Times Squared #2: Crossroads of Desire

Times Square Alliance is the business improvement district which has guided the reintroduction of Times Square as a family-friendly tourist destination. Recently, it commemorated the whole, sweeping, hundred-year Times Square story with a major gallery exhibit at the AXA Gallery on 51st Street.

Crossroads of Desire was the name of the show, which closed recently after a three-month run. I don’t know who named this alternate take on “crossroads of the world,” but it aptly acknowledges that Times Square always belonged chiefly to the night. Crossroads of Desire could also be named as a subtle tribute to a certain Broadway play in which Marlon Brando gave an emotionally raw performance. The influential 1947 production of A Streetcar Named Desire marked the approximate end to the era when Broadway would contain nearly all the staged entertainment that New York had to offer.

In its first half-century, Times Square knew the best and worst of economic times, but through it all Broadway was where everything took place—whether it was vaudeville, burlesque, musicals, melodrama, serious theater, or movies (Lowe’s on Broadway was the nation’s first movie theater). In the post-war years, important parts of the theatrical world splintered into off-Broadway and then off-off Broadway, finding homes in outside venues scattered in lower Manhattan. That’s how things still stand.

When Dianne and I ventured out to the theater last month, we didn’t go near Times Square. Instead, we went to Soho and, on another occasion, to St. Mark’s Place for sold-out, weekday evening shows in venues with about one hundred seats. Tickets were fifteen to twenty dollars, about the same as a movie with a stop at the concessions. This is affordable entertainment which can be stimulating, odd, or astounding.

I don’t think the theatrical world gains anything from this geographic separation of small theater from the hub of Broadway. Creators, performers, and theater entrepreneurs benefit from knowing each other, and more crosscurrents would occur if they lived and worked in the same neighborhood. Also, theater goers might get more easily hooked into the delights of sampling theatrical variety. Proximity is the opportunity of the compact urban place.

In Crossroads of Desire, stunning posters and artistic neon from the first half-century of Times Square gave way to porn shop artifacts and crime statistics as Times Square slid famously into urban decline. By the 1980s, each successive police report showed that assaults and batteries were an untreated epidemic in Times Square. For years, the tattered reputation of the nation’s recreation center continued to spiral downwards.

As the Crossroads of Desire displays inched closer to the 1990s, a display made from planning department survey data indicated that the community of residents and tenants displaced by redevelopment were more diverse than was widely perceived at the time. To me, this taunting evidence of a wider community within the boundaries of Times Square gnaws into my feelings that something socially dysfunctional took place in the renewal of Times Square. These were people disassociated from the perennial civic embarrassment of criminal activity but swept away along with it. Their voices were not heard in Crossroads of Desire.

Other voices I noticed to be missing from Crossroads of Desire were the politicians, developers, and planners who put into motion the redevelopment program for Times Square. During the years of urban decline, civic leaders and local property owners pondered and deliberated over the fate of Times Square. Eventually, put together the mix of urban renewal, selective historic restoration, zoning densification, and required electronic signage, that became the design for our own millennium era of Times Square.

These civic leaders belonged in a comprehensive gallery installation of the Times Square story. They spent hundreds of millions of public money to spur the private investment that followed. Instead of directing efforts to put buildings back into useful service, they moved tenants out and demolished rows of old buildings to make way for something new. The revival of Times Square was finally assured when Michael Eisner was lured in and committed large amounts of economic capital and corporate identity to the cause. After Disney was in, others came running. Today, with over 30 million visitors expected this year, Times Square is once again the happy picture of audacious signage and abundant entertainment.

Was this the inevitable strategy for success in a democratic society? More importantly, was a greater social good served through this style of redevelopment of Times Square than if a more community based approach had been tried? What if fiscal seed money had been put into housing and into special grants to nudge New York’s splintered theater community back into one single Times Square neighborhood? Who’s to know how adding another depth to the pool of creativity and entrepreneurship within Times Square might have rippled through the cultural life and economy of New York.

After spending a couple of hours absorbing the old Times Square at the Crossroads of Desire, I walked out into the new Times Square evermore mindful of how high it had flown in its heyday and how burnt out and depleted it was when it hit bottom.

I walked over to Eighth Avenue just outside the west edge of Times Square. This area was skipped over by the redevelopment of Times Square. According to a recent Times real estate piece, rents here are comparable to any local Manhattan neighborhood. It has a hotel or two where plenty of people come and go, and adult shops, bodegas, drug stores, and bars. It clearly retains some seediness.

