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

by James Traub

  When I went to meet Anita, in a cubbyhole office on the second floor of Chashama, she was bouncing lightly on one of those big blue balls said to be therapeutic. She was, when she stood up, tall and slender, with a ferociously cropped skullcap of black hair and the almond eyes of a Modigliani—Douglas’s eyes, actually—set in a narrow, triangular face. She was the kind of young woman (she was then thirty-two) who could war with her beauty and still look beautiful. We proceeded to have an oddly disjointed conversation; only later did I realize that Anita was so uncomfortable that she made me feel uncomfortable. She was terribly shy, as her father and grandfather were, but she also seemed to struggle in the medium of language; she would pull up short before fairly ordinary words. As a child, she had been severely dyslexic, and she still had trouble memorizing lines for a part; reading took real effort. Though trained as an actress, Anita was drawn to the kind of avant-garde work that often didn’t require much in the way of speech. A few years before, she had played a mute and sullen secretary in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant; a critic in the Times had described her as “spectacularly creepy.”

  Anita was the oldest of Douglas’s three children. She had been precociously ungovernable, appropriating a family car and driving it into trees at age thirteen—a story that Douglas told with some combination of awe and bewilderment, for she had set standards of willfulness that Douglas himself had never approached. School had been a nightmare: shipped off to prep school in ninth grade after proving a hopeless failure in public school, she was kicked out for smoking pot, took a one-year sabbatical to shack up with a biker, and was then enrolled by her obviously desperate parents in the kind of vocational school that was meant to be the last stop before the streets. “The classes were like ten minutes long,” Anita said, “and then in the afternoon you worked.” Anita earned her high school diploma by tending bar at a pizzeria. College was out of the question. She had no clear idea what to do with herself; her parents, having at least shepherded her through high school, asked her to move out. And then Seymour, of all people, invited her to move in.

  Seymour was the kind of charming oddball who can seem highly appealing to a rebellious teenager. He passed no judgments, asked no probing questions, and wanted nothing more than a faithful listener, which Anita was formed by nature to be. She moved into the Fiction Room, way up on the fifth floor, and came and went as she pleased. After a few years, she was ready to leave, but Seymour couldn’t bear to be parted from her. “He said, ‘Bring all your friends here,’” Anita said. “At one point, I had four or five people living with me.” And so Anita lived, very happily, in the midst of a commune. She browsed through the giant leather-bound two-volume set of Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection, and through the six volumes of I. N. Phelps Stokes’s Iconography of Manhattan Island. She listened to Seymour’s stories and crotchets, and she had breakfast with him every morning at the Burger Heaven down the street. Seymour recruited his librarians from among the waitresses there, since he claimed that professional librarians kept trying to improve on his “quintessimal” cataloguing system.

  Like many shy people, Anita fell in love with acting. Unlike most of the others, she had a father who owned Broadway theaters. In 1990, Douglas agreed to let En Garde Arts, a “site-specific” theater company with which Anita was associated, put on a play in the wreckage of the majestic Victory Theatre. Douglas quickly became Anita’s chief patron. He allowed her to use the semi-defunct Diplomat Hotel, on West 43rd Street, for a play called The Law of Remains, in which, Anita says, “Andy Warhol and Jeffrey Dahmer meet in Heaven.” The play was apparently based on The Egyptian Book of the Dead. The hotel had a series of splendid, haunted-looking ballrooms. “The big ballroom was Heaven,” Anita says, “and God was a Puerto Rican drag queen with an erection.” Douglas says that Seymour would leave after the first few scenes of these shows and report, “I didn’t understand it, but Anita was very good.”

  The Law of Remains had been mounted by Reza Abdoh, a celebrated Iranian multimedia artist who was Anita’s mentor and collaborator. Later she played “a black wench slave” in an Abdoh production called Tight, Right, White. “It was very in-your-face,” she recalls. Abdoh was an enfant terrible who infused Anita with a radical politics that goes rather oddly with her gentle nature and her very real fear of giving offense. Her actual politics seem to consist mostly of an abiding sympathy for all forms of disaffection or discomfort. Anita was proud to play host to the four-day Intergalactic Convention of Anarchists, though after the anarchists left she said that most of them had been peace-loving high school students who entertained themselves making puppets at another studio she ran. In Anita’s utopia, everybody would make puppets and eat breakfast at Burger Heaven.

