Through the Children's Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  500,000-square-foot “educational, entertainment, and exhibit center,” and a 2.1-million-square-foot merchandise mart for the garment trade, all strung together with aerial walkways and, lovely period touch, equipped with a monorail. Mayor Koch wasn't happy about the plan: “We've got to make sure that they have seltzer”—that it's echt New York—“instead of orange juice,” he said. But mostly he worried because someone else would be squeezing the oranges.

  Still, the plan did what such plans are meant to do: establish the principle, civic-minded rather than commercial, that something had to be done here, and the larger principle that whatever was done should be done on a large scale—the old, outdoor theater-and-arcade Forty-second Street could be turned into “a consumer-oriented exposition center with people moving across 42nd Street by means of pedestrian bridges,” as one early draft of the rhetoric put it. As the initiative passed from the developers to the Koch administration, a further principle was established. The transformation could be made only by large-scale condemnation of what was already there, and the city and state together proposed a new way to link up private and public: The developers would get the right to build on condition that they paid directly for public improvements. The price of your tower on top was a cleaner subway station below.

  Still more significant, and what should have been seen as a portent in the first Sacrificial Plan, was the felt need to pull away from the street completely. This was not simply snobbery but self-preservation; Forty-second Street wasn't dying but raving. The porno shops on West Forty-second Street weren't there because the middle class had fled. They were there because the middle class was there. The people who bought from the porn industry were the office workers who walked by the stores on the way to and from work, and the tourists who wanted to take back a little something not for the kids. The XXX video rooms and bookstores and grind-house theaters were going concerns, paying an average of $32,000 a year in rent; peep shows could gross $5 million a year. Though the retailers were obviously entangled with the Mafia, the buildings were owned by respectable real estate families—for the most part, the same families who had owned the theaters since the thirties, the Brandts and the Shuberts. Times Square was Brechtville: a perfect demonstration of the principle that the market, left to itself, will produce an economy of crime as happily as an economy of virtue.

  This—the crucial underlying reality in the Forty-second Street redevelopment—meant that the city, in order to get the legal right to claim and condemn property to pass it over, had to be pointing toward some enormous, unquestioned commercial goal, larger or at least more concrete than the real goal, which was essentially ethical and “cultural.” For once the usual New York formula had to be turned right around: A question of virtue had to be disguised as a necessity of commerce. On Forty-second Street, a group of perfectly successful private businessmen in the dirty movie-theater business were being pushed aside in favor of a set of private businessmen in the tall-building business, and the legal argument for favoring the businessmen in the tall-building business was they had promised if you let them build a really tall building, they would fix up the subway station.

  This produced the Second Sacrificial Plan, of 1983: Philip Johnson and John Burgee's immense four towers straddling either side of Times Square on Forty-second, each with a slightly different pedi-mented top. The Semi-Ridiculous Rhetorical Statement invoked for this plan was that the pedimented tops “contextualized” the big buildings because they recalled the roofline of the old Astor Hotel, a victim of development twenty years before. They were by far the biggest and bulkiest buildings that had ever been proposed for midtown; Sagalyn gasps at the sheer zoning outrage of it. They had to be that big to establish their right to be at all. The Brandt family, which owned many of the theaters, sued and lost. “The Durst family interests put their name on five lawsuits,” Sagalyn reports, “but the rumors of their financial backing of many more are legion.” (The Dursts owned various individual lots along the street, which they intended to put together for their own giant building.) After ten years, they lost, too. Forty-seven suits were launched, and the plan withstood them all. The Johnson models, fortresses designed to withstand a siege of litigation, had triumphed. But nobody really wanted to build the buildings.

  * * *

  In the interim between the First Sacrificial Plan and the Second, however, something had changed in the ideology of architecture. A new orthodoxy had come into power, with an unapologetic emphasis on formal “delirium” and the chaotic surface of the city. In Rem Kool-haas's epoch-marking manifesto Delirious New York(1978), the buzz, confusion, danger, and weirdness of New York were no longer things to worry about. In fact, they were pretty much all we had to boast of. To an increasing bias in favor of small-scale streetscapes and “organic” growth was added a neon zip of pop glamour. The new ideology was Jane Jacobs dressed in latex and leather.

  By what turned out to be a happy accident, this previously academic, pop-perverse set of ideas had influenced minds at the Municipal Art Society—the very group that had fought against the idea of signs and signage in Times Square at the turn of the century. In 1985, after the appearance of the Johnson plan, the Municipal Art Society, under the impeccable direction of the white-shoed Hugh Hardy, took on as its cause the preservation of the “bowl of light” in Times Square and “the glitz of its commercial billboards and electronic signs.” After being digested in various acronymic gullets, this campaign produced not only new zoning text (sections ZR81-832 and ZR81-85, as Sagalyn duly notes) but, as an enforcement mechanism, an entirely new unit of measurement: the luts, or “Light Unit Times Square.” (Each sign had to produce a minimum luts reading; the lighting designer Paul Marantz gave it its name.)

