A Times Square for the New Millennium: Life on the Cleaned-up Boulevard
Berman, Marshall
SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO, in a devastating song, Lou Reed portrayed FortySecond Street and Times Square as the "Dirty Boulevard." Looking at this same place today, we would have to call it...
...Its shape suggests a rollercoaster stood on its side...
...Hardly any of those kids will get on the air, except as part of the crowd, which seems to mean a lot to quite a few...
...the blocks of giant slabs on Upper Sixth) or the four giant Egyptian tombs designed by Philip Johnson for developer George Klein in the 1980s, part of an immense, abortive plan to turn Times Copyright © 2006 by Marshall Berman Square into "Rockefeller Center South...
...where was I supposed to do it if not here, at the Square's core...
...Late in the 1990s, it created a news zipper of its own, running along the building's marquee...
...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...
...If they want to be here now, they can't be made to move on...
...But once NASDAQ's book value plunged, its romantic graphics abruptly disappeared...
...They keep theater crowds flowing and overflowing at the Square's core...
...THANKS TO PROGRESS in Computer graphics, the best of the new signs and the total ensemble of signs are more exciting than ever...
...The reality of production in the Square generates not only many new jobs, but a distinctive vitality and allure...
...This spectacle is as old, and as modern, as the city itself...
...I saw three white men standing in front of the building, all large, middle-aged men in brown suits talking on cell phones...
...Neil Strauss might have learned this from that "gaggle of teenybopper girls," if he had bothered to talk to them...
...As we observed the midday traffic rush by, he seemed to abandon that idea...
...ABC's texts and images alike run to the shallow and the horrific: debris after bombs, blood saturating streets in neon red...
...I'd hate to wait for that post...
...One more striking case of this process is the fate of the electronic "zipper" that transmits breaking news...
...The thrill's not gone...
...The sign that attracted the most attention in the late 1990s was the electronic turret of the NASDAQ sign, on the north facade of the Conde Nast building...
...The biggest continuing draw is a program called TRL, Total Request Live, broadcast weekdays at 5 p.m...
...it evokes and strengthens the Square's perennial claim to be carnivalesque...
...In any case, this guard wasn't on routine patrol: he had come out of the building specifically to accost me...
...The worst of the new buildings are mediocre, not monstrous, and they are oriented toward the street system, rather than being—like the Astor and Marriott buildings—blows against it...
...The best new buildings are small, like the New 42nd Street Rehearsal Studios, whose delicate lighting blurs the boundary between building and sign...
...I might have had an unpleasant night, but I would have spoken up in court for the freedom of the city...
...The most romantic new sign in the recent Square was the half-scale model of the Concorde, the British-French Airways jetliner, installed on top of the Times Square Brewery, right at the Square's core, in 1996...
...It presents the modern city at its most expansive and intense...
...Must it happen here...
...But it was my son Danny's tenth birthday...
...Tama Starr, whose company built it, points out its curved corners, "an optical illusion designed to give the feeling that the information was coming out of the building, going across the front, and then going back into the building to be reprocessed, as if it were a manufacturing process...
...The big thing is that it isn't as bad, as antiseptic, as suburban, as many of us feared...
...He clearly wasn't prepared for encounters like this...
...Looking at this same place today, we would have to call it "the cleaned-up boulevard...
...it was a trip where the whole world could cruise...
...I moved on—the guard said, "Thanks"—and I got on the subway and headed back home...
...For boys and girls together, looking for publicity or for each other, the new Times Square looks like the place to be...
...I said I was writing a book on Times Square, and taking notes on what was there...
...Times Square, all through its "one hundred years of spectacle," has always been a place that wakes people up and makes them feel alive, more alive than they are supposed to be...
...It was a terrific ad for the Times, telling us that even in the midst of the Square's carnival phantasmagoria, we could trust the paper to keep us in touch 80 DISSENT / Winter 2006 with what was going on in the real world...
...In fact, I was also in the Square that day to buy him gifts: an Eminem CD, an MTV Times Square T-shirt...
