The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square

by James Traub

  What about the opposite scenario—a more obtrusive, more intellectually serious, and better-heeled state? Look at the city of Paris, which in recent decades has rebuilt its highway system, expanded its periphery, and built such extraordinary monuments as the Pompidou Center. This last, in fact, was a part of a much larger project to level and rebuild the ancient quarter known as the Marais—a project as large as the 42nd Street redevelopment, and occurring at much the same time. In Post-Industrial Cities, H. V. Savitch compares the two projects, as well as the renovation of Covent Garden, in London. Paris, as Savitch points out, is the great pride of France and of the French people; it would be unthinkable to leave so profound a matter as the expansion or preservation of an ancient Parisian neighborhood to the marketplace. The French government bore much of the $1 billion cost of the redevelopment of the Marais, and the plan was fashioned by the Prefect of Paris, an haut fonctionnaire operating at the highest reaches of the bureaucracy and insulated from virtually all outside influence—a modern version of Baron Haussman, who dynamited ancient Paris and created the modern city in the middle of the nineteenth century. The public had virtually no role in the reconstruction of the Marais: the great market area of Les Halles was leveled without so much as a hearing. And private developers had little more say than the public. In New York, by contrast, as Savitch writes, development is a matter of “political entrepreneurship” in which various contending forces struggle to assemble a coalition of the self-interested. It’s no coincidence that Paris feels like a supremely planned city, and New York like a supremely unplanned one. Paris is shaped according to a set of beliefs about its nature; in New York, Savitch writes, “The momentum for growth is so strong that little is sacred when it comes to matters of architectural preservation.”

  If New York were more like Paris, then the redevelopment of 42nd Street would have been guided more by a sense of the street’s place in New York’s history and culture, and less by the wish to expand commercial space westward. Planning would be a far more serious occupation than it is now. And city government would not have surrendered its municipal obligations to the private sector by counting on developers to pay for public amenities. Presumably, if Americans loved their great cities as the French do, New York would not have been permitted to suffer through its fiscal crisis in the first place.

  Of course, it’s impossible to imagine New Yorkers sitting still nowadays as an ancient neighborhood is demolished. After all, New York City once had an omnipotent haut fonctionnaire of its own; his name was Robert Moses. And Moses’s very name is now synonymous with the discredited vision of bulldozer development. Much of the messy and time-consuming panoply of the 42nd Street development process—the hearings, the guidelines, the environmental impact statement—is a reaction to that autocratic form of development. New Yorkers have decided, in effect, that they would rather risk getting nothing built at all than to have a vision of the city simply imposed on them. And the process does not inevitably lead either to paralysis or to mediocrity: it was another city-state entity that chose the acclaimed architect Daniel Libeskind to design a new complex on the site of the World Trade Center in 2003.

  The competition over the rebuilding of the World Trade Center offers a model for urban planning that does not submit to the whim either of the developer or of the government functionary, and that allows the public will to express itself without descending into chaos. Of course, the city-state body overseeing the development process at the World Trade Center site agreed to stage a worldwide architectural competition only after an impassioned public rejected the unimaginative choices that were initially offered. That was an unprecedented moment in the history of urban development; the rebuilding of 42nd Street took place under more normal conditions of public disengagement. And in the early 1980s architects had nothing like the kind of prestige they have today; the idea that an architect’s vision might transform a neighborhood, or even an entire city, was something quite foreign. In New York, architecture has, until very recently, functioned almost entirely as the handmaiden of development.

