Women and the Metamorphoses of Times Square
Berman, Marshall
STAND IN Times Square at night, thrown every way by waves of light and people. It is easy to feel that you are in the belly of some great beast, and that the beast is being fed more and richer...
...Other people worried...
...I've been sick," he answered...
...If I was walking a student to the Eighth Avenue subway or the Port Authority Bus Terminal, if I was going with a woman to a Broadway or an Off-Off Broadway play, we would have to take the most elaborate detours to avoid Forty-Second Street...
...2. The "working girls" of all ethnicities provided an increasing proportion of the people around the Square...
...All through its history, the Square has generated cascades of discourse and reflection...
...they called it "the capital of dangerous love...
...it was still beloved when (and even after) it was abruptly destroyed in 1965...
...third, the Great Depression, when the Square is inflated in Hollywood mythology, even as it deflates in everyday reality...
...then she lights up (is this Reefer Madness...
...The fact is, half the people in "the public" had come to feel the street life of FortySecond Street as a direct assault on them...
...The writer thought that this "hodge-podge" would give respectable women wild ideas, would inspire them to break down the walls between their supposedly sheltered lives and the lives of "women of the town...
...What were those angry moralists afraid of...
...He shows how city residents will be paying higher taxes to subsidize vast and unearned profits for a generation...
...Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser (1900), the first serious novel focused on Times Square, is certainly a book about dangerous love...
...and fi WOMEN AND TIMES SQUARE nally, the Square's decline after World War II and its redevelopment in the last decade...
...There are going to be conflicts...
...Women have been mostly locked up inside domestic and private cocoons, unable to participate in any sort of public life...
...The great bath of light flooded many people's minds in an ecstatic way...
...It's all I've got with me...
...The idea is [to] make it a place of stories, which comes from all that crass commercialism...
...The principle of the modern world," Hegel said in the 1820s, "is freedom of subjectivity...
...It is easy to feel that you are in the belly of some great beast, and that the beast is being fed more and richer ingredients than it can possibly digest...
...iMY SECOND fragment is a statistic that I found in Alexander Reichl's fine book Reconstructing Times Square, which derives from a demographic study of Forty-Second Street in the late 1970s...
...In most societies through the ages, men's lives have been largely defined by their public roles...
...There is one canonical image that captures the moment with a special luminosity...
...but we know that although Times Square may be a place to play, it's no playground, and it's a long way down...
...The great Times Square signs were also dark, ghosts of their former selves, and giant mementi mori for everyone who thought about things like death...
...Robert De Niro finally convinces Shepherd to go out with him, but then he takes her to a porn flick on West Forty-Second Street...
...Acoustically, the big swing bands of 1945 were said to fit 78 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 the Square very well...
...It was a place where they could conduct what John Stuart Mill called "experiments in living...
...New York Times, June 25, 1996) A place of stories...
...The subways brought tens of thousands of people every day...
...these entertainments expanded radically to meet the enlarged market...
...But somehow, with her hand on the Times Tower, she is not only keeping her balance but having a good time, and maybe even laughing at herself...
...People express horror and indignation that the Square's big buildings, its bright lights and fire signs, its DISSENT / Fall 2001 n 8 WOMEN AND TIMES SQUARE music and theater and cinema, are all "commercial," put there by rich corporations that hope to get even richer...
...But the image that is richest and most profound comes at the very start of her dream...
...They made the neighborhood far more informal than it had been before World War I. They elaborated a kind of jivetalk that American youth immediately took to heart...
...But her rise coincides with the fall of Edward Hurstwood, the man who brought her to New York, whom she loved once, and who gave up his whole life for her...
...I am struck by something else, which Reichl records but doesn't emphasize: its sexual segregation...
...So far as I can tell, the most compelling visions of Broadway in the Great Depression emanate from Hollywood: 42nd Street, Stage Door, the Busby Berkeley Gold Diggers series, WOMEN AND TIMES SQUARE and, at the very end of the thirties, Dorothy Arzner's Dance Girl Dance...
...Years of conflict between the Broadway and Fifth Avenue owners' associations led to a plan to restrict electric signs in most of Manhattan, but to concentrate them around Times Square...
...MARSHALL BERMAN'S latest book is Adventures in Marxism...
...There seems to be no personal intimacy between them...
...Chaplin's tramp, who resembles her, may be the second...
...In 1904, the Square became the terminal point for the new IRT and BMT subways...
...The dizzying metabolism of this place and the vertigo it inflicts are primary sources of its mystery...
...Some people call his landscapes "fascist," but surely not this one: fascists don't like inwardness...
...It was a twenty-five-story skyscraper with a dashing modern form like the triangular Flatiron Building and handsome detailing that evoked the Florentine Renaissance...
...But we intuitively trust him, as the photographer wants us to: although a kid, he will compose himself and straighten up fast...
...But places like Times Square may have made more of a difference for women...
...Forty-Second had become sexsegregated streets in the city...
...But Times Square lives and moves in the midst of modern life: it's the sublime that you can get to on the subway...
...You would expect them to feel especially betrayed to find themselves excluded from a street they used to call their own...