...The planners who imagined the new Square as a center for media production, not just for consumption and display, were on to something real...
...he had a cell phone at82 DISSENT / Winter 2006 tached to his belt, and he had clearly been talking to somebody...
...No, this sounds too conspiratorial...
...Again he shrugged: look, he had his orders...
...More likely, it was a misunderstanding...
...And isn't that bright boy part of their generation...
...But so much of our popular culture today is organized by media conglomerates, which are just as suspicious and hostile to people as steel conglomerates, liquor conglomerates, cereal conglomerates, auto conglomerates...
...The Concorde was one of the most glorious forms ever created by modern design, looking at it was always a thrill, and in the Square it was a perfect fit...
...World-class conglomerates take it for granted that their plus-size bottom lines entitle them to control the space around them...
...Any one of them could be the Times Girl or the Jazz Singer of tomorrow...
...MARSHALL BERMAN, author of All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, teaches at the City College of New York and the City University of New York...
...In 2001, the New York Times ran a story by Neil Strauss about a one-man protest against MTV, in the name of Tupac Shakur, a rapper who had been murdered young: DISSENT / Winter 2006 81 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...
...This sign works wonderfully as a travesty of what it was...
...Most likely, people who care about our streets and our spaces and our city will have to make signs and make noise and find ways to post it ourselves...
...I and many other people said this was silly, because on the sidewalks of New York, unlike inside Disneyland (and all other theme parks), they didn't control the space...
...Did I say, "All that is solid melts into air...
...if they look great or sound great, somebody somewhere, besides their parents and friends, will know...
...The big new buildings are more overbearing than the ones they replaced, but not one of them is as bad as the dreadful skyscrapers that blasted into the Square's heart a generation ago (One Astor Plaza, killer of the lovely Astor Hotel...
...But maybe somebody in city government gave the big boys a signal, or at least a hint, not to worry...
...There are some really good buildings in "The New Times Square...
...But I'm old enough to remember when you couldn't find any uniforms at all...
...The format is that "scouts" come down from above, survey the crowd on the street, and choose a few to "go upstairs," where they can become a small part of the day's action...
...Some of their products are thrilling and humanly liberating...
...The first big idea, which goes back to the start of the Enlightenment, is that the right to the city is a basic human DISSENT / Winter 2006 83 ing from the first, is the right to be part of the city spectacle...
...That was how people talked about James Dean and about Charlie Parker (they scrawled BIRD LIVES in the subway) when I was fourteen...
...Some adults are sure they can live without all that jazz...
...Did Reuters think it owned the street...
...It sounded like it did...
...Its electronic power suggested not that newspapers were being superseded by "new media," but that this paper was resourceful enough to do whatever it would take to keep the public in touch...
...84 DISSENT / Winter 2006...
...The Times's abandonment of its primal zipper is a parable of its betrayal of the Square as a human space...
...Epilogue: Reuters and Me I was standing in front of the Reuters building in June 2004 doing something I've done often through the past couple of years: sketching and taking notes on the people and the signs...
...I yelled, "HELP...
...it gave everybody a thrill...
...I am often sick of these uniforms and feel flooded out and menaced by them...
...Many adults are scornful, and would like to throw it all out...
...If he had, it could have helped him confirm his story's idea: Don't mourn the new Times Square...
...the "Hercules Units," city cops with machine guns and light body armor...
...but isn't it a little early to write off kids who often haven't even reached high school...
...At first that sign was a museum of kinetic art, with an amazing variety of forms, colors, textures, and patterns of motion...
...For people old enough to remember, it is a lightning rod for rage...
...I couldn't find a cop, no one in any nearby shop would let me call one, and the guy just kept bleeding...
...Its eclipse drew attention to another capitalist beacon whose design made it less dependent on history's ups and downs: the giant Morgan Stanley sign at the Square's northwest corner, enveloping the company's headquarters at 1585 Broadway...
...I don't think he ever stopped bleeding, but if they keep your head uncovered it means you're still alive, right...
