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

by James Traub

  Kusbit talks about the way TRL benefits from its identification with Times Square in much the same way that John Eyler does about Toys “R” Us. “It is the center of pop culture,” he says, “and TRL is so much about trying every day to be at the center of pop culture for its audience.” The show has, in fact, been criticized for offering up a steady diet of teenybopper music to the exclusion of grittier, less mainstream performers; but in this regard TRL is no different from Toys “R” Us or the ESPN Zone or McDonald’s or any of the other mass merchandisers of Times Square. It’s a democratic show, in the lowest-common-denominator sense in which the developer Bruce Ratner describes 42nd Street as a democratic experience. TRL gives people what they want, rather than telling them what is worth wanting. As Kusbit says, “The beauty of it is that the show is about the people anyhow. They vote for the most popular videos, they pick the order of the videos, we talk to them out in the street.”

  Total Request Live is really about providing youth culture with an image of itself. It is, on the one hand, a sexually charged self-image. Both the lyrics and the videos themselves are overtly sexual in a way that would have left the kids on American Bandstand goggle-eyed. The same is true of those giant images of siliconized teen babes on the billboards out the window. And yet the atmosphere of TRL is friendly, wholesome, fun-loving, even innocent. The studio audience, which functions as a microcosm of that culture, consists of eighty or so teenagers, almost all of them nicely dressed and well groomed and wildly enthusiastic, sitting in bleachers around the stage. The girls are almost guaranteed to cry if they get a chance to meet J. Lo or a Backstreet Boy. Carson Daly himself has often been compared to Dick Clark, the host of American Bandstand. He asks innocuous, not to say vapid, questions, never pries, always finds nice things to say to the kids in the audience, and has pep to spare. And he makes a point of standing up for good values. At one show I attended, he introduced Joel, who appeared to be working at the show on some kind of internship. “Joel thought up ‘The TRL Spelling Bee’ and ‘Spin the Bottle with Britney,’” Daly explained. “We made a deal with Joel—keep your grades up, we’ll keep you in the show.”

  In other words, TRL has the same kind of reciprocal relationship with the Times Square brand that Toys “R” Us does: it offers an upbeat, consumer-friendly image of pop culture, and thus of Times Square, the world’s capital of pop culture; and it uses Times Square’s own image to help shape its own. It has, in effect, created a Times Square of its own— a sexy, friendly, brand-conscious, rocking Times Square, a Times Square of Naked Cowboys rather than Midnight ones—and made that place vividly real to millions of people who live far from New York. It is, in fact, something of a joke among hard-boiled New Yorkers that tourists will gaze rapturously at the Virgin Megastore on the other side of Broadway and say, “That’s the place we saw on TRL.” And of course they have seen it as well on Good Morning America, and on CNN, and in countless TV shows and movies. They have consumed the Times Square brand before ever actually coming to Times Square.

  I SPENT AN AFTERNOON at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in the company of Mark C. Taylor, a philosopher at Williams College. Taylor is a deconstructionist, or perhaps a postdeconstructionist, who believes that the sharp distinction most of us insist on between “the real” and “the virtual,” or “the not-real,” is perfectly untenable and mostly reflects an atavistic wish for things to be just what they are, and no other. Taylor has written a book, Hiding, which advances the argument that the very idea of “depth,” and thus of “deep meaning,” is an illusion—that you can keep peeling away surfaces, and in the end you get . . . another surface. “This does not mean that everything is simply superficial,” he writes; “to the contrary, in the absence of depth, everything becomes endlessly complex.” Taylor loves the new Times Square of myriad reflective surfaces, of electronic apparitions fostered by global entertainment companies; it was his idea that we meet at Madame Tussaud’s, the perfect place for a lesson in virtuality.

  Madame Tussaud’s is, of course, one of the chief “entertainment concepts” of Times Square, an international chain of “museums” which traffic in representations that confound the distinction between the real and the not-real. This particular Madame Tussaud’s features a Broadwayinflected grouping of statues called “Opening Night,” a party held in a kind of Roman courtyard featuring flawless effigies of Elton John, Elle MacPherson, Sarah Ferguson, Donald and Ivana Trump (separately, of course), Nicolas Cage, George Steinbrenner, network news anchors, and, rising majestically from the fountain in the center of the room, the famous cross-dresser RuPaul, naked under his sequins, à la Josephine Baker (whom we also see later). Elsewhere are world leaders, athletes, figures from the French Revolution; here, in the place of honor, are the heroes of the media culture. The room is itself a tribute to the endlessly repeated imagery that makes for modern celebrity.

