of Night to James Leo Herlihy's Midnight Cowboy to Paul Rogers's Saul's Book and Alix Shulman's On the Stroll...

...Disney announced its intention to lease the New Amsterdam and use it as a base for extensive New York operations...

...When the man asks him what he thinks a president should do, Travis's rage spews out: Well, he should clean up this city here...

...In the Park you enjoy a landscape that changes with the seasons, but is constant from year to year...

...It arranged to abruptly turn off all the bright lights, so people could see how much they meant...

...76 • DISSENT Signs of the Times In his weary and hungry state, he should never have come here...

...These alluring, notorious places helped transform New York into what an angry moralist of the 1900s called "the capital of dangerous love...

...But he is drawn to the light, even as it seems to proclaim death for him...

...Disney may be behind it all, but I'm still waiting to see some hard evidence...

...So should we worry...

...But it often seems that these hopeful visions are eclipsed by bitter diatribes whose theme is Paradise Lost...

...Nobody else wants any...

...The Square is arranged to promote the most intense and frantic modes of hyper-dealing...

...Back in the 1910s, when cars were still a novelty, the Square was already a leading site for drive-by killings...

...Travis feels no nostalgia: he is trapped in the present moment like Kafka's mole in his impenetrable burrow...

...We need a president that would clean up this whole mess...

...One of the Square's special qualities, all through the twentieth century, has been its capacity to nourish and inspire impressive works in every genre of art...

...So much of the talk about Times Square seems to be both driven and crippled by nostalgia...

...It started an international design competition for the Square, and exhibited drawings and models far better than Johnson's...

...He let loose a plan that, had it been fulfilled, would have drowned the whole Square in orange juice...

...I'm not exactly saying these prejudices are wrong...

...As for sex, let's remember that Heatherbloom woman...

...Soon after The Great Gatsby appeared, Arnold Rothstein—consummate gambler, loan shark, sportsman, Broadway producer, and bon vivant, and real-life Gatsby character— would meet the same fate, victim of his greatest hit...

...One of the great New York novels, Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, features a doomed love affair between respectable people who simply cannot find places to be alone together...

...Around 1910 a circa-eighty-foot sign featured an electric young woman whose skirts blew back and forth and up and around her in response to an electronic program, to promote "Heatherbloom Petticoats...

...But then I realized it wasn't true—or maybe only half true...

...I'll quit this...

...had never come into being...

...In fact, if we read around in its history, we find that violence has always been close to the surface here...

...Finally, in February 1994, after hondeling between Stern and Disney CEO Michael Eisner, the ball game abruptly changed...

...In the Square you're completely enclosed, and you can't see anything except the buildings and signs that are part of the Square itself...

...But an important part of the story is more modern and secular, and rooted in contemporary political economy...

...What can we hope for in Times Square tomorrow...

...81 Signs of the Times high point of Sorkin's career came when Johnson refused to appear at a Forum on Times Square if he was in the room...

...Among cut-rate haberdasheries, cafeterias and bus stations are tokens of a not-so-distant past...

...He and Governor Mario Cuomo both embraced it, and put it under control of the state Urban Development Corporation...

...Could it be that after a decade of controversy, our leaders had actually learned something about New York...

...If Disney has played a role in this, it has probably been indirect: not Disney making threats, but other people censoring themselves out of fear that Disney and all its capital might disappear...

...Between 1986 and 1988 the City Planning Commission and the state UDC pressed Park Tower to renegotiate the office towers' design, to incorporate bright lights and big signs and show some respect for the context of the Square...

...From this perspective, the optimal business districts were uniform blocks of large office towers, like Wall Street and Rockefeller Center...

...The cover of the New Yorker for June 12, 1995, offers a lovely vision by B. Bliet...

...Instead, a great many got violently mad...

...Baudelaire, Whitman, and two generations of Parisian painters had portrayed this as a central modern theme...

...In New York...

...The contrast was too sharp...

...The Municipal Art Society, under Kent Barwick, made Times Square a top priority, and demonstrated a genius for publicity...

...One of the most passionate enemies of the old 42nd Street is Travis Bickle, the Vietnam vet and Underground Man who is the hero of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976...

...He accepted the real estate industry's premise that the only way to get action was to build enormous skyscrapers on the corners of 42nd and Seventh Avenue...

...But is it true...

...Another current in American life has been a desire to protect our children from harm that is really out there: demagogues have exploited this fear for generations, and often, as in the satanic ritual/child abuse scares of the 1980s, whipped large numbers of people into hysterical frenzy...

...Hurstwood seems about to commit what our mayor would call a "quality-of-life crime...

