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

by James Traub

  By the summer of 2001, LED was beginning to emerge as the new medium of corporate spectacularity. NASDAQ had built a giant cylindrical sign jutting out over the street at the northeast corner of 42nd and Broadway, though all sign connoisseurs agreed that the quality of both the LED and the programming was poor. On the other side of Broadway, Reuters had commissioned the designer Edwin Schlossberg to create programming for a series of giant black panels that run down one vertex of the building and then continue just above the street level on two sides— and to use, as Morgan had, the highest quality of imagery.

  Morgan planned to fully occupy its new building on November 15, 2001, so the programming was to be fully operational by then as well. Over the summer, Morgan installed the incredibly elaborate equipment required to operate the sign, and then began experimentally running the programming. It was during this period that passersby could see the piggybank gavotte, and the bouncing apples, and the pedestrians and the bridge. And then came the terrorist attacks of September 11. Suddenly, the idea of having your employees concentrated in the world’s most famous urban space lost its appeal; within weeks, Morgan Stanley was scouting for new locations and for a buyer for its “heart.” It quickly found the latter in Lehman Brothers, which had lost its headquarters, in the World Financial Center. In early October, Lehman bought the building, for $700 million. The sign, which had been four years in the making, was an afterthought. By the time Lehman formally took title, in early December, three of the six segments were up and running, but Lehman had suspended work on the rest.

  In order to comply with the Times Square lighting regulations, Lehman continued to run the sign, but it kept only the most literal-minded images—the suspension bridge and the gallery of pedestrians— and ran them over and over until it was difficult to remember why the sign had been worth caring about in the first place. It was understandable that after the tremendous shock of 9/11, and the sheer logistical challenge of moving, reprogramming the sign was not exactly a top priority. Nevertheless, the bank hired Roger Dean, the Morgan executive who had been responsible for the engineering on both the sign at 1585 Broadway and the new one. When I went to see Dean in early 2002, he explained that Lehman had decided to at least temporarily strip away all the “foreground” images of data and graphics and to keep those few “background” images with which company officials felt comfortable. He had hired a new programmer, who had worked on the technical aspects of the new sign. He felt confident that Lehman would not reduce the sign to a commercial. “I don’t get the feeling at the moment that we’re likely to be blatant about it,” he said. “There’s enough blatancy in Times Square, and I personally would like to be removed from that.”

  The new programming went up in the summer of 2002; I stood in front of Starbucks to take a look. The words “Lehman Brothers” covered most of the building, save for two panels on which appeared the phrase “Where Vision Gets Built,” apparently the company’s rather awkward motto, since it was followed by a trademark sign. Then a background of blue mosaic tiles appeared, and once again the giant words “Lehman Brothers,” this time sliding by as cutouts composed of the tiles. Then a mighty sea crashed against rocks; then “Lehman Brothers,” and “Where Vision,” etc., once again. Then came the bridge stretching over the sea, then rolling surf, then the company logo again, then the bridge, then a great mass of clouds, then the logo again, and then the blue tiles. I had had enough.

  I called Roger Dean and asked how the corporate advertising squared with his antiblatancy pledge. “I don’t know if I would consider it advertising,” he said lamely. He was plainly uncomfortable. He added that his responsibility was “purely on the technical side.” This was true, though it also seemed plain that he had lost some internal battle. “Our thinking has obviously developed,” he said, and then asked, or rather pleaded, that I direct any further questions to Tony Zehnder, Lehman’s head of corporate communications. Zehnder seemed utterly mystified by my sense of forfeited possibility. He said, “We took the content that Morgan Stanley had for the sign and we pared it down to what we thought were usable images, and we put our name on to identify the name of the building. That’s what the sign is for the moment.”

  I called the new programmer, Steven Heimbold. Months earlier, he had been cautiously hopeful that Lehman would let him do something as inventive as Imaginary Forces had done. But they hadn’t. “Lehman Brothers has not really embraced the sign in any way like Morgan Stanley,” he admitted. “The imagery they want is more generic. They’re not really looking for any higher meaning other than looking at the sign.” Heimbold, like Dean, was having trouble being the good corporate soldier. “The public,” he said, “really hasn’t seen it in its full glory.”