Could a vision for incubating small theater coupled with affordable housing to help support the theater community take hold here? It’s not likely to happen. The planners at the Times Square Alliance already have a vision for Eighth Avenue. They reportedly hope that Best Buy, Barnes & Noble and the rest of the rest of the package of chain stores commonly found in the neighborhood business districts will move in next door to the crossroads of desire.

Time Squared: Chromium and One-Eyed Midgets

I keep a permanent spot in the limited bookshelf space of our one-bedroom apartment for a tattered, oversized volume that came down to me from my parents. It is called The Face of New York and was published in 1954. Here is what it says alongside photos of Times Square:

“New York’s theater district is not hers alone, it is a recreation center claimed by the whole nation. The crowds moving up and down the street have come from all sections of the county and form a great part of the audience, be it a cheap movie or an expensive stage production….Today it’s a world of chromium, neon lights, cut-rates, and crowds.”

The first time I saw Times Square I was a small child. It was the place described above. My parents took us kids out of Long Island to see The Ten Commandments on the Cinerama screen of the Criterion Theater. After the intermission, I remember feeling confused as we went back to our seats, thinking the movie was already over.

Mostly, though, I remember walking in Times Square itself. It was dusk and we blended in with the teeming crowd to get some dinner, stopping momentarily with shameless awe to watch the perfect smoke rings from the huge Camel sign—a miracle of special effects that surpassed Cecil B. DeMille’s parting of the Red Sea.

Recently, I made room for another permanent entry on my bookshelf, Bob Dylan’s new memoir, Chronicles, Volume 1. I don’t know if it was his idea or someone else’s—but I was intrigued by the photo of Times Square on the dustcover. In the book, Dylan recalls his first impressions of New York with a sharpness for detail that seems almost photogenic itself. New York had a powerful influence on Dylan’s fertile imagination, and the Times Square cover pays tribute to that.

Last week, I saw on a gallery wall a different, well-known photograph that had the same big electric sign for Admiral TV I recognized from the photo on Dylan’s book. In this photo, the neon lights of Times Square shimmer in the background as James Dean, his hands dug into the pockets of his overcoat, walks towards us in the cold night air. Most any other photo of James Dean will focus on him alone, but not this one. It had a feeling of a wider, more sweeping Cinerama epic story, captured in the gait and face of an actor who happened to be out on the sidewalks of Times Square.

The James Dean photo was taken in 1954, the same year as The Face of New York, and also, coincidently when Times Square itself was exactly 50 years old. Longacre Square.was renamed Times Square in 1904 to help promote the newspaper which moved into its new office building that year. The Times saw a promotional opportunity from the new subway system about to begin operation, and wanted the stop at 42nd Street to be named “Times Square Station.”

Times Square, the area generally from 42nd Street to 51st and from Eighth Avenue to Seventh, became the story of different eras tumbling one on top of the other, astounding chapters to one of the great American Dream stories. For fifty years it served the highest functions that a city can in a free society, allowing the catalyst of democratic communities to build upon the capital of their extraordinary human potential for creativity and entrepreneurship.

By the 1920s, the American cultural landscape was forever changed from the activities and cultural changes that took place there. Eugene O’Neil took American theater far beyond the confines of melodrama, the women of the Ziegfried Follies displayed new attitudes towards sexuality and fashion, advertising was displayed at cathedral heights using electric light and dazzling graphics, and nightclub culture was created by Prohibition’s underclass of gangsters and their speakeasies.

At the end of the Depression another wave arrived with 1940’s Oklahoma and its blend of popular arts into a new type of American musical. In the years ahead, Tennessee Williams deepened the scope of themes for American drama, and Marlon Brando put new emotional edge to acting on stage.

By the time Ed Sullivan introduced the Beatles from a theater soundstage on Broadway and 53rd Street, only a year or two remained for the Times Square which was effusively described in The Face of New York. A mix of urban forces that would eventually be felt in almost every American city was shifting Times Square into a different kind of social era, one in which Times Square became known to the world through the backdrop atmosphere seen in Midnight Cowboy, Shaft, and Taxi Driver.

One day, in the twilight period of the earlier The Face of New York era, I was walking with my father in Times Square when he paused a few feet from a blind man who was dressed like an ancient Viking.

“That’s Moondog. He’s here everyday,” my dad said, who worked at the New York Times. “If you want, I’ll introduce you.”

I asked Moondog if he was a real Viking. He answered with a line of poetry. We had a conversation and he offered me to take a tract of his poetry with his photo standing a grassy hill. Times Square was still the kind of place where a blind musician might somehow help stretch out the world of a young teenager passing through with his dad.

Many years later, I would read that Moondog eventually became known as an avant-garde jazz musician with an avid cult following. Back when he was known as the Viking in Times Square he also musically accompanied various performers using his array of homemade instruments. Tiny Tim was mentioned as one of the performers who sometimes played with Moondog.