...The city courted Disney enthusiastically...

...Long-standing rage against Disney is part of the deal...

...But now the subject is collective: a whole bunch of kids who can do it, a scruffy, multinational, urbanpublicschool bunch of kids, and not by magic realism but by force of real talent...

...In fact, the Square has always been loaded with some of the poorest people in the city...

...Andy Logan, a great city reporter, in her book Against the Evidence, argued plausibly that Charles Becker, the police captain executed for this crime, was a crook but not a killer, and, as his widow inscribed on his tombstone, was "Murdered by Governor Whitman...

...the city in the last frames is entirely gentrified, pastoral, like some real estate developer's dream...

...What was once a path of glory has turned into a location for "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock...

...through the movie's magic realism, she can overcome both gravity and traffic—she can fly...

...Any place on earth that generates crowds and promotes emotional extravagance and release is bound to be violent...

...private in public space...

...As principal developer, Koch chose his biggest contributor, George Klein...

...But many people here were themselves pulled down: "I'll just go down Broadway," he said to himself...

...Would they call it Henny Youngman Plaza...

...The FALL • 1997...

...The Square's reFALL • 1997 • 79 Signs of the Times spectable people have always harangued the cops to get rid of these shadows so close to the bright lights...

...It's like an open sewer...

...On 42nd Street, as elsewhere, the most effective censorship is self-censorship...

...All sorts of new people got into the case...

...It's a delightful movie...

...Whether he does or not, we need to see it, because, as long as we love New York, we're all in it with him...

...Carter Wiseman in New York and Michael Sorkin in the Village Voice tore the project to pieces...

...But now, close to the end, he has disintegrated into a drunken bum...

...Today's blatantly commercial model of urban renewal has the capacity to waste more land than the modes of the past...

...Whatever you think, spectators have to create a story to make the ad make sense, and as we do, we notice (or else we don't notice) that we are working for the Company...

...What's the use," he thought...

...Sometimes the nostalgia and the hatred are reversed...

...Now, Reuters is one of the more interesting world media giants, and its presence on the Square could be a good thing, but not if the city grants it the staggering tax breaks it seems to want to give—as if to say, in the midst of a property boom, "Now, take our prime real estate—please...

...Hollywood had taken over all the best locations, relegating the legitimate theater business to the side streets . . . . On 42nd Street, once the district's showplace, famous theaters have been converted into movie "grind" houses devoted [mostly to] burlesque shows...

...Not only is he cleansed by his killings: the old Times Square magically disappears...

...Keeler is portrayed as a klutz who can't dance—unlike her rival, Bebe Daniels, who can—but who is like her audience, like us...

...His entertainment is the all-night porn flicks and shooting galleries around 42nd Street...

...In the last couple of minutes, after he goes on a rampage and kills several of "them," he looks relaxed and feels cleansed...

...In the next decade, Times Square's "fire signs," like so many American industrial products in those days, just grew and grew...

...Beyond the products and activities they promoted, Times Square's signs have always proclaimed a promotional environment, a spectacular place where Americans could imagine themselves—and sometimes actually see themselves—not merely as spectators but as participants in the spectacle...

...he is projecting onto "them" all that he most fears in himself...

...In fact, this image is a democratic parable...

...They agreed to try to promote more...

...People who care about the Square had better raise the roof, before this deal gets done...

...many of these new people are colored, many are poor...

...at the edge...

...If you study the history of Times Square, it's amazing to see how pervasive nostalgia is as an organizing force for visions of the place...

...and people (like Samuel Delaney, Rem Koolhaas, photographer Langdon Clay) who are nostalgic for the pre-AIDS golden age of hustling...

...We could play this fire sign game with generations of paintings, of songs (even as Hurstwood collapses, Sister Carrie sings to herself, "There's a Broken Heart for every light on Broadway"), of stores, of office buildings, of restaurants, of theaters— but here you need to be prepared to cry...

...Sexuality is the only card they hold, but it depreciates fast...

...One spring day in the middle eighties, I met a CUNY graduate student and his partner on the west side of the Square, holding hands as they looked raptly up and to the east...

...See what I get for making an argument that our governments have learned something...

...Sometimes he appears at home in these lower depths...

...others could just be ordinary people out having a good time...

...After the golden age, it's said, the Square was overrun by commercial sex, sleaze, and violence, and it became a human sinkhole, a civic disgrace, a place where no decent person would willingly go, and where the only helpful thing would be to blow it all away...

...The Square's whole life has been a life of selfreflection and semiotic overflow...

...Even with new people running the city and the state, no politician has the brains and guts to say the original deal was a disaster and walk away from it...