  As Taylor and I were standing at the edge of “Opening Night,” I noticed an old woman with a handbag posed behind the newscaster Matt Lauer. Who in the world was she supposed to be? And then she moved: it was an old woman with a handbag. Taylor was delighted by this play of appearances. “Who’s that?” he said to the friends of another woman standing next to Elle; and they all dissolved in a hail of giggles. “There are wax museums out west where they have Greek sculptures that have been colored,” he said. But of course, many Greek sculptures were originally colored. The fake was truer than what we experience as the real. He had read, he said, that the criteria by which a forgery was detected were the same as those used to judge the original. “In other words, what constitutes the ‘authenticity’ of the authentic?”

  Taylor showed almost no interest in the actual simulacra before us; what fascinated him was the idea of the simulacrum, and of Times Square as the center of a proliferating world of globalized images and messages and data. “Times Square,” he said, “is now about globalization. Look at everything Virgin is into, and it just explodes.” It was an airline that had ramified into a music store. “What they’re trying to do is create the Virgin way of life. And who knows what Viacom owns, and how all these things connect? And then there’s this whole question of inside and outside. You have these studios, ABC, MTV, or ESPN, which have shows where they will literally make the audience perform at certain moments—live TV.” Taylor was, of course, thinking of TRL. He talked about Las Vegas, another node in the network of global imagery; the difference between the Vegas of Robert Venturi et al. and the Vegas of today, he said, was “the difference between automobile culture and driving down the road, on the one hand, and electronic culture and being inside a virtual reality terminal.” The Times Square equivalent was the forest of electronic signs and studios, gesturing over our heads to one another. “There’s a sense in which in Times Square you’re inside an imagistic, virtual space,” Taylor went on. “It’s the image that is being continually replayed that is creating the space.”

  Taylor understood Times Square as the all-but-perfected form of a new world, a world whose essential commodity was information, and which was thus based on the insubstantial, the transitory, the instantly transmissible—information as a universal currency into which all the solid things of the world are translated. In the world of bits, distinctions between surface and depth, high and low, original and reproduction, fall away. This was the world described by the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, who, in Simulacra and Simulations, declared the death of a stable world of correspondences, in which, say, the relationship of physical territory to map was understood as that of a real thing to its abstract representation. By contrast, in a world of simulations and infinite reproduction, Baudrillard writes, “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map which precedes the territory— precession of simulacra—it is the map that engenders the territory.” The map engenders the territory: the TV show creates our sense of the reality of the place; the street figure as well as the toy store dissolves into “brand identity.” And the territory
—the original—does not survive the reproduction: “No more mirror of being and appearances,” Baudrillard writes.

  Like Taylor, Baudrillard is fascinated by the emerging world of global imagery; he has written an almost Tocquevillean account of America. And yet he describes the precession of simulacra as a species of death. “Something has disappeared,” he writes: “the sovereign difference between [territory and map] that was the abstraction’s charm. For it is the difference which forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real.” One might well say much the same thing about this new Vegas-ized Times Square whose advent Taylor was announcing. I asked Taylor how he felt about the place. Did it have any of the attributes of a “place”? Could you situate yourself in it, even find yourself at home in it, as people have found themselves at home in Times Square for a hundred years? Taylor considered this for a moment—he is a very fast thinker—and replied, “The question of home, and feeling at home, is a crucial one. In some sense, the real is always elsewhere. Part of the dilemma is to get over it and get on with it.” Perhaps, Taylor said, the wish for familiarity, for charm, was itself an anachronism in the global city. “I don’t think that kind of cozy gemütlichkeit is attainable, and I’m not sure it’s desirable.”

  Isn’t it, though? Are we really equipped to occupy a world of simulacra? Am I? I assume it’s just that wish for “a cozy gemütlichkeit” that attracts me to the Howard Johnson’s, and the Polish Tea Room, and McHale’s. And surely what draws so many people to Broadway theater is the wish for a familiar, anachronistic kind of simulation, where the gulf between being and appearance is perfectly stable and legible, and where the very setting provides a powerful link to the past. (Mark Taylor himself lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, a place redolent of its eighteenth-century origins.) We crave, still, not only the magic of the concept but the charm of the real, even if we no longer know exactly what we mean by the word “real.” And that is why it is hard to share Rem Koolhaas’s deadpan embrace of the rootless, postmodern “generic” city.