...The detour blocks—Fortieth or Forty-First Streets, Ninth Avenue—offered plenty of sleaze in their own right...
...Why should this be...
...On Monday afternoon," Neil Strauss wrote in the Times last spring, Adam Gassman, a 14-year-old from Queens, stood amid a gaggle of teenybopper girls outside MTV's Times Square studios, as he does almost every day after school...
...Magically yet realistically, it transports the shaken couple to a real city...
...They worked more easily than their predecessors with black performers and grasped black music...
...Fans of Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, and Toulouse-Lautrec, and people who have seen Moulin Rouge, will recognize her Parisian image, but I haven't found her in the iconography of America's Gilded Age...
...If it fails to revive, it will be mourned by many people who have no love for its market values...
...She finds herself inside an immense ballroom: at first, she seems part of the chorus...
...Times Girl's sexiness is open and artless, casual and messy, without apparent shame or guilt, but also without pomp or pretension...
...My mother, ace stenographer, was one of this company...
...Where does naiveté end and cruelty begin...
...In 1909, a state court overturned a city law limiting their size...
...The long-term process of modernization, and spinoffs such as democracy, city life, twentieth-century "consumer society," bright lights, and mass culture have created significant new openings for public life for both sexes...
...This is the first year that it's possible to see what the new Square really looks like...
...they are not, for instance, looking into each other's eyes, like the young lovers in so many thousands of street snapshots in the Kertesz-Bresson tradition...
...But when he tries to explain how the public could let itself be suckered into such a disgrace, his house goes dark...
...People shrieked, jumped up and down, danced, hugged and kissed each other, squeezed not only the friends and loved ones they had come to the Square with, but total strangers in the crowd whom they'd never seen and would never see again...
...Where did she learn to talk this way...
...We will meet her descendants in 42nd Street, Guys and Dolls, Gypsy, A Chorus Line, and in many films noirs...
...What the ad promised is something that the New York garment industry, just a few blocks down, knew how (and still knows how) to deliver: cheap knockoffs of expensive fabrics and designs, aristocratic fantasies that a plebeian mass public could afford...
...then she sings to the crowd, in an invitation both sexual and political, "Why don't you come and get me...
...she and my father met and fell in love on West Forty-Fifth Street and went to the theater and dancing there for hundreds of nights till the kids came along...
...Carrie knows which way he is going...
...Robertson, Dykstra, and Cahan deserve to be recognized as authentic Times Girls, stretchCora Cahan, president of New 42d Street...
...Dreiser calls Carrie's theatrical company "the Casino," maybe to dramatize his sense of the randomness of fate...
...Some people say it's the most crowded place in the world...
...He says he lives on the Bowery now...
...This is because for everyone who wants to exist in this place or even to dream about it, its presence is so intensely public...
...The complexities and contradictions of their shared sensibility are clear just in the titles of some of their books: Powers of Desire, The Sadean Women, Pleasure and Danger, The Bonds of Love...
...they not only instantly made Forty-Second Street and Broadway the most crowded place in New York, but connected it directly with far-flung immigrant neighborhood in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens...
...Of course, for women (or for men) who did not want to change, or who wanted not to change, Times Square was a far more problematical place...
...Reichl, reading Kornblum's numbers, is struck by the street's racial integration...
...Nearly overnight, a new generation of huge, bright, kinetic signs came to life...
...IHAVEN'T FIGURED out where I fit in here...
...They manifested their presence by obtrusively "hanging out," in delicatessen-type restaurants like Lindy's or directly on the street...
...The Nineties: The Three Witches Rule In the 1990s, the bureaucrats who were most powerful in dragging the renewal plan forward, and destroying the dilapidated Deuce, were three smart and articulate women, collectively known as the "Three Witches": Rebecca Robertson of the State Urban Development Corporation, Gretchen Dykstra of the Times Square Business Improvement District, and Cora Cahan of The New Forty-Second Street Foundation...
...By virtue of her verve and nerve, she incarnates what Baudelaire in the 1840s called "the heroism of modern life...
...3. And then there was the Light, which was spectacular before the First World War, but seems to have become truly overpowering in the 1920s...
...Best new building: the Forty-Second Street Rehearsal Hall, right next to the American Airlines Theatre...
...It now transmits only stock quotations...
...For women looking for ways to be modern, to change themselves, to become sexual subjects as well as objects, the Square was a great fair of human possibilities, an ideal democratic space...
...Why, George," she said, "what's the matter with you...
...The first was a notorious electric sign, a fifty-foot-high ad for "Heatherbloom Petticoats, Silk's Only Rival...
...1900: A Star Is Born In the 1900s, Times Square got the name we know it by today...
...But the fact that mass spectacles are constructed and programmed does not mean that they are fakes...
...If a high school student can create one, can be one here, and can make it into the Times, it may be a sign, not only that the kids are going to be all right, but that the "New Times Square," with its blend of electronics, groupies, demonstrators, spectators, and reporters, is going to be a fruitful place...