...What no one imagined was that the world tourist industry was even more volatile than the New York real estate industry, and that even before Boston Properties had a chance to pull the model from the roof, a close-to-bankrupt British Airways would pull the thing itself, the Concorde, from the sky...
...It carried an excellent series on the antiGOP mass demonstration that took place just a few blocks away from this building, on August 29, 2004...
...As I noted the details of a LET THE NEW AGE BEGIN sign, I was disturbed by a man wearing a plastic vest marked SECURITY, a black man around forty years old, who told me I was not allowed to stand in front of the building...
...I called it "Albert Speer Plaza...
...Was I making too big a deal of this...
...The Conde Nast building and the Westin Hotel were designed to look dynamic and original from the angles at which they are most often seen, but utterly pedestrian from everywhere else...
...As the Clinton boom became a memory, the sign decayed into a clunky, overgrown bulletin board, its adventurous graphics loved and mourned mainly by people who had little love for its market values...
...They are all over the place, but their biggest crowds are on the sidewalk in front of (really underneath) the MTV production studio, on the west side of Broadway between Forty-Fourth and FortyFifth...
...There are people in assorted law enforcement uniforms— the New York Police Department...
...The Reuters Building has a castlelike bulk and heft, so I could be sure there would be plenty of days...
...Will it be posted on the zipper, or on the Morgan Stanley sign...
...Could it have been Rudolph Giuliani, who was so proud to be photographed signing the documents that brought them in...
...One of the virtues of today's spectacle is its capacity not only to contain but to nourish protests against it...
...Meanwhile...
...If I were a serious citizen, as I like to think I am, I would protest another day...
...New York City had offered immense tax breaks to Disney, to Virgin, to MTV, and at last to Reuters, in the context of what Lynn Sagalyn calls "a dramatic shift in values, from corporate business to popular culture...
...It's nice to see that Rudolph Giuliani's project of turning the keys to the city over to Disney hasn't turned the city into Disneyland...
...the U.S...
...But are we supposed to think of him as more heroic or more authentic because he's dead...
...The rollercoaster structure of its sign suggests a world full of startling leaps and plunges, but one that can finally be contained, so that everything comes back to where it started, and a life full of dread can still be a carnival...
...When Disney arrived on the deuce in the middle of the 1990s, some people said it was turning Times Square into one of its private theme parks...
...Traub savors the irony that so many of Morgan Stanley's executives apparently did not want to be in New York in the first place, did not want to locate in a prominent part of the city, and did not want to have a spectacular sign...
...I felt terrible, and I still feel terrible, that I just let it be...
...It will keep on flowing whether times are good or bad, a classic rather than romantic spectacle, immune to time's booms and busts...
...What...
...Doesn't he, like every avant-garde in history, share their desire for exposure and publicity...
...the Department of Environmental Affairs...
...and a wide variety of street, building, and corporate security guards—working to guard the Square's cleanliness and order...
...MTV's production values fuse sexual display, salesmanship (or rather salespersonship), and spectacle, in a way that harmonizes with some of the Square's oldest traditions...
...In the void the Times left a generation ago, electronic media have finally begun to stake claims...
...so I let it be, until the day one of these global corporations touched me, and told me I wasn't allowed to stand on the street on Forty-Second Street and Broadway...
...When they signed in, nobody wanted to complicate the party by explaining that New York's everyday life depends on the simple but complex practice of sharing space...
...On one hand, Reuters, the British news service, is probably the freest in the world, offering a picture of reality that is more incisive and generally accurate than any of its American competitors...
...The Square's original zipper flashed fresh news across the triangular structure of the old Times Tower: it made breaking news part of the building...
...You can't keep MTV on for long without seeing a dramatic perspective of "the outside," and MTV's outside is Times Square...
...It enveloped the whole world in its spectacle of bright lights...
...His longplanned party was going to start in an hour uptown...
...When I think of the appalling big buildings constructed in my lifetime, the mediocrity of "The New Times Square" looks like progress...
...As for Tupac, his early death was heartrending...