  And so perhaps it is vain to wish that Mayor Koch and Governor Cuomo had invited the half-dozen greatest architects in the world to reimagine 42nd Street, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor George Pataki ultimately did in the case of the World Trade Center. It wasn’t in the cards. And yet it would have been one of the most thrilling and illuminating architectural competitions ever staged. Great architects love great cities. Who among them wouldn’t have viewed the opportunity to reinvent the greatest urban space in the greatest city in the world as the achievement of a lifetime? Who would have sneered at “the goddamn corny image of what’s in Times Square,” or fantasized about giant wrecking balls crushing decaying structures? It’s true that the horror of urban life so widespread a quarter century ago might have made the prospect of erasure appealing, as it was to Philip Johnson. But others might have designed a 42nd Street Futurama, like the architects of Cityscape; or a 42nd Street of the decorated shed in the manner of Robert Venturi; or something else nobody ever thought of. What 42nd Street needed, as Robert Stern and Tibor Kalman understood, was not an architectural straitjacket, but a master plan—a plan that could pay homage to all that the street and Times Square had been, while launching it into an unknowable future.

  It’s too late for regrets, or even for blame. One can only imagine what might have been and take comfort in the fact that the public seems more aroused on matters of architecture and design than it has ever been before. Perhaps the next time, whenever the next time is, the process will work because it worked, and not because it failed.

  PART THREE

  CORPORATE FUN

  13.

  A MIRROR OF AMERICA

  TAKE THE SUBWAY to the Times Square station. It only costs two dollars, you can get there from practically anywhere, and it’s been working perfectly well, more or less, for one hundred years. Emerging onto the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway, you will be much impressed by the sheer scale of the neighborhood. Four immense glass office buildings tower above you. None is particularly distinguished as architecture, though the lights and signs they wear make them more playful than their kin on Sixth or Third Avenue. The Reuters Building, on the northwest corner of 42nd and Broadway, even has a bit of V-shaped deco-style trim running around the corner, a wan recollection of the Rialto Building, which once occupied the same spot. The principal tenants of the office towers are law firms, investment firms, and media and entertainment firms, which is to say that they are not much different from office towers elsewhere in midtown Manhattan. The biggest of the towers, at the northeast corner of Broadway and 42nd, houses Condé Nast, publisher of such glamorous magazines as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. Times Square is no longer interesting enough, or chic enough, to be an important subject for these magazines, as it was seventy-five years ago; it is, on the other hand, a far more suitable setting for their corporate headquarters than it ever was before.

  Now you may turn back toward Eighth Avenue. Immediately to the west of the office zone is the culture zone, which is also the preservation zone—the lovingly restored New Amsterdam Theatre to the south and the New Victory Theater to the north, as well as the Ford Center, where the play 42nd Street has long been entrenched, and an entirely new building, known as the Duke, which houses studio space as well as the Roundabout Theatre, a highly respected nonprofit theater company. The Duke is a nine-story building that at night lights up with multicolored horizontal neon strips; it is the only aesthetically pleasing new structure on 42nd Street. The street also has a museum. On the south side, where Peepland and, before that, Hubert’s Museum once stood, is Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, an institution that traffics in immaculately reproduced copies.

  The remaining two-thirds of the block, where once the all-night cafeterias reigned, and the penny arcades and the shooting galleries and the novelty shops and the hot dog stands, is now a Global Retail, Fast Food, and Entertainment Concept Zone. Moving east t
o west along the southern blockfront, you would find (as of the middle of 2003) the world’s largest McDonald’s; a food court where the visitor can choose among Applebee’s, California Pizza Kitchen, Chili’s, Cinnabon, and yet others; an HMV music store; and New York’s largest multiplex, the AMC 25. Crossing the street and reversing course to the east, you would first encounter Chevys, a bait-shack-themed restaurant that sells thirteen kinds of margarita, including the Midori and the Lava Lamp, and then a Japanese fast-food place, a Yankees merchandise store, and the Sanrio store, purveyor of the Hello Kitty line. In the middle of the block are the Broadway City arcade and the B.B. King Blues Club, both owned by actual New Yorkers, making this the Indigenous Institutions Microzone.