  Standing at the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street, with Disney duking it out against Viacom, and Reuters against Condé Nast, we do, indeed, feel that we are occupying “an imagistic, virtual space.” And it is a thrilling space, the crossroads of the colossal enterprise of pop culture—just as it was, mutatis mutandi, a hundred years ago. It is both a particular place and a virtualized, electronic no-place. The giant cylindrical NASDAQ sign reminds us of this new world, whose lifeblood is a bit-stream. There may be no other spot on earth where we feel so utterly a part of our new millennium. Baudrillard would, I’m sure, be mesmerized. And yet at the same time, we draw back—from the bit-stream, from the simulacrum, from the millennium itself. We stand in awe of this stupendous contrivance; but we are happy, in the end, to slip away to the quiet side streets toward Sixth Avenue, to the little bars and shops and restaurants that occupy an older, localized place where things are as they are, and not otherwise.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  OF THE TWO YEARS it took me to write this book, I spent about half in and around Times Square, and the other half in libraries. Virtually everyone I approached for an interview—real estate moguls, theater producers, street performers, former city officials, architects, sign makers, homeless people, corporate executives, waiters—gave me their time, whether they had a lot of it or very little of it. As for the indoor portion of my research, Madeline Kent, librarian of the Seymour Durst Old York Library at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, was bottomlessly patient and endlessly helpful. I also could not have written this book without the intellectual guidance provided by two prior studies of Times Square: Lynn Sagalyn’s Times Square Roulette and the collection of essays contained in Inventing Times Square.

  I would not have written this book at all but for my agent, Andrew Wylie, who urged me to write a book about the city where I have lived for my entire adult life, and to which I have devoted much of my journalistic work. Nor would the book read quite the way it does without my editor, Jonathan Karp, who arrived in medias res and reminded me to tell stories about people, and to climb down off my high horse.

  My friends David Scobey, Susan Margolis, and Giovanna Borradori read portions of the manuscript and made thoughtful comments. My wife, Elizabeth Easton, read the entire manuscript and asked the questions that I should have been asking myself.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  SOURCES

  CHAPTER ONE

  Gouverneur Morris, Simeon DeWitt, and John Rutherford, “Commissioners’ Remarks,” in David T. Valentine, A Compilation of the Laws of the State of New York Relating Particularly to the City of New York (New York: E. Jones, 1862); Hendrik Hartog, Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730–1870 (Raleigh: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); Rebecca Read Shanor, The City That Never Was (New York: Viking Press, 1988); David M. Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Miriam Berman, Madison Square (Salt Lake City: Gibbs-Smith, 2001); David C. Hammack, “Developing for Commercial Culture,” in William R. Taylor, ed., Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (New York: Penguin, 2001); Mary C. Henderson, The City and the Theatre (Clifton, N.J.: James T. White and Co., 1973); Parson Zellers, Tony Pastor: Dean of the Vaudeville Stage (Ypsilanti, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1971); Tony Pastor Clip File, New York Public Library; Harper’s Magazine, Harper’s Monthly, Electra Magazine, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated; Martha J. Lamb, History of the City of New York: Its Ori gin, Rise and Progress, vol. 2 (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1880); James Miller, Miller’s Stranger’s Guide to New York City (New York: James Miller, 1876); George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, vol. XII (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940); Marvin Felheim, The Theater of Augustin Daly: An Account of the Late Nineteenth Century American Stage (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956); Stephen Burge Johnson, The Roof Gardens of Broadway Theaters, 1883–1942 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985); Rudolph Aronson, Theatrical and Musical Memoirs (New York: McBride, Nast, 1913); Casino Clip File, New York Public Library; E. Ideall Zeisloft, ed., The New Metropolis (New York: D. Appleton, 1899); Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (New York: Signet Classics, 2000); Lois W. Banner, American Beauty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Brander Matthews, His Father’s Son: A Novel of New York (New York: Harper and Bros., 1896); Edgar Fawcett, A Hopeless Case (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1880); Arthur Bartlett Maurice, New York in Fiction (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1901).

  CHAPTER TWO

  W. G. Rogers and Mildred Weston, Carnival Crossroads: The Story of Times Square (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960); Mary C. Henderson, The City and the Theatre (Clifton, N.J.: James T. White, 1973); E. Ideall Zeisloft, ed., The New Metropolis (New York: Appleton, 1899); Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Clifton Hood, 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Gay Talese, The Kingdom and the Power (New York: World, 1969); Joe Laurie, Jr., Vaudeville: From the Honky-tonks to the Palace (New York: Henry Holt, 1953); Abel Green and Joe Laurie, Show Biz: From Vaude to Video (New York: Henry Holt, 1951); Everybody Magazine, October 1903; Mary C. Henderson, The New Amsterdam: The Biography of a Broadway Theatre (New York: Hyperion, 1997); Brooks Atkinson, Broadway (New York: Macmillan, 1974); Theatre Magazine, January 1909; Robert W. Snyder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Peter A. Davis, “The Syndicate/Shubert W
ar,” in William R. Taylor, ed., Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); George Rector, The Girl from Rector’s (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1927); Parker Morrell, Diamond Jim: The Life and Times of James Buchanan Brady (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1934); New York Plaisance: An Illustrated Series of New York Places of Amusement, No. 1 (Henry Erkins, 1909); Lewis A. Erenburg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).