...This situation oozed irony...
...The zipper still zips, its century-old technology classically cheap and adequate...
...disturbing the peace...
...I replied that there I wouldn't be able to see the things whose presence I was trying to record...
...This was true for the Roman circuses lamented by the poet Juvenal in the first century and for the Nuremberg Rallies that typified the horrors of the twentieth...
...By and by the manager of one of the pornographic cinemas came out with his walkie-talkie (this was long before cell phones), and in a minute an ambulance came and took the man away...
...its blend of toys, electronics, T-shirts, groupies, demonstrators, spectators, and reporters is developing into a fruitful place, a place where "the kids are all right...
...and found myself totally alone...
...Most forms of city spectacle are designed at once to give their spectators a thrill and to reduce them to docility...
...How many more of the Square's new corporate giants share this belief...
...Where did these guys get the idea that they own the street...
...The guard shrugged and looked at me sadly: why was I making his job hard...
...ABC now produces Good Morning America live in the office tower at 1500 Broadway, between Forty-Third and Forty-Fourth Streets...
...It was mounted on top of one of the Square's few surviving low buildings, and we knew it was only a matter of time before the model was evicted for some new skyscraper...
...I have been telling stories about how the Square has enticed and inspired all sorts of men and women to step out of line, to engage actively with the city, merge their subjectivity into it, and change the place as they change themselves...
...there are whole generations of stories waiting to be lived...
...In his hand was a large white sign with two words sloppily scrawled in thin black marker: TUPAC LIVES...
...if I didn't leave, I would be "forcibly removed...
...Sometimes this has crushed the self (Edward Hurstwood's "I'll quit this"), but sometimes it has brought joy and creative triumph (The Jazz Singer's "my name in electric lights...
...There is a giant video screen just above the curved marquee, designed to illustrate the news events the zipper describes...
...I still look back fondly on the hearings and demonstrations that kept it from being built...
...0 NE OF THE FIRST groups of people to fit itself comfortably into the new Times Square has been teenagers...
...The old spectacles are gone, but the people on the street look like they have the life and energy to create new ones—including big or small demonstrations ("TUPAC LIVES") that things are wrong...
...my wife would have called people we know in the press, and some of them would have seen something alarming enough to print...
...Maybe, too, considering the line of fire where he has placed himself, he even wants to meet girls...
...Those kids could be auditioning for the primeval 42nd Street or A Chorus Line...
...I'll take the uniforms, thanks, so long as they keep people on the street alive...
...Maybe it was just a slow day, and the guard, a lower-level employee, felt that in order to keep his job, he had to convince his superiors he could handle strangers like me—an old fat man with a beard, in a T-shirt and shorts, with a red notebook...
...Whatever this fight consists of, it may be the only way we can translate the Enlightenment idea of "the right to the city" into twenty-first century Times Square...
...But they will need a pretty big garbage bag, marked "popular culture" or "American dreams" or "city life...
...Some of the new lines and planes are surprisingly graceful and delicate...
...Others will have second thoughts, which is what adults are supposed to have...
...People with point-and-shoot cameras love to be shot, and to shoot each other, against the background of this curve...
...The squarest and soberest people who love Times Square today may have to do what those Marx Brothers of Rap, the Beastie Boys, told their MTV audience they would have to do in 1986: "You gotta fight for your right to party...
...Now I was really mad...
...His new book, On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square, from which this essay is excerpted and adapted by permission, will be published by Random House in February 2006...
...There are other stories I could have told, and still others I can't tell...
...First, he suggested "in the street...
...The best ones are the oldest, and they are live and lively theaters: the New Amsterdam, once home of the Ziegfeld Follies, now the Disney flagship, and the neo-Baroque New Victory, now a terrific avant-garde and cosmopolitan children's theater...
...As I CLOSE, there are two big ideas to sign...
...He pointed to what looked like a pillar used by construction men, and said I could stand against or behind it...
...This story is more complex than it looks...
...I asked, whether they, too, were forbidden to stand in front of the building...
