The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (28 page)

The other branch of the Times Square street subculture is overtly criminal—the “underworld,” in all senses of that term. Even the heightened degree of social control has been unable to eradicate drug dealing and prostitution from the area, and above all from the tawdry blocks of Eighth Avenue immediately above and below 42nd Street, though the substitution of “good uses” for bad on Eighth Avenue—hotels, restaurants, the new headquarters of
The New York Times—
is likely to reduce crime there, as it has on 42nd Street. Yet even this rampant activity has been contained, for Eighth Avenue is not in the least ominous even quite late at night, and visitors are even less likely to notice drug deals than they are the homeless. And on 42nd Street, where at least a dozen police officers are posted many nights, you are unlikely to notice either. There may be trouble inside the Broadway City arcade, but it rarely spills out into the street.

Certainly the instruments of control are, if not powerful, then at least numerous. The area is patrolled not only by the New York Police Department but by security officers from the Times Square BID. The BID, a private body made up of local property-holders that performs what are normally thought of as public functions, both cleans up and patrols (and offers services for the homeless) in an area stretching from 40th to 53rd Street, and east of Broadway to west of Eighth Avenue. At any one time, the BID fields as many as thirty-two officers on both fixed and walking posts throughout the area. They wear uniforms, with big-brimmed Smokey the Bear hats. (One officer said that she had been offered $500 for her hat.) But they do not carry weapons and they are not empowered to make arrests; their job is to serve as “the eyes and ears” of the police, and mostly to be a comforting and friendly sight to tourists, who constantly stop them to ask directions, or just to pose for a picture.

One Friday evening in the early summer, I took a tour of Times Square with Eric Rivera, a veteran security officer with the BID and a genuine connoisseur of street crime. Rivera was a fireplug, self-confident and voluble and fond of action: he had enlisted in the Marines as a kid, and though he alluded vaguely to some youthful misconduct, he would be joining the police department the following week. At about ten-thirty that night, Rivera brought me to the Burger King at the southwest corner of 40th Street and Eighth Avenue. We stood across the street, our backs to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and Rivera said, “This is one place I would never tell anyone I know to go to. You got more gun-related incidents here than anywhere. Look at all those people hanging out in front; they’re selling guns, drugs, girls, you name it. It all comes in through the Lincoln Tunnel.” A knot of men stood on the sidewalk, dark silhouettes against the lighted storefront. A police van was parked in front of the restaurant, and an officer was moving from one loiterer to another. “She’s telling them they’ve got five minutes before they have to move along,” Rivera explained. “But they’ll be back.”

As we walked north along Eighth Avenue, Rivera, gesturing around the bus terminal, said, “You got the low-level prostitutes here, the fiftydollar hookers; they’ll turn tricks for a rock of cocaine if they’re hard up. Then you go all the way up to the four-hundred-dollar hookers who hang out at the bar of the Sheraton on Fifty-third.” Without turning around, Rivera said, “The guy in the black-and-white shirt behind us, he’s selling crack. This guy right in front of us here is a pimp. From Fortieth to Forty-eighth, we call it the coke and hooker stroll. They’ll just go up and down all night, looking for action.” The stroll was on the west side of the avenue, which was still chock-a-block with sex shops and strip clubs. We crossed over to the east side between 43rd and 44th and stood among the parked cars, looking back across the street. Rivera picked out his marks like an expert duck hunter peering from the blinds. “See that guy in the red jersey? Certifiable pimp; they call him Little Joe. And there’s Soap-man.” This was Rivera’s own nickname for a dealer who sold crack that turned out to be soap flakes, leaving the unwary buyer sending bubbles up from his pipe. But all the dickering and the dealing vanished into the torrent of the avenue’s racing life. “You can walk around here, and it’s like nothing’s going on,” Rivera said. “The buyer drops a five-dollar bill on the ground, the seller covers it with his shoe. A third guy comes and drops the rock or the gel cap on the ground. The seller hands the money to a kid, who vanishes. And it all happens in a second.”

Rivera pointed out the subway landing where a gang leader had gotten his throat slashed in the midst of a chain snatching, and then the path he had staggered down until he had bled to death in front of Chevys. But I had gotten the same tour way back in October. It had been a long time between murders. In fact, Rivera said, even chain-snatching and petty thievery were rare. Violent crime was almost unheard-of. Bob Esposito, the BID’s chief of security and a former police officer who put in many years in Times Square, says, “The kind of call I get now is, ‘The musician’s too loud,’ or, ‘I don’t like what the Black Israelites are saying.’” Rivera said that when he was in junior high, twenty years ago, he used to cut school and watch dirty movies on 42nd Street. “In those days,” he said, “you could never go to Eighth Avenue unless you had a weapon, or you came with twenty of your guys.” Now, forget it. Rivera was hoping, once he became a cop, to be assigned to the most crime-infested neighborhood around. He had just about had it with Times Square; it was too tame.

16.

ASK NOT FOR WHOM THE ANIMATRONIC T. REX ROARS

ON NOVEMBER 15, 2001, a big, excited crowd gathered at the northeast corner of Broadway and 44th Street. This was the exact same spot where Times Square’s very first crowd had gathered, slightly over a century before, to witness the opening of Hammerstein’s Olympia. Since that time, the Olympia had given way to an early movie theater that had in turn been converted back into a legitimate theater; the whole structure had been torn down to make way for a modern movie emporium, which in turn had been joined to the Bond’s Clothing store and to the International Casino, one of Times Square’s biggest and flashiest nightclubs; the entire complex had slid into disrepair, and the whole structure had been demolished once again. Civilizations had risen and fallen, and risen and fallen again, on this one rich archaeological site. And now a new culture, and a new epoch, had come: this crowd had gathered for the opening of the Toys “R” Us flagship store, the biggest, flashiest retail establishment in the history of Times Square. Oscar Hammerstein had hailed the Olympia as “the grandest amusement temple in the world.” And the press managers for Toys “R” Us surely were exercising no more hyperbole than Hammerstein had when they called the store “the Toy Center of the universe.”