  Might they someday? Zehnder had, after all, said “for the moment.” A different moment could come, and all of the elaborate wiring and computer hardware would be there inside the building waiting to be used. One of the saving graces of Times Square is that nothing is forever.

  20.

  à LA RECHERCHE DES FRIED CLAMS PERDUS

  UNLIKE THE STRIP in Las Vegas, or the E-Walk in Los Angeles, or the countless malls and festival markets and converted train stations all across this great nation, Times Square is full of old places—and, especially, of old places that do the same thing they did when they were new. Indeed, the building of all the new stuff, the office towers and the megastores, was justified in no small part as a way of preserving the old: that is, the Broadway theaters. The theaters evoke powerful feelings, and not only because of the shows mounted inside but because of the sense of antiquity, of unbroken tradition, provided by the buildings themselves. Disney bought itself immeasurable goodwill, perhaps especially among those otherwise inclined to deplore its presence in Times Square, by its meticulous and loving renovation of the New Amsterdam Theatre, even though the city footed the bill.

  There are other places in Times Square famous for being old, beloved spots that bear the fossil traces of an all-but-vanished civilization. Most of these places are restaurants, like Sardi’s, on 44th Street, where tourists have been coming for decades to ogle show folk, or what they suppose must be show folk. These sites have a special status as living proof that the indwelling spirit of the place hasn’t died out. Perhaps the granddaddy of all such nostalgia magnets is the Edison Coffee Shop, universally known as the Polish Tea Room (a joke on the grandiose and self-important, and now late and lamented, Russian Tea Room). The playwright Neil Simon, a habitué, even wrote a play about the place, Forty-five Seconds from Broadway (the title a spoof of one of George M. Cohan’s, Forty-five Minutes from Broadway). Located on 47th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, the coffee shop was originally a salon of the posh Edison Hotel and is decorated like a giant Wedgwood tea set—blue for the ceilings, pink for the walls and columns that march incongruously down the middle of the coffee shop. The truncated remains of a grilled balcony look out over the luncheon counter, where a sign lists the featured specials of a bygone age of Jewish heartburn-producing cuisine—kasha varnishkes, blintzes, whitefish, gefilte fish, and so on. The cast of ancient regulars sipping tea at the counter looks like a lineup of George Segal sculptures. The actual Broadway folk sit in front, near the windows. You might be able to get a better pastrami on rye elsewhere, but the Edison is less an eatery than a tableau vivant, a show where lucky tourists are invited to mingle, as at audience-participation plays like Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding. Stubborn archaism and a kind of slapdash gemütlichkeit turn out to exert a tremendous atavistic appeal. The Edison is, in its way, a terribly fashionable place, and the tables are often filled with editors from The New York Times and masters of the universe from Morgan Stanley.

  The Edison Coffee Shop teeters on some ontological knife-edge between the unself-conscious and the italicized, and thus between the lovable and the quaint. What is lovable—what you are willing to attach your emotions to—is not simply the old, but the unrenovated, the thoughtlessly preserved, the effortlessly itself. This, of c
ourse, is what no theme park can achieve. And the persistence of the unrenovated is the source of such charm as Times Square still has. This is especially true in what might be called Times Square’s private spaces: the cross streets and the northern reaches, where the great crowds peter out. These are the places still patronized principally by actual New Yorkers. Irish bars still line both sides of Eighth Avenue. McHale’s, a dark little pub on the northeast corner of 46th and Eighth, opened up in 1935 as the Gaiety Café, and in 1953 passed into the hands of the McHales, who ever since have been serving large hamburgers, modestly priced beer, and televised ball games. Upper Times Square still bears strong marks of the jazz and popular music culture that radiated from there half a century ago. Colony Music, at 49th and Broadway, opened up a few blocks to the north in 1948, at the site of the old Alvin Hotel, where Billie Holiday used to perform. The owner, Richard Turk, grew up in the store, where his father worked as the accountant. Irving Berlin, aged ninety, once accosted him to ask, “How’s ‘White Christmas’ doing?” To which Turk said, “It’s doing fine, and ‘Easter Parade’ isn’t doing so bad, either.” Today the Colony offers an immense library of “music-minus-one” arrangements; what Turk calls the largest selection of karaoke machines in New York; and an odd assortment of rock-and-roll schlockabilia—e.g., Monkees lunchboxes—that appears to be only nominally for sale.