  And so the Municipal Art Society became the major apostle of a continuing chaotic commercial environment in Times Square, while the big developers had to make the old Beaux Arts case for classical order, lucidity, and space—for “trees and clean streets … museums and sidewalk cafés,” in the plaintive words of the developer David Solomon. Eventually, in the early-nineties decline, Prudential, which had been holding on to the development on West Forty-second Street, was forced to sell its rights at a discount—to the Durst family, which had been leading the litigation against the plan all along but which, as everyone could have predicted, was there at the finale to develop and build, including 4 Times Square, the big building where these words are being written.

  None of this, however, could have created the new Times Square had it not been for other, unforeseeable changes. The first and most important was the still poorly explained decline in violent crime. (Traub tours the Eighth Avenue end of Forty-second with one of the district's privately financed security officers, who points out that there is still plenty of prostitution and drug trafficking but very few muggings or assaults; even chain snatching and petty theft are now rare.) This decline allowed for the emergence of the real hyperdrive of the new square, the arrival of what every parent knows is the engine of American commerce: branded, television-based merchandise directed at “families” (that is, directed at getting children to torture their parents until they buy it). The critical demographic fact, as a few have pointed out, is the late onset of childbearing, delayed here until the habit of New York is set and the disposable income to spend on children is larger. When Damon Runyon was writing, the presence of Little Miss Marker in the square was the material for a story. Now Little Miss Marker runs the place.

  Of all the ironies of the Times Square redevelopment, the biggest is this: that the political right is, on the whole, happy with what has happened, and points to Times Square as an instance of how private enterprise can cure things that social engineering had previously destroyed, while the left points to Times Square as an instance of how market forces sterilize and drive out social forces of community and authenticity. But surely the ghosts of the old progressives in Union Square should be proudest of what has happened. It was, after all, the free market that produced the
old Times Square: The porno stores were there because they made money as part of a thriving market system. Times Square, and Forty-second Street, was saved by government decisions made largely on civic grounds. Nothing would have caused more merriment on the conservative talk shows than the luts regulations—imagine some bureaucrat telling you how bright your sign should be!—but it is those lights that light the desks of the guys at the offices of Clear Channel on Forty-second Street and bring the crowds that make them safe. Civic-mindedness once again saved capitalism from itself.

  And yet you don't need to have nostalgia for squalor and cruelty to feel that some vital chunk of New York experience has been replaced by something different and less. Traub ends with the deconstructionist Mark Taylor, who trots out various depressions about the Society of Spectacle to explain the transformation, all of which are marvelously unilluminating. Times Square may be spectacular—that is what its signmakers have called their own signs for a century—but in the theoretical sense, it's not a spectacle at all. It's not filled by media images that supplant the experience of real things. It's a tangible, physical, fully realized public square where real people stare at things made by other people. The absence of spectacle, in that sense—the escape from the domination of isolated television viewing—is what still draws people on New Year's Eve, in the face of their own government's attempts to scare them away. (Dick Clark, of course, is a simulacrum, but he was born that way.)

  Traub toys with the idea that the real problem lies in the replacement of an authentic “popular” culture, of arcades and Runyonesque song pluggers, with a “mass” culture, of national brands and eager shoppers. But it's hard to see any principled way in which the twenty-foot-tall animatronic dinosaur at the new Toys “R” Us howls at the orders of mass culture, while O. J. Gude's dancing spearmen were purely Pop. The distinction between popular culture and mass culture is to our time what the distinction between true folk art and false folk art was to the age of Ruskin and Morris; we want passionately to define the difference, because we know in our hearts that it doesn't exist. Even fairy tales turn out to be half manufactured by a commercial enterprise, half risen from the folkish ground. The idea that there is a good folkish culture that comes up from the streets and revivifies the arts and a bad mass culture imposed from above is an illusion, and anyone who has studied any piece of the history knows it.

  All the same, there is something spooky about the contemporary Times Square. It wanders through you; you don't wander through it.

  One of the things that make for vitality in any city, and above all in New York, is the trinity of big buildings, bright lights, and weird stores. The big buildings and bright lights are there in the new Times Square, but the weird stores are not. By weird stores one means not simply small stores, mom-and-pop operations, but stores in which a peculiar and even obsessive entrepreneur caters to a peculiar and even an obsessive taste. (Art galleries and modestly ambitious restaurants are weird stores by definition. It's why they still feel very New York.) If the big buildings and the bright signs reflect the city's vitality and density, weird stores refract it; they imply that the city is so varied that someone can make a mundane living from one tiny obsessive thing. Poolrooms and boxing clubs were visible instances of weird stores in the old Times Square; another, slightly less visible, was the thriving world of the independent film business, negative cutters and camera-rental firms.