  Reza Abdoh died of AIDS in 1995, and Anita then formed a company to carry on his work. After combing through books in her grandfather’s library, she named the company “Chashama,” a combination of the Persian words for “spring” and “eye,” more or less. In 1997, as he had begun building 4 Times Square, Douglas gave Chashama the adjacent building, which had housed Herman’s Sporting Goods. And as the leases of neighboring storefronts expired, he gave those to Chashama as well, though doing so cost him close to $2 million a year in forgone revenue. Chashama theaters and studios alternated with a Peep-O-Rama, Tad’s Steaks, and a drugstore. The billboard had come courtesy of Adbusters, a radical antiglobalization magazine to which Anita’s younger sister Helena was particularly devoted. Some members of the Chashama staff worried that Douglas might take the motto as a very public rebuke to himself and to all his building represented, as well he might have. But Douglas would not dishonor his inner Jerry Garcia. The billboard stayed, until Anita and her colleagues tired of it.

  Anita was more or less the Mabel Dodge Luhan or Peggy Guggenheim of her particular early-millennial fringe artistic moment, though since even the most difficult artists can now gain the backing of powerful mainstream institutions, she was left with a fairly shaggy fringe. Anita faithfully maintained Abdoh’s commitment to confrontational art, though it was often hard to say what end she had in view. She herself directed The World of the P-Cult, a production featuring a group of dominatrixes and neo-go-go girls she had rounded up from downtown as well as a young man with a terrible deformity that left his arms looking like flippers. The show had an atmosphere of portent, menace, and unleashed sexuality, with antlered S&M queens vaulting down from a catwalk to swagger through the audience. It was slightly reminiscent of the unfortunate climactic scene of Eyes Wide Shut. A pyromaniac named Flambeau kept columns of flame lit on the stage. And few who were fortunate enough to be there will soon forget the climactic scene, in which the naked flipper-boy, his genitals in a little bag, was borne onto the stage in preparation for ritual sacrifice, singing in his unearthly, androgynous voice a tune that mixed the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Madonna’s “Material Girl.”

  Though Douglas was utterly baffled that his daughter, whom he considered an incorrigible space cadet, was able to run an organization of any kind, he backed her to the hilt in all things. If a movie production company wanted to shoot a scene in the Condé Nast Building, the answer was always the same: “Only if you give Anita a part.” When Anita, in turn, had the ingenious idea of staging a series of tableaux vivants in the empty windows of 1 Times Square, the building at 42nd between Broadway and Seventh Avenue, she called her father, who in turn talked to the real estate broker. (No dice.) She once contemplated asking her father if she could broadcast a clandestine radio station from an antenna on top of the Condé Nast Building.

  Anita, herself such a wounded creature, had no wish to wound anyone, least of all her own family. She was horrified at the suggestion that her plutocratic father might in any sense be the target of Chashama’s radically anticorporate posture. “As a businessman,” she said earnestly, “he’s known for being very generous and very kind.” In fact, Anita saw Chashama as a fulfillment of Seymour’s crotchety w
orldview. “My grandfather hated Disney,” she said. “He always said Times Square was meant to be built up by the community. That was one of his bottom lines.” It would have been heartless to point out that Seymour had tried to create a Rockefeller Center Times Square, and that the Condé Nast Building played a starring role in the global entertainment-finance-media nexus of the new Times Square.

  Like Aaron Beall, Anita wanted to offer something raw and unfiltered in a Times Square increasingly given over to “corporate rule.” It was very important to her that Chashama have a presence on the street, so she had installed odd and often cryptic artworks in each of the storefront windows. These installations were often interactive, and thus offered a series of small-scale engagements between performer and spectator, animating Times Square’s street life in a way quite different from, say, the transaction between spray painters and customers farther west on 42nd Street. There was the Deli Dance, which brought dancers out onto the sidewalk in front of a delicatessen. The Seder Installation, mounted during Passover, began as a window display of matzoh surrounding a chair, and then evolved into an actual seder on the crowded sidewalk.