...In fact, libertarian feminist discourse was especially rich in the 1970s and 1980s, thanks to writers like Angela Carter, Ellen Willis, Alice Echols, Ann Snitow, Kate Ellis, Jessica Benjamin, Carol Gould, and many more...
...Our cities—and our citizens—need bright lights as badly as they need critical thought...
...then, dancing, she leads the crowd up and up a spiral staircase, to the penthouse where she will make her great leap...
...Better go on in," he said...
...She begins the story totally absorbed in farm work and care of her baby and emotionally dead...
...The Times Girl is not only Sister Carrie's kid sister, she is the twentieth century's first comic hero...
...But what's the matter with you anyhow...
...The picture is taken in daylight, near the center of the Square, looking north...
...These signs gave the Square a new scale of fame and nourished the fantasy lives of people all over the world...
...Look back at Classified, a wonderful 1926 silent film about the girls who work the phones to solicit ads for a Timesesque newspaper...
...Alas, stories of nakedness weren't in her playbook...
...The office of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, the theaters whose marquees flashed all through the Square, the corporations that flaunted their logos on extravagant signs, the companies that designed and installed the signs, Con Edison the electric company, and the Times, were all involved in the choreography...
...I've been sick, I told you...
...They flunk the basic skills test for city living: they simply look through the DISSENT / Fall 2001 • 7 9 WOMEN AND TIMES SQUARE people with whom they need to share space...
...Geoffrey O'Brien, The Times Square Story (W...
...And in the 1970s and 1980s, when Forty-Second Street was called "the Deuce," a large part of that aura was an assault on women's identity...
...But we still have to ask whether a sense of betrayal is a good basis for urban policy...
...Victory meant the destruction of one of the most murderous regimes in history...
...That group made itself famous not just for feeling rage but for expertly deploying and manipulating it...
...The enormous neo-Baroque Astor Hotel opened in 1905...
...Dreiser tells us she is embarrassed, and so is he...
...Some of these women were prostitutes, professionally offering many varieties of sex, appealing to customers in every class...
...Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver (Faber and Faber, 1990...
...In Martin Scorsese's classic 1976 film Taxi Driver, Cybil Shepherd is their representative...
...But one thing they shared was a strong feeling that the Deuce was a danger, not only to them but to all women...
...The Street Splits Now, one way to see Times Square in the second half of the twentieth century might be this: sailor and girl split up...
...This might help explain the strikingly intense female rage toward Times Square in the 1970s and 1980s...
...She stretches and spreads herself out over an abyss...
...In his hand was a large white sign with two words sloppily scrawled in thin black marker: TUPAC LIVES...
...Author's note: One of the most striking things about Times Square has been its capacity to generate discourse...
...But he just doesn't get it...
...August 1945: The Couple and the Crowd One of the great moments in the history of Times Square took place in August 1945, just after the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II...
...When women walking through the Square looked at each other, or at women characters and actresses (and fellow audience members) in plays or in the movies, or at singers and dancers in clubs or cabarets, or at figures on the giant signs around and above them, we should try to see their glances as part of their Bildung, their growth as human beings...
...then Powell sings to her that she should join the crowd...
...and Alexander Reichl, Reconstructing Times Square: Politics & Culture in Urban Development (University of Kansas, 1999...
...They vilified Times Square as a place that would drive "women out of control...
...Here," she said...
...But the fact was that when the crunch came, no libertarian feminists were willing to stand up for Forty-Second Street...
...Many of these writers went out of their way to celebrate sleazy neighborhoods from the standpoint of Bildung: women needed places to go where they could reimagine and rework their sexuality and their selves...
...Robertson, Dykstra, and Cahan knew that one of their big jobs was to reassure people that the plan wasn't in fact going to kill the street...
...she looks nice rather than "dangerous...
...For centuries, the only socially recognized "public women" were whores...
...Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (W...
...Still, the force of her comedy depends on her closeness to tragedy...
...One up, one down...
...William Kornblum and his graduate students from the City University of New York sociology department had a grant to count the people on the street, between Sixth and Eighth Avenues...
...Now she sings the same song again, but with a jazzy tempo, backed by a big swing band...
...and suddenly her face becomes the city: her eyes, nose, mouth, metamorphose into a landscape of midtown New York...
...In and around the "Tin Pan Alley" of the Brill Building, they created innovative forms of popular song...
...But nothing has been recorded about what Sister Carrie might have meant to them...
...Then the camera zooms in, and settles at closeup range...
...Some would have died rather than give up their virginity, yet sought alluring ways to present their sexuality in the ways they dressed, moved, spoke...
...The Depression and the Working Girl All writers on Times Square in the 1930s talk about its economic depletion and creeping sleaziness...
...When he says he can't get a job in New York, she responds not just with impatience but with a condescension that is new and startling: "You couldn't have tried so very hard, . . . I got something...
...She knows it herself and puts her appeal in the mail...
...I'm much obliged but I won't bother you any more...
...Very early in its life, Times Square emerged as a place where respectable women had the freedom to display themselves...
...A great, impure public place like Times Square is big enough to hold us all...