...It wants to build an 800,000square-foot office tower on Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street...

...It may be, though, that the truth is on a less multinational scale...

...Sounds up-to-date, doesn't it...

...Sarah's wish was that of our leaders, Democratic and Republican, liberal and conservative, sophisticated and provincial, for the past fifty years...

...What do you think happened to all those generations of girls who were rejected at those auditions, or who never made it off the chorus lines, or (as in 42nd Street) who got the part but broke a leg...

...If you are lucky enough to know both, and to negotiate between them, you can be fully attuned to twentieth-century urban life...

...Indeed, Times Square has the capacity to engender a "discourse of nostalgia" that floats freely and unites people with radically different views of the Square and the world: people (like my mother) who are nostalgic for the great days of Helen Hayes and Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine...

...This would be an ongoing struggle, even if the Disney Corp...

...Ezra Pound wrote in 1910 that, thanks to electrification, New York was "the most beautiful city in the world in the evening...

...Ever since the Heatherbloom lady, rich soft-core semiotic desserts like these have been a Times Square special...

...In the Square you don't see the seasons at all (though you can feel them), but you are subject to the most dramatic and extreme turnovers in buildings and signs...

...The most striking idea here is that now there are new people in the cast and on the street...

...Koch asked for models, but then disparaged the ones he got: "New York isn't orange juice," he said, "it's seltzer...

...This complex goes back a long way: we can find it at the very end of the Bible, in the Book of Revelation, in the portrayal of the Great Whore Babylon...

...Apart from all the generations of sexual activity around the Square, sexual fantasy has always been the primary fuel for its "fire signs...

...But they are antithetical as human experiences, and the antitheses that they constitute help give New York its distinctive form...

...Abe Rosenthal supported the project with his usual crude and bullying editorials—"Get Out of the Way on Times Square," "Porn Again or Born Again"— but Paul Goldberger denounced it on the arts pages...

...When he reached Forty-Second Street, the fire signs were already blazing brightly...

...And this is the way people talked in an era that we see as Times Square's golden age...

...Civil libertarians need to deal with real fears, and to show people that the castration of culture won't help their children grow up...

...But the vibrancy and desperation of the Square's homosexuality were not so different from the texture of its heterosexuality...

...Remember in Guys and Dolls, when the gambler Sky Masterson complains to Sarah Brown, a.k.a...

...Mayors, governors, and their planners, radically opposed in so many other ways, have all agreed—or simply taken it for granted—that the Square has become a malignant tumor, and that it's got to go...

...As a great public space, Times Square is, and always was, tied with Central Park...

...They appointed an architect, Robert Stern (from Columbia University), and a designer, Tibor Kalman (from the Benetton Company), who had an intuitive feeling for the Square...

...As the deindustrialization of America began—in New York, the garment industry was the first to go— smart money came to believe that the only salvation of America's cities lay in FIRE...

...people (like our mayor, and like former mayor Ed Koch) who are nostalgic for the years of Winchell, Runyon, and Guys and Dolls...

...I'm not saying we don't have a Disney problem...

...Next year the Brooklyn Bridge...

...It's all up with me...

...Or not quite nude: as they faced the camera— some looking flustered, others brazen—they were all holding small placards over their genitals: they said truth, lies, attitude, power, and— for the youngest looking kid, hair tousled, looking like a gamine—first date...

...And not if it is built in the way the landowner, Prudential Insurance, wants to build it: reviving Philip Johnson's despised design, the great glass slab, scourge of sky and street...

...four pages later he does it and the book ends...

...but part of its charm is the way it uses magic realism, as in The Jazz Singer, to turn tragedy into comedy...

...Since the completion and convergence of several elevated and subway lines around the turn of the century, the square—even before it became Times Square (which it did with the opening of the New York Times Building at 1 Times Square in 1905)—has been a special kind of space...

...Nothing like this existed in nineteenth-century America, where the lines between respectable and dissolute spaces were sharply drawn...

...In place of gigantism, they would promote small-scale street-level revitalization along 42nd Street...

...According to the official nostalgic vision, sex and violence and crime arrived in the Square only yesterday...

...Alas, Koch didn't have the courage of his metaphors...

...Neighborhoods like Times Square, scruffy and raggedy, full of small parcels and mixed uses, were irrational and inefficient...

...No sex is shown in films like Stage Door...

...In the 1980s, some people complained that it wasn't what it had been in the 1940s, others that it wasn't what it had been in the 1970s...

...We should remember the outer-borough Catholics who make up a large part of Giuliani's support...

...That's right, eat...

...But it has definitely invested its superclean, superrich and super-American image...