  I always made a point of walking by to see what was new. One afternoon, I noticed a young woman with a microphone sitting in the window, with a big bag of fortune cookies next to her. “Would you like to know your fortune?” she said into the microphone. I said that I would, and she broke open a cookie and read, “Kindness is the highest form of wisdom.” When I asked whether it was a “real” fortune, she pointed a finger at me and said, “You mean if I wrote them, they’re not real?” This was a pretty good point, and by the time I had formulated an answer I had a little audience of passersby, which made for a very odd and uncomfortable conversation. I realized that public engagement, and my discomfort with it, was part of the point; or perhaps it was an inadvertent by-product. Chashama productions often made me doubt whether having a point was the point.

  What was plain, though, is that there was a wish, both in the window installations and in many of Anita’s terribly of-the-moment productions, to bring back to life an old, knockabout, spontaneous Times Square, a Times Square devoted to the marginal and the odd—the Times Square of her grandfather’s collection. Many of Chashama’s productions dabbled in the forgotten forms of Times Square, like cabaret or vaudeville, and for all their rather mannered weirdness had something good-natured and fun-loving at heart. Chashama’s hardiest production, which ran from July through December 2002, was a kind of neo-vaudeville production known as the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus. The circus consisted principally of two characters, neither of them actually named Bindlestiff, and was organized as a variety act, with old-fashioned rope tricks, sword swallowing, a bed of nails, and the like performed on a tiny stage before a tiny audience. Alex and I went one Saturday afternoon and found that most of the dozen or so people sitting with us were either wheelchair bound or mildly disturbed. The overall impression that we had wandered into the Twilight Zone was very much enhanced by the Museum of Times Square, located in the theater’s lobby—a collection of old programs from Hubert’s Museum, a carousel with odd little mechanical animals, and, in the back, behind a curtain, a collection of “frozen fetuses” in bell jars.

  Anita had, perhaps unintentionally, created a kind of italicized, spoofy, self-conscious version of the Times Square that had been obliterated beneath the office towers. It wasn’t “the real thing”; but, of course, if Chashama had been the real thing, it would have been a preposterous exercise in nostalgia. The old Times Square was not a thing you could bring back; but you could restore its spirit in an entirely new key. Chashama’s marginalness, its pluckiness, even its amateurishness, was an antidote to the glittering Times Square of the office tower. It was a delicious, and very Times Square, irony that the man who made it possible owned the biggest office tower of them all.

  19.

  A SIGN OF THINGS TO COME

  IN THE LATE SUMMER of 2001, a beautiful art object appeared in Times Square. This was, in itself, an almost unprecedented event. Works of art, in the form of plays, are regularly presented inside buildings in Times Square; but, considered as a physical entity, Times Square contains very little that is beautiful, or that even aspires to the status of art. And this new object was, in fact, a building, though it was, at the same time, a show. The building was a thirty-two-story office tower built for Morgan Stanley on the east side of Seventh Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets. It was an attractive enough building, though scarcely interesting as architecture. The art object wasn’t the building, but its sign. Actually, it was hard to know how to characterize the relationship between the two— between the solid thing and the evanescent thing that played across its surface. In effect, the building was a sign, for imagery appeared, dissolved, and reassembled itself across the entire block-wide façade of the building and wrapped around either side, up to the twelfth-story setback.

  The pictures had a wildly exaggerated pop vitality, as if Roy Lichtenstein had scripted the show. The best place to watch was from the street-side counter of the Starbucks across the way. There you could see immense red piggybanks performing a sort of piggybank shuffle; the dance gave way to a cascade of green apples bouncing down a chute. The piggybanks were of the reddest red, and the apples of the greenest green, you could imagine. The apples in turn gave way to a computer-animated image of a great suspension bridge soaring over a sparkling bay, and this in turn to an image of silhouettes walking down a long corridor, perhaps one inside the building itself. Words and numbers sometimes flashed on the screen—that is, on the building—but never the word “Morgan.” This was a sign, but not a billboard or a television commercial. The images bore an intentionally tangential, sometimes almost a mocking, relationship to their sponsor. The piggybanks and the apples constituted a wry, children’s-book version of the global marketplace in which Morgan operated.