...Of course, you are one of these ingredients, even as you stand there trying to analyze the menu...
...In the great crowds that poured out of the subways, down from the elevated trains, off the trolleys and into the Square every day, there was an amazing variety of women of all classes and ethnicities: cooks, bakers, waitresses, seamstresses, milliners, maids, office cleaners, salesgirls for all commodities, actresses and singers and dancers, wardrobe mistresses and costumers, switchboard operators, fashion models, theater ushers and dressers, nightclub hatcheck girls, office clerks, typists, stenographers, bookkeepers, and on and on...
...Remember WAP, the Women Against Pornography group that led Take Back The Night marches through the sleaziest parts of the Deuce all through the 1970s...
...This is just the sort of thing that scared many people about the Square...
...The star of this number, playing Times Girl in the thirties, is Wini Shaw...
...It moved according to an elaborate electronic program and showed "a girl caught in a storm, with her skirts fluttering back and forth at the mercy of swirling rain and gusts of wind...
...They all highlight showgirls as members of a class, as victims of collective forms of suffering, as human subjects with a collective awareness, and as heroines in a collective struggle...
...She tried to answer but he turned away and shuffled off toward the east...
...But they lived and moved in the shadows, in private places...
...So far as I know, this is the one place in Berkeley's oeuvre where he focuses on an individual and her inner life...
...that if he doesn't get a better foothold fast, the momentum of her body is going to throw them both to the ground...
...Just then, like a spirit in a fairy tale, a trolley car suddenly materializes in the depths of the forest...
...The building was universally praised, and its image, beaming floodlights over the city, was reproduced on mass postcards and in Sunday rotogravures...
...As her dream unfolds, a metropolitan crowd surrounds her, and she alternately merges with the crowd and emerges from it...
...So there was plenty of life flowing through the wartime Square...
...This sign not only stopped traffic—it prefigures Sam Shaw's 1952 image of Marilyn Monroe photographed for The Seven Year Itch—but seems to have been very effective in stimulating sales...
...But her empathy and soulfulness disappear when her middle-aged lover stumbles and starts to fall...
...their presence marked the ascent of women into the highest ranks of corporate and political management...
...they are about how theatrical illusions are created by real people, members of real hierarchies of power, willing to sell themselves in exchange for real money—but often unable to find buyers...
...She smiles up at us, her black hair curling over her face...
...Four Notes on the 1920s 1. The arrival of Jews in Times Square, especially East European Jews, born "on the other side" enriched vaudeville and popular comedy, DISSENT / Fall 2001 n 75 WOMEN AND TIMES SQUARE which flourished in the Square...
...As the twentieth century dawns, she is just coming over the horizon, a sign of her times...
...She sings the "Lullaby" slowly, with only faint accompaniment...
...She is at home in public here in the way a soulful young clerk would be at home on the Nevsky Prospect in St...
...One of the most poignant 1930s meditations on individuality and collectivity is Busby Berkeley's "Lullaby of Broadway" number from the Gold Diggers of 1935...
...Look at her again and you will see a classic archetype of a modern woman on her own, inhabiting the city center but living close to the edge, surrounded by men and institutions who want her lights, but wouldn't think of recognizing her rights...
...She shows the world her spirit along with her flesh...
...Everything is dramatized as if it is her dream...
...their images were not flaunted in public or sent openly through the mails...
...Rebecca Robertson, head of the 42d Street Development Project...
...Thinking about the place can make you dizzy in some of the same ways as being there...
...then she is on a balcony, watching the crowd, with a movie star, Dick Powell...
...It includes a large crowd, but it features a sailor and a young woman, seen from behind, dressed like a nurse...
...But none of those blocks had an aura, the way Forty-Second Street has had an aura since Times Girl's day...
...So much of the history and reality of Times Square comes to life in this book, written even before the Square got its name...
...and Gretchen Dykstra, president of the Times Square B.I.D...
...I don't mean that there weren't women who looked like her in New York and in every other American city...
...There may never have been such a vast variety of women thrown together in any one place before...
...8o n DISSENT / Fall 2001 WOMEN AND TIMES SQUARE ing their silken legs over Broadway, working through the night to destroy Times Square in order to save it...
...Rains orders his assistant to "arrest the usual suspects...
...The most famous shot in this number comes at its dramatic climax, when, pressed by a great crowd, the girl plunges over a balcony— is her plunge an accident, a suicide, or a symbol of female orgasm...
...In the summer of 2001, the sign's great moving picture went dead...
...moreover, they were full of sailors, whose ships were docked along the Hudson just a quarter mile to the west...
...But here she learns what we have known all along: she got off the death train too early...
...yet its visual presence is so overpowering, that it makes not only the answers but even the questions seem trivial...
...Sometimes they especially named Times Square, possibly in response to WAP manifestos, which had demanded that Times Square be wiped off the face of the earth...
...he attacks her, but pulls back as she flees...
...Visions of other women suggested people they might want to know or imitate or hope to become...
...But there is recognition: in some essential way— this is the photo's charm—they know and they are known...