  The Edison, McHale’s, the Colony, and other such places, which together constitute the surviving vestiges of the indigenous, all occupy peripheral locations in the global crossroads that is Times Square. Within the four corners of the crossroads itself—which is to say, 42nd Street between Broadway and Seventh to the south, and 47th between Broadway and Seventh to the north—Times Square is almost as uniform, as gigantic, as “totalized,” as Disneyland or the Strip: it is one pulsating global media–financial services–information–entertainment zone. All traces of an older, more localized, more organic life have been obliterated.

  And yet not quite all. There is one holdout, one irrelevancy, one outpost not so much of nostalgia as of pathos: the Howard Johnson’s on the northwest corner of Broadway and 46th Street. The Howard Johnson’s is Times Square’s very own “Night Café.” When I sat down one day on one of the orange Naugahyde swivel chairs at the lunch counter, I had two other customers for company; another half dozen or so were scattered around the orange banquettes that ran back toward the bar—also empty. “Shake, Shake, Shake” was blaring out over the tables with their little hooked coat stands; over the silent, lingering waiters; and over the little wooden cubicle toward the front where the cashier sat, with the boxes of saltwater taffy displayed in the shelving above. I had never seen such a lifeless place in Times Square.

  The counterman was a roly-poly man with a soft face and a black mustache. Irfan Anwar had been born in Kashmir, raised in Lahore, and then immigrated to this country; fourteen years earlier, he had landed a job at Howard Johnson’s. Irfan moved with great deliberation, and not only because of his bulk: it had been many years since haste served any purpose. When he had first started working, Irfan said, “Every day we would be serving lunch to five hundred people, six hundred people. If you came here at lunchtime, you would see the people lined up four deep. And then came the war in the Middle East.” Irfan maintained, not altogether logically, that the 1991 Gulf War had destroyed the restaurant’s fortunes, and indeed had wreaked havoc on the block. “There was a Burger King just up the street. I think it was maybe a hundred years old,” he explained. “And soon after that, it closed up.” Irfan felt that everyone was hurting. I asked about the Edison Coffee Shop, just around the corner on 47th Street. The Edison, I pointed out, was usually jammed. “I do not know this place,” Irfan said. This was after fourteen years.

  There was something almost uncanny about the Howard Johnson’s, so profoundly removed did it feel from the roaring world outside. Just up the block, at the 47th Street corner, fabulous-looking young people with money to burn were flocking to the Blue Fin, a glassed-in bar and restaurant affiliated with the new W hotel. Here was the new Times Square consuming class—the fashionistas from Condé Nast, the editors at Random House, the bankers from Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers. They might have enjoyed the retro warmth of the matzoh ball soup at the Polish Tea Room, but you wouldn’t catch them at Howard Johnson’s even on a lark. While the Blue Fin was hopping, a few old ladies sat at the Howard Johnson’s counter delicately drinking ice cream sodas. Even the ice cream flavors bore the stamp of the retrograde: maple walnut, butter pecan, mocha chip. One day I ordered a turkey burger for lunch, and I received an article that bore no discernible relation to the austere, low-fat item that now graces coffee shop menus—a defrosted patty so thickly slicked with grease that even the pita bread in which it came was hard to hold on to.

  The most exotic thing about Howard Johnson’s was the waitstaff, which had been drawn from all corners of the globe. There was Ivan Pinto, a bald, coffee-colored, bespectacled gentleman in his mid-sixties whose name and accent were so unplaceable that he dared visitors to guess his origins. Trinidad? No. Guyana? No. “I come from Bombay,” said Ivan, “but I am a Christian. We tend to live apart, and so do not pick up the Indian accent.” There was a very black man with his hair shaved high above his temple on one side: Michel Valmont. “Like Liaisons Dangereuses?” “C’est ça,” he said delightedly. Michel was a linguist. Born in Martinique, he spoke French as a mother tongue, but he had also picked up some Danish and German. One afternoon I heard Michel saying something guttural to a Nordic-looking tourist he was escorting to the bar. “What was that?” I asked. Michel said that he had been speaking Dutch, and the young man confirmed that Michel had been speaking identifiable Dutch to him.