...Then and there, he decides to kill himself...

...Buildings at night appear "immaterial," the spectator "sees but the lighted windows...

...A crucial ingredient in modern city life was looking: looking at other people, looking at yourself, looking at others looking at you...

...Crowds were hastening to dine...

...Or of the movies, from Stage Door to Dance, Girl, Dance to Guys and Dolls to The Sweet Smell of Success to The Producers to A Chorus Line to Taxi Driver to Fame to Batman...

...It was pitched at a weird angle so that, as you looked up, the model seemed to be falling in your face...

...The Park is configured to give the subject a temporary rest from dealing...

...This is based partly on an accurate view of Walt Disney's racist and xenophobic right-wing career, but also on prejudices of our own: prejudices of many intellectuals against mass culture, prejudices of seltzer against orange juice, of ethnic easterners against middle America, of New York against 82 • DISSENT Signs of the Times the world...

...Another equally classic Times Square image is Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street, in a top hat, dancing at first on a theater's stage, but then suddenly on the roof of a moving taxi...

...Several officers followed him with their eyes to see that he did not beg of anybody...

...We need to look to our own house, to New York's own volatile political culture, so receptive to mobilizations of bias and outbursts of bad faith...

...Johnson packaged himself in contradictory ways, at once a nihilist who was above any guidelines and a whore who would build whatever his client told him to...

...As in many interesting ads, ambiguity is central to the allure...

...Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, in what seems like a perverse zeal against sex, belongs squarely in the tradition of the sleazier producers in these movies, trumpeting wholesome "family values" while they pinch actresses' cheeks...

...It may be that, in the late-twentieth-century USA, Disney, along with our other media conglomerates, functions as a sort of cultural superego...

...Official vision, the vision shared by everyone who has ruled Albany or City Hall for the last fifty years, places the golden age in 1945, when mobs of people danced in the streets in honor of our victory in "The Good War," and dashing young sailors (pretty much all white) poured off their ships in the harbor and along the Hudson to go "On the Town...

...Koch and Cuomo had praised Klein and Park Tower as brilliant salesmen...

...What's going on here...

...Some of the meaning is luminously hopeful...

...This is Edward Hurstwood, ex-lover of Theodore Dreiser's heroine Sister Carrie (1900), and one of America's classic victims of dangerous love...

...The outcome, unveiled in early 1983, was a set of three giant slabs, a la upper Sixth Avenue, only decorated with Mansard roofs like the roof of the Times Building...

...According to the Guide, "Only the lonely, those with nowhere else to go, will go there now...

...So many of the classic and glamorous Broadway films are really about the fate of girls who come to Broadway hoping their bodies will put their names in lights...

...That "Scarsdale Galahad" would bring to the Square the saving, purifying FIRE...

...A traffic-stopper from the early 1990s was an enormous curved Benetton poster on 49th Street and Seventh Avenue, touting the company's new Colors magazine...

...It's as if Travis's hatred for "them," the men and women of the Square, has become a catalyst for every hateful desire of his own...

...q P.S...

...When we (and Carrie) first meet him, he is a manager and an impressive man...

...Many academic people today, following the critic Mikhail Bakhtin, idealize everything connected with the word "carnivalesque...

...Arquitectonica of Miami (whose buildings framed Miami Vice), which can give the Street the moxie it deserves...

...The high concept is called FIRE: finance, insurance, and real estate...

...its everyday life was pastoral till that point...

...This design combined the most arid and arrogant modernism with the most blatant and slavish postmodern pseudo-history...

...Some days I go out and smell it, and then I get headaches that just stay and never go away...

...Within twenty years, the Times Square district would spawn a spectacular abundance of locations—all with private dining rooms above or below—where men and women could meet each other and be This article is adapted from the keynote address at the Conference on Times Square sponsored by the Buell Center for American Architecture, Columbia University, March 6, 1997...

...At this point, in 1983-1984, the Times began to divide in fascinating ways...

...Johnson said he wanted to turn Times Square into an extension of Rockefeller Center, and that New Yorkers should be glad...

...To be precise, it's against the small sex business...

...So far, apart from the renovated and recently reopened New Amsterdam Theater, Disney has not spent much money...

...the bad news was that it was only "interim," and that if the real estate market ever picks up, Park Tower/Prudential will still have the right to build those dark Satanic mills...

...He vilifies those who killed it: "a coalition of moralists, planners, and a nostalgia-driven entertainment giant...

...Some people, noticing how the city turned over Central Park to the Company for its premiere of Pocohontas in 1995, and turned over almost the whole of midtown for a Disney Parade in 1997, would say the proper word is "abjectly...