...IN THIS CONTEXT, imagine the power surge on the night of August 15, when, after years in the dark, all the lights in the Square came on...
...Best new sign: NASDAQ, mounted on the north side of the Conde Nast Building at Seventh Avenue and Forty-Third Street...
...He falls for the city girl whom they have taken in as a summer boarder...
...WAP is gone, but the Three Witches (and those who followed them) carry on its tradition of magical thinking...
...And then we have Times Girl...
...I'm not sure what I think about the late rapper Tupac Shakur, but I'm impressed with his young fan...
...My parents assured me that the Square really was full of people like those guys and dolls, but they were hanging around because it was the depression and there was no work...
...W. Norton & Company, 1992...
...I just got out of the hospital...
...Opponents of the plan never recognized this rage...
...She leaves him, concentrates on her career on the stage, and manages not to see what she knows is going on just offstage...
...Now the husband no longer needs a city girl: by plunging into the city, his wife has become that girl...
...And they didn't see that it was shared by many of New York's most educated and civically active women, who would ordinarily have been the fiercest fighters against a plan to kill a street...
...In the endless talk about Times Square, there's a lot of silliness that passes for urbanism on the left...
...But meanwhile, lots of teenage kids seem to be fitting themselves in just fine...
...Women have entered the Square as a classic workplace, or as an arena for a great variety of entertainments, or as both...
...Paul Schrader's screenplay puts it this way: "He is so much a part of his own world, he fails to comprehend another's world...
...If we face the reality of this collective sense of assault, it may help us grasp what happened next...
...Toward the east" signifies the East River, and, in the language of 1900, this river means death...
...Those of us who heard them at hearings and in interviews could see substantial differences in their sensibilities and views of the world...
...I have never seen a Heatherbloom Petticoat, but still I know how it was structurally similar to the electrified mass culture embodied in its sign...
...The Times Building, cartoon postcard, 1903...
...A different but similar spectrum opened up when they looked at men...
...It was one of those great American "wonders of the world," a space the whole world recognizes as magnificent and sublime...
...People who had been there both before and after the war were always saying this, and photographs convey some sense of what they were talking about...
...This sign originated in 1909, part of the first generation of signs with no size limit...
...The floodlights shone on special occasions at least till the 1930s...
...Many of the new buildings are bigger and more overbearing than what they replaced, but some of the new lines are surprisingly graceful and delicate...
...Occupants of this street were "overwhelmingly male (90 percent...
...Lewis Erenberg, Steppin' Out: New York Night Life and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930 (University of Chicago, 1981...
...This magic moment was carefully choreographed...
...women and their changing relationships to Times Square...
...These books, listed chronologically, are all interesting and valuable, but they barely scratch the surface...
...Samuel Delaney, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York University, 1999...
...They moved easily between media—vaudeville, theater, cabaret, radio, movies—and imagined "mass culture" before sociologists did...
...I have been writing about Times Square for years (see "The Lure of Times Square," Dissent, Fall 1997), and hope to finish a book on it, to be called One Hundred Years of Spectacle: Metamorphoses of Times Square: Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, 1900 (first uncensored version, University of Pennsylvania and Viking Penguin, 1981...
...A great public space puts everybody in it on display...
...This is a demonstration at once against Times Square and within it...
...This essay is organized around the idea of Woman—or rather, around different forms of This essay is adapted from the forthcoming One Hundred Years of Spectacle: Metamorphoses of Times Square and from a talk given at the Leo Bronstein Memorial lecture in April of this year...
...All these women were graduates of elite schools and colleges...
...All right," he answered softly "I'll give it back to you some day" People stare at this odd couple...
...While the schoolgirls begged producers to let them into the studios for the day's taping of "Total Request Live," Adam looked on dour-faced...
...This is a photograph by Alfred Eisenstadt, published in Life magazine...
...The one-man demonstration is a classic modernist form, put on the map by Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground...
...The Times's new corporate headquarters opened with an extravagant fireworks display on the stroke of midnight, on New Year's day 1905...
...The building is the new Times Tower: in 1903 it wasn't open for business yet, but its triangular structure and Renaissance facade were complete and laid out on Forty-Second Street...
...These 1930s films, although they hardly ever use anything that could be called Marxist language, shift consciousness in what we have to call a Marxist direction...
...You would probably have to go to the meatpacking district to top that 90 percent...
...With great cleverness, Robertson was invoking one of New York's classic mottos, "There are eight million stories in the naked city...
...Both are part of what Henri Lefebvre calls "The Right to the City" It's a right for which the left has to learn to fight, not only against our rulers but even sometimes against ourselves, against our desire for purity and perfection...
...The thousands of people who worked around the Square every day became a primary market for the theaters, restaurants, dance halls, and cabarets that thrived by night...
...They all uphold the Times Girl tradition of portraying the showgirl—the girl in the chorus line, not the star—as Times Square's Representative Man...
...In the course of that magical summer, the great power surge was repeated, often with jazz accompaniment...
...William Kornblum, editor, 42nd Street: The Bright Lights District (City University of New York, 1978...
...The subways were more jammed than ever and the late crowds even thicker...