  Richard Simon, owner of the arcade and heir to its traditions, is in fact the last unimpeachably authentic son of the soil left on 42nd Street. Simon is a middle-aged, balding gentleman, slightly querulous, with the classic New York sense of preulcerous aggrievement. “I’m the only legitimate New York entrepreneur who’s not sending the money to the home office in Peoria,” he says. “I’m the quintessential New York guy.” (It takes a quintessential New York guy to imagine that the home office is in Peoria.) The Broadway City arcade is a lineal descendant of the Broadway Arcade, established in the late fifties by Simon’s father, Albert, on Broadway between 51st and 52nd Streets. The old arcade had pool and Ping-Pong tables downstairs, and upstairs pinball, a magic shop, costumes, homemade candy and home-roasted nuts, and of course arcade games—a juicy slice of Times Square, Late Golden Era.

  Simon, the son, fondly recalls that far-off time when things were where they were supposed to be and what they were supposed to be: when Lindy’s, Damon Runyon’s old haunt, sat right there on 49th Street. When your dad took you to lunch there you ate chopped steak and creamed spinach, and never thought to ask for anything else. Simon’s office, in a quiet warren behind a door at the otherwise insanely noisy arcade, is a shrine to his hero of heroes, Mickey Mantle, the blond god of the fifties, and to the slightly ratty pizzazz of his father’s era. In the time even before the Broadway Arcade, Albert sold coin-operated arcade games from an office on Tenth Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia banned pinball as part of his campaign against vice, and Richard has a photo of goons smashing his father’s stock. More authentic than that, you don’t get.

  The Broadway City arcade is generally a nice place, which can’t be said of all arcades. The Playland, which flourished for years along the west side of Broadway between 42nd and 43rd, was an ominous dive where both fake driver’s licenses and male hustlers were readily available. I never set foot in Playland, though at one point in my life I walked past it daily. On the other hand, I often go to the Broadway City arcade with my son, Alex, who is always up for a few rounds of virtual boxing (bob, weave, kayo the reigning heavyweight champ). It’s a clean, inviting, and safe place—except late at night, when it isn’t. But you wouldn’t mistake it for the old Broadway Arcade. A sculpture of old-fashioned construction workers eating their lunch on a plank is suspended from the ceiling— a retro touch designed, Simon says, to convey the old-time “warmth and character” that he remembers so well. Of course the very act of evoking that atmosphere italicizes it, makes it a marketing decision rather than an aspect of the place’s character. Perhaps the simple fact that the Broadway City arcade is new, and that it is (mostly) safe and clean, and that it is located in the middle of the new, safe, clean, bright 42nd Street, opens up an immense gulf between it and its progenitor. Simon could serve home-roasted nuts, and it might not matter.

  To which one might well say: So what? Simon himself says, “I wanted to be part of the resurgence of Times Square, and especially Forty-second Street.” And he plainly is (though he complains that the rent is stratospheric, the local businessmen don’t patronize his “corporate space,” and he is besieged by the “Eighth Avenue crowd”—that is, black kids). Forty-second Street had become the kind of place where many New Yorkers, and certainly many tourists, wouldn’t set foot in an arcade. Now, on the new 42nd Street, they do. As in so much of modern life, material progress offers itself as compensation for spiritual loss.

  IT IS PERFECTLY OBVIOUS that 42nd Street could not have become once again any of its past selves—not, at least, without unintentional self-parody. Neither could it have become the enclosed gallery of futuristic entertainments imagined by the authors of the City at 42nd Street plan. But did it have to be this? Did it have to be Chevys and Applebee’s and Hello Kitty? In 42nd Street Now!, Stern and Kalman had promised that 42nd Street would become “an enhanced version of itself,” not a “gentrified theme park or festival market.” The possibility that it might become a honky-tonk theme park seems not to have occurred to them. New Yorkers tend to view the block as a deracinated fragment of global monoculture grafted into the city’s street plan—a place with none of the characteristics of locality. Couldn’t it have been more . . . real? The Bright Light study had suggested all sorts of exotic entertainment activities for the block, including a “sports exhibition center” where amateur athletes could compete in pickup basketball games, skateboard slalom, karate, and so on; a roller disco; a jazz cabaret; and a gallery of “futuristic electronic amusements.” (Actually, that sounds like the Broadway City arcade.) What’s wrong with that?