  Kevin Kennon, the architect chiefly responsible for the sign, was delighted to see that people would walk by the building, look up, startled, and then stand and stare, as they had half a century earlier, in the glory days of the spectacular. Kennon had hoped to design an idiom, or a medium, in which the new, corporate Times Square could express itself without blotting out the meanings that had made Times Square such an object of veneration. He had hoped to find a means by which an increasingly “virtual” Times Square could at the same time be thrillingly actual. And the reaction of those commuters and tourists told him that people wanted to be engaged, that they would stop and look if given something to stop and look at. But he also knew, like Aaron Beall, that he was pushing against the limits of his patron’s patience, taste, and budget. He was trying to move Times Square in a direction it was reluctant to go; to put it more optimistically, he was trying to shape Times Square while its direction was still an open question.

  TIMES SQUARE HAS NEVER, in all its long history, had so many signs as it has today. Forty-second Street is bedecked with signs as it never was in the heyday of Erlanger and Klaw, and even the upper reaches of Times Square are dense with billboards. The 1987 zoning regulations forced developers to put up brightly lit signs, while Times Square’s rejuvenation filled it once again with the kind and number of people advertisers were eager to reach. The logic was no different than it had been in the twenties, when an adman had calculated that a spectacular could be erected for fourteen cents per thousand viewers; now, through some extremely creative math, Spectacolor, the largest sign company in Times Square, calculated that the cost-per-thousand of a Times Square sign was one-sixth to one-tenth that of a network television spot. For a brief period in the mid-nineties, Times Square signage had its own tulipmania. In 1995, a group of partners at Lehman Brothers stunned the real estate world by buying the Times Tower, essentially a nineteen-story signboard, from the Banque Nationale de Paris for $27 million. Within two years the building had been sold twice, each time for double the previous sum, so that the final price tag was an astounding $110 million.

  But as sign
s increased in number and value, they became, inevitably, commodities—utilitarian articles designed to sell, not to dazzle. In an earlier day, the spectacular had been a medium of sheer virtuosity—the bigger, the brighter, the more wildly and improbably inventive, the better. O. J. Gude’s dazzling Spearmen, or Douglas Leigh’s Camel smoker, were something like the Super Bowl ads of their day—to be judged not by how much product they moved, but by how much glory they reflected on their sponsor. And in the days before television, how could any other advertising medium compete with a Times Square sign, either aesthetically or commercially? But that era was long gone by the 1990s. A few advertisers—Budweiser, Wrigley’s Gum, Planter’s Peanuts—returned to Times Square as a way of reminding viewers of past glories. But even Budweiser, according to Tama Starr, the third-generation chief executive of the venerable sign company Artkraft Strauss, couldn’t be bothered to use most of the fancy graphics on its sign on the Times Tower, which Artkraft Strauss had designed. Most of the signs in Times Square could have been transplanted easily enough to, say, the Queens entrance to the Midtown Tunnel.

  By the 1980s, sign-making had ceased to be a form of handicraft. The old sign companies were gobbled up by huge billboard firms that were in turn owned by multinationals like Viacom or Clear Channel. Artkraft Strauss, which has been building signs in Times Square for a century, is the last survivor, and today it owns only a dozen locations in Times Square. Tama Starr is afflicted with a rather extreme, if understandable, sense of declinism. Leaving aside her own signs, she says, Times Square has been overtaken by “video and vinyl”: oversize screens showing commercials, and giant billboards of computer-printed vinyl, which can be discarded and replaced at a moment’s notice. Even the executives of Spectacolor, a company founded in 1976, suffer pangs of nostalgia for a golden age they had no role in shaping. “You have an explosion of inventory,” says Michael Forte, the company’s president and CEO, “but you also have a lost art of spectacularity.” Spectacolor’s fourth-floor boardroom looks across Broadway to the spot where some of Times Square’s most spectacular signs once stood—Wrigley’s wiggling fish, the Bond waterfall, the giant Pepsi bottles. Today there is a forest of bodacious—but very vinyl— blondes strutting their stuff for Pony and Liz Claiborne. Forte gazes through the boardroom’s picture window and says, with piercing regret, “To think that it went from that to this.”