...West Forty-Second Street, anchor of the WOMEN AND TIMES SQUARE Square, came to reproduce the social order of the ship—all mates, no dames—while the girl and her friends came to feel that there was no place for them on what used to be their street...
...Enraptured with her, he dreams of an abstract, psychedelic landscape that is very suggestive of the "Dream Street" incarnation of Times Square...
...She is aghast and walks out in revulsion...
...The girl seems to have hurled herself with great enthusiasm: as she grasps him hard, her purse swings ahead of her, her legs kick up behind...
...His only explanation is that the public saw the Street as black turf (even though, as he shows by the numbers, it wasn't) and felt nothing but racist revulsion...
...Of course, it has been the same for plenty of men...
...He is embarrassed and confused: he didn't mean to hurt her...
...For God's sake, let me have a little money, will you...
...In the city, she comes to life, and grows into an animated, vibrant, radiantly sexual person...
...One feature of the literature they produced, which I've never heard discussed, was its urbanism and its desire to fight for a shared vision of city life...
...His policy analysis is incisive and trenchant...
...I want to start with several fragments and put them together into a coherent story...
...we can also get there on the subway...
...The targets of the ad must have been seamstresses and switchboard operators on their way to work, or schoolteachers and stenographers going to plays...
...Given the overpowering depression with which Dreiser afflicts him, probably no one could have helped him before, either...
...Elegant restaurants went bankrupt and were replaced with fast food joints...
...She slides back into sleep, and wakes up just in time for another night on the town...
...They are cordoning themselves off, not only from a great source of joy, but from the moral and psychological growth that city life can bring...
...The Three Witches came from a generation of women who had every reason to feel betrayed by the Square in its Midnight Cowboy incarnation...
...Carrie Meeber, Dreiser's heroine, starts out as a Wisconsin farm girl, boarding a train for Chicago, driven not by a will to succeed or get rich but by a vaguer, more general yearning for a better life...
...Since the coming of the subways in 1904, the Square has been the most crowded place in New York...
...It is a collage of a woman and a building...
...One minute, you feel you are drowning in floods of talk and thought...
...Their failure to do so should make it clear how far gone the Square was, and why it had to go...
...There is one more important thing these movies share...
...This is what the classic Jerome Kern—Paul Robeson Showboat is all about...
...He thinks of killing his wife (Dreiser's American Tragedy had just appeared...
...Of course," said Carrie, her lip trembling...
...In this period, Damon Runyon's Times Square writing canonized a whole generation of small-time hustlers of both sexes who spent their lives hanging around...
...However, you could ask whether anybody involved in recent Times Square controversies could pass this test...
...There really was such a company, on Thirty-Ninth and Broadway, just up from the Met, just down from the Square...
...Millions of watts of power came on, a rainbow of neon colors came on, Lady Liberty's floodlights came on, the Times building's zipper came on, the three hundred-foot-long Wrigley Spearmint waterfall came on, the Camel sign with the soldier blowing smoke rings came on...
...Alexander Reichl, in his Reconstructing Times Square, gives a highly detailed account of a spectacular real estate giveaway, featuring billion-dollar subsidies to some of the richest and most bloated corporations in the world...
...The photo's moment may have been the last moment when people understood not only Times Square, but New York City itself, as symbols of America...
...At a time when Hollywood was on a roll of spectacular prosperity, many people benefiting from this roll still believed that the theater, so much more precarious and vulnerable than the movies, was correspondingly more "authentic...
...But women have had to come a longer way, to make a bigger leap, and to pay a greater price...
...Of course, he brings us his usual Piranesian vistas and Gargantuan choruses...
...she sits on it, entwines herself around it, smiles playfully and kicks her legs out like a girl on a swing...
...One last point...
...She is its star, not only in the sense that she does more acting and singing and gets more screen time than anybody else, but also in the sense that the whole number, with its cast of hundreds, is about her, her fantasies about herself, her quest for identity...
...The first fragment is a souvenir postcard, supposedly dating from 1903, which I found in the Museum of the City of New York (reproduced in Columbia Historical Portrait of New York, edited by John Kouwenhoven...
...Their rage was more than a front for racism or real estate deals, it was real and went deep...
...She is too close...
...stylish boutiques gave way to Army-Navy stores...
...People who didn't like them said they treated the Square like a ghetto...
...Not that it would have made a difference if they had...
...Five hundred pages and ten years later, she is a star on Broadway risen from the DISSENT / Fall 2001 n 73 WOMEN AND TIMES SQUARE chorus overnight as Carrie Madenda, toast of the town, her (new) name in lights...
...If she can move onward and upward, why can't he...
...in response to the social and psychic splits it expressed, they wanted to split its head open...
...4. Sunrise...
...The girl has just, a second ago, thrown herself into the sailor's arms...
...There were virtually no women here...
...Photo by Chang W. Lee/New York Times, 1996...
...Sales to whom...
...It has been a workplace for a tremendous assortment of women who, in Karl 72 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 Marx's words, could "live only so long as they find work" and who "find work only as long as their labor increases capital," who have been forced to "sell themselves piecemeal" and compete with other women very like themselves, whose lives have been shaped by "the vicissitudes of competition and the fluctuations of the market...