In Chronicles, Dylan recalls Tiny Tim was one of the performers who helped orient him to the New York scene. Dylan recalls that Tiny Tim sometimes performed at Hubert’s Performing Fleas Circus on Times Square. “I would hear more about that later,” Dylan writes.

Hubert’s was originally established during the Depression in the heart of Times Square on 42nd Street and Broadway. Visitors paid at a booth and descended to the basement to watch a show by unusual performers on one of several small raised stages. In The Devil’s Playground, Jim Traub wrote:

“Hubert’s became for a new generation of alienated souls the One True Place, an underground fastness of the marginal and the grotesque hidden away from the all-devouring world of consumerism and plenty. Lenny Bruce worshiped at the altar of Professor Heckler. And Diane Arbus passed countless hours photographing the midgets and the fake magicians and Congo the Jungle Creep.”

As to whether Dylan made it down those steps at Hubert’s, perhaps the following lines from Ballad of a Thin Man offer a clue:

“You hand in your ticket / And you go watch the geek
Who immediately walks up to you / When he hears you speak…

Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you / And then he kneels
He crosses himself / And then he clicks his high heels…

Now you see this one-eyed midget / Shouting the word "NOW"
And you say, ‘For what reason?’/And he says, ‘How?’…”

Today Madame Tousand’s occupies the space once occupied by Hubert’s Performing Fleas Circus. I am told that visitors to Times Square especially like to get their picture taken next to the replica of Donald Trump.

The World’s Transcendent Home

The Times has put out the call for a better new slogan than “The World’s Second Home,” the catchphrase currently being used to sway the Olympic Committee to New York. The main problem is that it doesn’t relate to the eight million people who actually live here. Second Home? Right, and my other car is a Cadillac.

However, there are a couple of things about it that do work for me. I appreciate the economy of words—even if Big Apple and Helluva Town nailed something about New York even more succinctly.

What doesn’t work is the word “second.” It just plain doesn’t fit here, unless used to convey time, preferably speed—but then we already have “in a New York minute,” which, I recall Johnny Carson once defined as the amount of time it takes in New York for the car behind you to honk after the light turns green.

“World” is a good fit. Just how worldly is New York? Along with London, New York received the highest ranking of world cities in a study by the Globalization and World Cities Study Group & Network. The study ranked world cities using criteria such as “first-name familiarity”—no one says of a world city, where’s that?—international influence, global participation, and so forth. After New York and London, the next ranked world cities were Chicago, Hong Kong, Paris, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Milan, Los Angeles, and Singapore. In all, 55 world cities were listed.

“Home” also fits. Home is about security beyond mere shelter and comes close to the essential of what any city should strive for. Home is where ever the internal city’s compass points: where you hope to find, or make for yourself, friends and family, a roof and plumbing, sidewalks and wifi, a stranger to help out or to exchange pleasantries about the weather. One of a city’s promises is to deliver on our dreams associated with our inalienable rights that include “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Life leads the list in this nation’s founding document, but, unlike the others, is rarely cited as the source of American dreams. Nevertheless, each of us has to belong somewhere—life just isn’t possible without taking up space. Home is a state of mind with a place on the map.

This takes me to seeking out a new modifer for “the world’s home,” something that holds up to the kind of home the world has in New York. So, how about “The World’s Transcendent Home?”

Subtract points for its lack of the common touch; transcendent is not like the word “big” in big apple, it needs dictionary support. According to the American Heritage, transcendent has several meanings. Two involve concepts about “the unknowable” and “being” which I’ll pass on. Another meaning is “preeminant or supreme.” But the fact that New York is only almost preeminant among the world’s cities, based on its tied ranking with London, doesn’t lend itself well to that meaning. Finally, transcendent means “lying above the ordinary range of perception.” Here I find an appealing truth about New York.

The idea of New York as transcendent was engraved in the world’s memory most profoundly by the attack of 9/11. God knows how many hidieous acts of war were perputated on the world’s cities throughout history. Even the 9/11 attack on Washington came from the ordinary perceptions of extremists with hostile ideas about US imperialism. But why attack the people in the Twin Towers? Certainly, as a symbol of global trade, but also as something else. The Twin Towers belonged to a city where 38 percent were foreign born and 140 languages were spoken on its sidewalks—we know this from the 2000 Census. Bin Laden hit the New York skyline as a sneering pronouncement to take nothing for granted anymore.

And yet, since the attack, New York has proved itself to be truly far above the ordinary. It remains a city friendly to the world, arms wide open, especially to the immigrant on the first step to a new way of life. As if to say, welcome to New York—the world’s transcendent home.