  The answer is that roller disco doesn’t pay the rent. The 42nd Street Development Project was designed to make the block attractive to private developers, who would lease most of the space on the street. Public officials would establish design guidelines, but the marketplace would decide who would occupy the space. And the marketplace was going to supply the lowest common denominator. Bruce Ratner, a former city official who had become a major real estate force in Brooklyn, ultimately purchased the lease on the south side of the street, while John Tishman, a member of one of the city’s great real estate clans, took over the north. Both men believed that immense crowds would flock to the new 42nd Street; that these tourists and office workers and passersby constituted a tremendous new market; and therefore that they could charge tenants stratospheric rents. And the kind of tenants who pay $1 million a year for a modest storefront are not normally adventurous.

  Ratner says when he sought tenants in 1997, he received proposals from the Hard Rock Café, the Rainforest Café, the Moulin Rouge nightclub, Cirque de Soleil, Fred & Busters game rooms, Universal Walk, the ESPN Zone, and so on. It was, he says, “the era of entertainment concepts.” None of these chains had even existed twenty years earlier, when the CUNY researchers had suggested their charmingly homemade entertainments. In the interim, Disney and Warner Bros. and Viacom had transformed the very nature of entertainment, while the Gap and Barnes & Noble and HMV had similarly transformed the nature of retailing. “Popular culture,” that localized, handcrafted thing, had become “mass culture,” an extrusion from mighty corporate ovens. These entertainment and retailing leviathans roamed the globe in search of sites suitable to their brand. To see how mass culture has changed the places where it is situated, you need only think of Las Vegas. As recently as the 1970s, Las Vegas had consisted of the eccentric and largely family-owned casinos that so fascinated the authors of Learning from Las Vegas; by the nineties it had turned into a giant Monopoly board of entertainment concepts. So with 42nd Street.

  The idea that the city is the home of intense particularity, of the untrammeled individual—the idea at the heart of so much of Balzac and Dickens and Dostoevsky, and then of Dreiser and Howells—has given way, in recent years, to a new and alarming idea of the city as the site for a deracinated, universalizing popular culture: the city as Las Vegas. The architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas calls it “the generic city”—“the city without history,” “the city liberated . . . from the straitjacket of identity.” (Koolhaas likes—or straight-facedly claims to like—the generic city.) Another architecture critic and urban theorist, Michael Sorkin, writes, “The new city replaces the anomaly and delight of [the old] with a universal partic
ular, a generic urbanism inflected only by appliqué. Here, locality is efficiently acknowledged by the inclusion of the croque-monsieur at the McDonald’s on the Boule Miche or the Cajun Martini at the airport lounge in New Orleans (and you’re welcome to keep the glass).” In other words, authenticity has been reduced from a touchstone of value to a marketing concept, a salable commodity the up-to-date city traffics in.

  Along 42nd Street, locality is acknowledged by the sculpture of the workingman in the Broadway City arcade, and of course by the lights and signs that line the street. The most common epithet that critics, and for that matter contemptuous New Yorkers, apply to 42nd Street is “Disneyesque.” In fact, the very first sentence of a recent critique of the redevelopment process reads, “The cheerful face of Mickey Mouse now greets visitors to Times Square from atop a Disney superstore.” Used as an epithet, the word “Disney” conjures up the image of a meticulously engineered, and thus secondhand, and thus spurious, form of fun. It must be noted, in all fairness, that if anyone has Disneyfied 42nd Street in this sense, it’s not Disney, which has meticulously re-created the archaic splendors of the New Amsterdam Theatre and has used it to present The Lion King, an exercise in avant-garde puppetry that has confounded the company’s critics with its insistent modernity and its unmistakable stamp of individual authorship. But the street may be Disneyesque nevertheless. The author of the critique, Alexander J. Reichl, goes on to predict: “From the towers to the superstores to the orgy of lighted advertisements, Forty-second Street and Times Square will epitomize the corporate dominance of publc space.”