...Many New Yorkers today, in their relationship to one of the city's primary spaces, are arresting themselves...
...Brooks Atkinson, Broadway (Macmillan, 1970...
...She would give and share more if she could, but it is clear that nobody can help him now...
...In historical perspective, this statistic gives Forty-Second Street a startling trajectory: it began as a public space where women could feel at home and gradually developed into its opposite, a place from which women were almost totally removed...
...Some of these people sound like Claude Rains in Casablanca, when he says he is "shocked, shocked" to hear that there is gambling...
...William Taylor, editor, Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World (Russell Sage, 1991...
...The question is part of a bigger one: where will anyone fit into this place...
...In fact, this thinking works better in corporate and bureaucratic suites than it ever worked in the street...
...He put her in a pumpkin shell, and there he kept her very well...
...The sailor's body language seems uncertain, but he has probably grasped what we can see (or is it just the camera angle...
...but now they mean far more than usual, because, instead of just dropping these tropes on our heads from some Olympian sky, he shows us how they can spring organically from a woman's life, from "her yearning capacity...
...The two films share many of the same themes...
...I've heard citizens of Tokyo and Calcutta say that DISSENT / Fall 2001 n 77 WOMEN AND TIMES SQUARE their hometown crowds are pallid in comparison...
...what makes her special to people is a kind of "emotional greatness," a soulful "longing for that which is better...
...It was instantly beloved, especially by producers and consumers of "show business," but also by tourists looking for New York "flavor...
...She seems paralyzed with guilt and anxiety, and keeps asking him what is the matter...
...82 n DISSENT / Fall 2001...
...One of the places they fit is under the giant picture window of the new MTV studio, on the west side of Broadway between Forty-Fourth and Forty-Fifth...
...they created a press and a language to talk about it...
...And thousands more every day and night came into the Square as customers for its infinite varieties of entertainment...
...What has Times Square meant to a century of women...
...All through the twentieth century, Times Square was a tremendous visual presence, not just in New York, but around the world...
...If the MTV kids are lucky, they will get to see themselves on television...
...Her style prefigures the formula that Florenz Ziegfeld would develop for his Follies: fullblown sexuality combined with the artless sweetness of "the girl next door...
...An editorial from around 1910, noting that many dance halls were opening up there, lamented the hodge-podge of people in which respectable young married and unmarried women, and even debutantes, dance not only under the same roof but in the same room with women of the town...
...People increasingly spoke of the Square as a kind of psychedelic environment, "Dream Street...
...Its members constructed a politics of demonology that would have done any southern demagogue proud...
...This was the end of a war that had killed more than thirty million people, including six million Jews, a great many with families among the two million Jews in and around New York...
...It is the wife, played by Janet Gaynor, in whose changes we really believe...
...And our subways (alone in the world, I believe) run all through the night, so that the crowds can gather twenty-four hours a day, and New York can enjoy some cachet as "the city that never sleeps...
...Even if they don't get on TV, they may make it into the pages of one of the Conde Nast magazines (Vogue and others) produced in the gigantic building just across the street...
...The conjunction of youth and this not-yet-finished building are a perfect symbol for the first "New Times Square...
...How could people not have felt ecstatic...
...She was opening her purse, and now pulled out all and the only bills in it, a five and two twos...
...Nonprofessionals offered themselves to coworkers, bosses, or customers, sometimes in hope of a respectable marriage, other times settling for such cruder satisfactions as furs, jewels, and money for the rent...
...There have always been more libertarian ways to stand up for women...
...They spend a tourist day exploring the city, and Murnau makes the trip transform them both...
...The heroine is Babs Comet, "a girl whose earning capacity fell short of her yearning capacity...
...Meanwhile, the development of electric power in the 1900s made it feasible to install enormous electric signs, sometimes mounted on the roofs of shorter older buildings, sometimes on the facades of big new ones...
...See how her arms, shoulders, and legs are visible, her skirts blowing in the wind...
...During the Second World War, many factories were running night shifts in the garment center, just a few blocks to the south...
...These films are all about the backstage world, the world behind the world of illusion...
...W. Norton & Company, 1998...
...IN CARRIE'S ERA, there were two other very striking images of women in Times Square...
...She plunges down into the cityscape, and now the great first shot is reversed: the city becomes her face...
...Murnau's surreal Times Square is the medium of her metamorphosis...
...And it frightened the hell out of many moralists, religious and secular, politically right and left, who agitated in vain for laws that would shut down the theaters and subways and close down the whole town by 10 p.m...
...Let's think about public spaces now...
...As NASDAQ's book value keeps plunging, we will see if the sign survives...
...He notes something else—"the real pattern of dominance [on Forty-Second Street] was based on gender"—but he misses its significance...
...If my analysis of Times Square cultural traditions is right, then women have felt a special intimacy with Forty-Second Street that goes back for generations...
...What worried them in the 1920s, so they said, was the power of this spectacle to render people— usually young people, often female people, but really all people—"blinded by the light...