  There was always time to talk to the waiters, who were pretty much the only denizens of Howard Johnson’s in the long, lassitudinous period between lunch and dinner. By three-thirty, the place was virtually lifeless. Even happy hour, which started at four and lasted until seven, and featured mixed drinks for $3.25, only marginally enlarged the crowd. One afternoon, I sat at the U-shaped bar in the back talking with Victor, the bartender, who had spent the previous twenty-eight years working, first, at the Chock full o’Nuts on 50th and Eighth, and then here at the Howard Johnson’s, which had opened up in 1959. I asked Victor why the bar didn’t have a television set. “I been asking Mr. Rubinstein for years if we could put in cable,” he said. Kenny Rubinstein owned both the franchise and the real estate it sat on. “He hasn’t got to it yet.” A few minutes later, two men in suits walked out of the kitchen, and Victor, pointing to one on the left, said, “That’s Kenny.”

  Kenny Rubinstein was in his late forties, with curly brown hair and a solid build. I walked over, introduced myself, and congratulated him on having preserved this last little shard of old Times Square. It was the wrong thing to say: Rubinstein assumed that I was being sarcastic, for what real estate man would feel proud of having the last unimproved property in the core of Times Square? “I don’t know how much you paid for that jacket you’re wearing,” Rubinstein said testily, “but I’m sure whoever sold it to you could make a pretty good profit if he sold one every week. But you can’t sell one every week.” I wasn’t sure where Rubinstein was going with this conceit, but then he said, “People think that if you own a property here, it’s easy to make a fortune, but they have no idea. They think IBM comes along every week; but I’m still waiting for IBM.”

  The Rubinsteins, it turned out, were another Times Square real estate family, like the Mosses, the Brandts, and the Dursts but not quite so successful. Kenny’s father, Morris, had bought the parcel that included Howard Johnson’s, as well as another right across the street, on the east side of Seventh, some time in the fifties or so—Kenny was hazy on the history, and Morris was dead. Morris had held the franchise for several of the Howard Johnson’s in Times Square, as well as for the Chock full o’Nuts where Victor had worked, back when they were profitable entities. Now the land underneath the Howard Johnson’s
was worth immensely more than the restaurant, but Kenny’s ship hadn’t yet come in. He said, “I can count on one hand the number of serious discussions I’ve had.” Kenny had fond memories of Times Square when he was a boy, but he would have unloaded the Howard Johnson’s in a second; the only thing stopping him was that he was asking a very large number for a fairly shallow, and thus not altogether desirable, site.

  Howard Johnson’s was not, strictly speaking, an indigenous institution. Howard Johnson himself was a restaurateur from Quincy, Massachusetts, who made a better grade of ice cream and began building a local chain of restaurants in the late twenties. Johnson appears to have invented the idea of restaurant franchising, and in the thirties local entrepreneurs opened franchises up and down the East Coast and along the rapidly expanding network of thruways and turnpikes. Times Square, with its great mass of tourists, was a natural site for the new chain, famous not only for its ice cream but—a reminder of its eastern seaboard origins—for its fried clams. The first Howard Johnson’s in Times Square opened on Broadway and 49th Street, across the street from Jack Dempsey’s bar and just east of Madison Square Garden, in the late 1940s. It was a tiny place that sat no more than seventy-five people. Joseph Sherry, the manager of the current Howard Johnson’s at 46th Street and the self-appointed custodian of the restaurant’s Times Square history and cultural status, says that, as he understands it, the comic Lily Tomlin perfected her gum-popping wiseacre coffee-shop waitress routine behind the counter at 49th Street, while Gene Hackman, decked out in white gloves, worked as the doorman, for in those glorious days patrons of Howard Johnson’s were greeted at the door.