...And how did they get it...
...The victim went down and spurted blood all DISSENT / Winter 2006 79 over the street, from which everyone instantly disappeared...
...But it may be premature for the Times to embrace his picture of reality, a reality divided into "a gaggle of teenybopper girls" who crowd the pavement, wave to the people in the studio upstairs, and are dying to be invited in to expose themselves, versus a solitary, honest avantgarde guy who stands alone, scrawls sloppily, and wouldn't go inside if MTV paid him to...
...But the program, now sponsored by Dow Jones, consists mainly of stock quotations and sports scores...
...0 N ANY GIVEN day, there are people in many differently colored uniforms— New York Sanitation Department, Urban Development Corporation, Business Improvement District, and more...
...James Traub describes it as a spectacle of pure numbers in perpetual motion: "three bands of stock information," prices on the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, and the Dow, "running across the facade at different speeds, [flanked by] forty-foot-high cylindrical maps, showing the time zones of Morgan Stanley offices across the world...
...Traub says it "makes essential statements about the company: that it traffics in information, not just in money...
...The company triumphed in spite of itself...
...Some of them, if they hang out long enough, may make it as extras into one of the Conde Nast magazines produced here: Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, Self, Allure...
...One twilight evening on the deuce in April 1980, I saw a man crack another man's skull, with a club that looked like a prop from The Flintstones...
...that it is in the moment...
...Maybe it was the "Alice's Restaurant" syndrome in action, where lots of crime-fighting capability meets little crime, and cops get itchy...
...What kind of citizen was I? I should have stayed on the spot in protest, forced a confrontation, got arrested—I wonder what would it have been for, for "loitering...
...what is he creating today...
...Or maybe Michael Moore has changed the ball game, so that wherever security forces meet, Fat Men Spell Danger...
...His murder in 1998 is still unsolved...
...There was no way on earth I could explain not being there to him: not yet...
...that it is a central switching device in the global economy...
...In the daytime, the sunlight reflects in striking ways off the skyscrapers' glass, and the total ensemble looks more exciting than we had any reason to expect...
...This has been so ever since the coming of the New York Times a century ago...
...Ironically, its builtin optical illusions will enhance its capacity to tell us the truth—but also its capacity to mislead us...
...Children of the 1960s loved it: it could wash over you, you could get high...
...What can we say about life on the cleaned-up boulevard...
...Pac's rapping was intense and powerful, so was his movie acting (see Juice), but he was flamboyantly theatrical, expert in creating spectacle, and deeply dependent on MTV, which has kept him in heavy rotation long after his death, and put him in platinum from beyond the grave...
...The Times is snide about those girls...
...Military Police...
...disorderly conduct...
...That zipper was one of the highlights of the "paper America," the America that existed to be written about, that Jack Kerouac celebrated in On the Road...
...The zipper immediately became an integral part of the experience of being here: you would stop, read, and reflect...
...and that it is . . . a branding device both for Morgan Stanley and for Times Square...
...What has made Times Square special for a century is that, to a remarkable extent, it really did belong to everybody...
...Will our city government explain it now...
...It gives people ideas, new ideas about how to look and how to move, ideas about being free and being oneself and being with each other...
...On another hand, here it was acting just like the many despotic regimes it covers so well around the world, regimes to which the British feel so superior, regimes that deny that their people are a public and deny that their city streets are public space...
...Because these publications are centralized in the Square, they have all been drawn to exploit what ad people call "the backyard...
...Gassman sounds like a great kid: the capacity of a 14-year-old to create a one-man demonstration intelligible to the Times four years ago is impressive...
...If people want a chance to live them, they must get a foothold on the street...
...But the people look great, the lights look great...
...the Marriott Marquis Hotel that killed the Automat and the Helen Hayes...
...The most striking thing about the marquee is that, against a background of angular forms and voids, it is daringly, romantically curved...
...The fact that they depend on our fantasies and dreams for their money has not done much to bring them and us humanly closer...
Vol. 53 • January 2006 • No. 1