...then suddenly she turns blonde, and becomes Ginger Rogers, and gets whirled in the air by a man who travesties Fred Astaire...
...She kicks her legs up with the exuberance of a girl on a swing...
...She looks undefended, like an open city...
...The women I want to talk about lived over four periods: first, the Square's early years, before World War I; second, the 1920s, "the jazz age," supposedly the Square's most dazzling period...
...her face luminous against a background of total blackness, putting special stress on one of the last lines: "Your baby goes home to her flat, to sleep all day...
...Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York...
...They all came on with implacable hauteur...
...But it was also more: I believe it has played a major role in women's Bildung, in their moral education, the process of finding themselves, of identity formation, of growing up...
...But it flowed in darkness, as the Square, like all the rest of New York, was enveloped by a blackout...
...They just don't get it...
...She is almost as big as the tower...
...The DISSENT / Fall 2001 n 71 WOMEN AND TIMES SQUARE woman is a gigantic cartoon, dressed in the provocative outfit of a chorus girl...
...Ironically, the very depletion and desperation that enveloped depression-era Broadway qualified that neighborhood, maybe for the first time in its history, to represent a real world...
...A year or two later, he has crumbled into a drunken bum, dressed in rags, his body and face caved in, not far from starvation...
...These buildings expanded the architectural scale, paved the way for more big buildings, mostly office towers, and enlarged both the day and night populations...
...For fifteen years or so, no woman I know would go there...
...He shows how the Forty-Second Street urban renewal project destroyed many small-scale urban resources that were perfectly viable and delivered nothing to the public in return...
...Most of America's grand spaces—Niagara Falls, the Everglades, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone—are in the wilderness, a world away from the pressures of modern life...
...Moreover, at the request of the Civil Defense Administration, everyone was dressed in black, so that people looked both spectral and menacing...
...This ad had already run in the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine, and soon it found a home beyond the Three Witches' reach, on classy Fifty-Seventh Street, right next to Carnegie Hall...
...In traditional cultures, "women of the town" are routinely displayed, but respectable women are displayed only at specified times (for example, festivals), and then only under the control of others: parents, husbands, elders, priests...
...Eisenstadt's postwar celebration is so memorable because it reads as a parable of "The Good War" itself— America's last good war...
...MTV's presence is as commercial as can be, nourished by big tax breaks, but it also fits into Times Square's century-old history as a production site as well as an exhibition space for advanced mass media...
...When The Jazz Singer created 76 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 a sensation in October 1927, it obliterated what may have been the greatest film ever made in Hollywood, F. W. Murnau's Sunrise, which had opened just a few days before...
...Thanks to progress in computer graphics, the best of the new signs are more thrilling than ever...
...It presupposed a large num74 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 WOMEN AND TIMES SQUARE ber of respectable women who would respond to a public, flamboyant sexual display and buy a garment that they hoped would help them change themselves in its image...
...I don't understand exactly how this came to be, but it is important to see that it was real...
...Not to the most affluent women in the Square, who would have surely stuck with silk, since ancient times a symbol of class...
...Most of the theaters went dark or were taken over by cinema or burlesque...
...They hitch rides from various points uptown, and by the time they hit the north end of the Square, they have to fight the drivers off...
...Thus Robertson said the New Times Square would be more diverse and inclusive than any theme park or suburban mall: When we're done, we'll have 60 different stories on Forty-Second Street, arguing, fighting for product and advertising space...
...In this form he encounters her by the Casino Theatre, where she is now a star...
...Something like this could be said about all the people in the last decade who have come to nostalgically glorify the Deuce...
...Where will women fit into the Times Square of the twenty-first century...
...But this has never been the only feminist perspective...
...Looking on a century later, we have to agree that, to a large extent, the fears were justified...
...We don't know anything about this couple, but they look like strangers...
...All this gave the Square an aura of tremendous sexual promise...
...a minute later, if you just step back and gaze around, the floods look like puddles...
...To be part of it is not only a human right...
...Murnau's hero is a family farmer who is at both an economic and a psychic dead end...
...She curves her right hip into the building's phallic tower and caresses it with her right hand, while she kicks her right leg out into the expanse of Broadway...
...A nursery rhyme that every child knows gets the classic gender polarity just right: Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater, had a wife but couldn't keep her...
...Dreiser's Carrie isn't beautiful or smart in any conventional way...
...It helped both my mother and father move beyond the horizons of the Lower East Side ghetto where they grew up...
...Alix Kates Shulman, On the Stroll (Alfred A. Knopf, 1981...
...She is innocent of the Gilded Age pretension that comes naturally to most of the people around her...
...I'm a bit surprised that a Post Office haunted by Anthony Comstock let this card be sent through the mails...
...Petersburg...
...I will call her "Times Girl...
...When an animal-rights group tried to mount a billboard that portrayed a nude image of the model Pamela Lee testifying she would rather wear nothing at all than wear fur, the corporation said no: "too racy for Times Square...
...Look at her...
Vol. 48 • September 2001 • No. 4