  There is hardly a single weird store left on Broadway from Forty-second Street to Forty-sixth Street—hardly a single place in which a peculiar passion seems to have committed itself to a peculiar product. You have now, one more irony, to bend east, toward respectable Fifth Avenue, toward the diamond merchants and the Brazilian restaurants and the kosher cafeterias that still fill the side streets, to re-create something that feels a little like the old Times Square. (Wonderful Forty-fifth Street! with the Judaica candlesticks and the Japanese-film rental and the two-story shops selling cheap clothes and stereos, lit up bright.) Social historians like to talk about the Tragedy of the Commons, meaning the way that everybody loses when everybody overgrazes the village green, though it is in no individual's interest to stop. In New York, we suffer from a Tragedy of the Uncommons: Weird things make the city worth living in, but though each individual wants them, no one individual wants to pay to keep them going. Times Square, as so often in the past, is responding, in typically heightened form, to the general state of the city: The loss of retail variety troubles us everywhere, as a new trinity of monotony—Starbucks, Duane Reade, and the Washington Mutual Bank—appears to dominate every block. We just feel it more on Broadway.

  Do we overdraw Times Square history, make it more epic than it ought to be? Piccadilly and Soho, in London, and Place de Clichy, in Paris, are similar places, have known similar kinds of decline and similar kinds of pickup, but without gathering quite the same emotion. We make Times Square do more work than it ought to. Other great cities have public spaces and pleasure spaces, clearly marked, and with less confusion between them. When Diana died, it was Kensington Palace, not Piccadilly, that got the flowers, and in Paris it is the Champs-Élysées, not Place de Clichy, that gets the military parade on the fourteenth of July. Which returns us, with a certain sense of awe, to the spell still cast by the original sin of the 1811 grid plan. We make our accidental pleasure plazas do the work of the public squares we don't have. This is asking a lot of a sign, or even of a bunch of bright ones lighting up the night.

  The Running Fathers

  The Running Fathers are sorry that they ever started, but they cannot seem to stop. Two and three and sometimes four times a week they put on their Walkman loaded with the Stones or Sting—it is really a Discman now, but the old name seems to suit the thing better, implying forward motion and a wandering impulse rather than a disc merely revolving, too quickly, round and round—and they run around the reservoir in Central Park for as long as their feet and lungs allow.

  They recognize one another's presence as they lap the cinder track, and nod as they pass, between breaths and gasps. They wear sober gray tracksuits and plain black pullovers, gray sneakers and wool hats. They run reasonably well, considering how long it has been and how cold the air can be. They understand that they are distinct from the True Runners, with their skintight Lycra pants, their stopwatches and high-stepped knees, and their studied, educated panting. But they are distinct, too, from the Good-Natured Joggers, who wear old sweaters and torn gray sweatpants, and who huff and puff cheerfully, remnants of another, macramé universe.

  They are sorry that they ever started, for they never meant to be here. Once, not so long ago, they would mock the men who went running around the reservoir. Back when they began life in New York, the runners at the reservoir seemed like symbols of a life of narrow needs and self-absorption, as vacant and mechanical as the toy animals turning slowly around the Delacorte clock at the entrance to the zoo. “Young executive types,” they called them, the word “yuppie” having not yet even been invented.

  “This is a path!” one of them recalls shouting to the runners as they went by, “not a track!” They thought they were defending the idea of the park as a refuge, a meditative place for retreat and retrenchment. Now the difference seems harder to define, the distinction between a track that leads you around and a path that leads you forward harder to believe in.

  Why, then, are they running; why are they out here in the morning and at dusk? They could go to the gym, of course, and run there, or bike there, or step there, or do something there. But somehow the gym has lost its charm, its magic, its promise of renewal. For years to go to a gym was pure pleasure—a feeling of infinity, “The 59th Street Bridge Song” made flesh, twenty again—but it has changed, and, in its changing, a feeling of expulsion has attached to it.

  Is there something about approaching death that makes them run? Not that death feels imminent or even nearby; it is simply real. The Running Fathers envy those who knew it all along, who were running from the first, who got e
xistential despair early on, Larkin-like, and then had only to settle in to make things pleasant while they waited, like condemned men decorating a cell. You start to run, perhaps, when you discover that something is gaining on you, when you discover not just that death is real, but that it is banal, too, that the end of life is merely like—there should be a higher or tonier metaphor, but there isn't—a canceled television series. First surprise at the sudden ending (were the ratings really that low, the heart really that fragile?), then shock, then a wistful hanging on, and then vague memories, afternoon syndication, and then nothing, only nostalgia and perhaps a website.

  Even to be remembered after you are gone is always to be remembered wrong. A biography is to a life exactly as the movie-feature remake of an old television series is to the television series: a sequence of agreeably open-ended adventures, suddenly terminated with a rush to tie up a few loose ends in a last episode, is turned into something suspiciously well shaped, with an arc and a story and a backstory and a clear hierarchy of “choices” and motives. Charlie's Angels are given parents and old lovers, childhood traumas and life choices; Mannix is made over into a man with a past and, more important, a destiny, just as the dead subject of a biography is made a character in a story, with a character's neat consistency and regulated growth. The shape is imposed, and the essential appeal and pleasure of all lived experience, as it is the pleasure of all old television series—that it had no real plot, no pleasure outside the sequence of open-ended episodes with the same repeated characters, the same promise of more like it next week at the same time—is gone, vanished. And so they run, even though they are beginning to hear rumors that running does no good.