Earlier that day, dozens of attractive young people wearing lime-green T-shirts that said “Xbox” on them had fanned out across Times Square; they were handing out cards that would entitle the bearer to stand in line at midnight and buy the new $299 Microsoft video game machine. Bill Gates himself had agreed to come to the store and sell the first Xbox in the world. And so here, at midnight, were five thousand people calmly and casually snaked around the building. The crowd flooded into the store, bought their games, and happily dispersed. It was a far more professionally managed opening than the Olympia’s had been. But the sale of the video games was, in a way, a pretext for a yet larger event. Over fifty media crews from all over the world came to cover this mind-boggling convergence of global brand names. Afterward, Microsoft’s marketing team calculated that the event created one hundred million “impressions” worldwide.

This beguiling accident of location, in which an early-twenty-firstcentury temple of entertainment is built atop the ruins of a late-nineteenth-century one, leads one to measure the course of history through comparison. The Toys “R” Us flagship store is an exciting, energetic, crowd-pleasing place, as the old Olympia was; and it is monumental, and prodigious, as the Olympia was. It, too, is a “theatrical” place, though of course its theatricality is a means to the end of getting people to buy things. The one was for grown-ups, the other is for kids. The Olympia was also a hopeless folly, while Toys “R” Us is wonderfully efficient, as befits the flagship institution of a $13 billion global enterprise. But perhaps the most striking difference is an evanescent one: Toys “R” Us is not only a store or a company, but a “brand”; and it exists in a world of brands, of which “Times Square” is very much one.

THE CORPORATE OFFICE of Toys “R” Us is situated in an office park just off an exit ramp in suburban New Jersey, about forty-five minutes from the Toy Center of the Universe. The headquarters is a bright, sunny, boxy glass building with toys and stuffed animals on landings and in open spaces. It feels like a pleasant place to work. On the top floor is the office of John Eyler, the company’s chairman and CEO. Eyler is a blond, square-jawed corporate executive with an earnest, straightforward manner and a basso profundo voice. He is a native of Washington State, a graduate of the Harvard Business School, a career retailer. Before he ran Toys “R” Us, he was CEO of F.A.O. Schwarz, which was the biggest toy retailer in the world in the day when the toy industry consisted largely of small family-owned stores. Toys “R” Us was part of the new world that had eclipsed F.A.O. Schwarz. It was a publicly owned firm that sold inexpensive toys in giant supermarkets, a ubiquitous presence in suburban shopping malls, with 1,500 stores around the globe. But Toys “R” Us had, in turn, been eclipsed by Wal-Mart, which also sold toys as commodities, but sold them even cheaper. Toys “R” Us hired Eyler in 2000 with the hope of regaining the market share it had lost.

Eyler recognized that Toys “R” Us could not compete with Wal-Mart on price and instead needed to forge a new and distinctive identity, more service-oriented, more fun, more dramatic. Eyler and his team retrained salespeople, changed the layout of stores, forged exclusive relationships with prestigious suppliers like Steven Spielberg (himself a powerful brand name in the world of toys). But Eyler understood that he had to not only change Toys “R” Us but find a platform from which to proclaim those changes. Toys “R” Us needed a flagship store. “A flagship store,” Eyler said, when I visited him one very pleasant afternoon, “is important to serve as a tangible symbol of change, to be the ultimate example of what the strategy is when the strategy is fully articulated.” Eyler felt that the flagship store had to be in New York, since New York was where the media, the big buyers, the finance industry, and the nation’s largest toy fair were located. And Times Square was the obvious location. Eyler said, “We chose Times Square because it has evolved into the highest-energy location in the city. Times Square is increasingly becoming the crossroads of the world. It has become a family-friendly place, and we felt that we were a continuation of that trend.” Eyler understood that he could re-brand the company by associating with the brand that was the new Times Square: exciting, energetic, urbane, yet clean and family-friendly. And the effect was reciprocal, for he was, as he said, reinforcing the Times Square brand by virtue of joining it.

Eyler hired Joanne Newbold, a store designer who had created the F.A.O. branch stores during his tenure, to design the interior of the new store. And he told her: “I want to create new traditions for kids in New York City.” The new store would feel magical to children, as F.A.O. Schwarz does; it would also be designed so as to transport an unprecedented volume of customers efficiently through the vast space and toward the various selling areas. Newbold created an interior radically different from the bland, bright supermarkets Toys “R” Us had built all over the world: a vast, open cube, an almost raw space with theatrical lighting hung from catwalks, bright colors, a glass elevator rising through the middle. The glass façade of the store is covered with square canvas panels, 155 in all, each of which carries eight images; the panels can be rotated like a shade, so that Toys “R” Us is effectively covered by an ever-changing billboard. The panels can also be rendered transparent so that pedestrians can look straight into the store. And what they see, from the outside, is the centerpiece of the store, of the company, and of the Toy Universe itself: a sixty-foot-high Ferris wheel that rises from the basement toward the upper reaches of the store, its giant red neon spokes flashing clockwise as the ride sedately rolls through the store, providing children and their parents an eagle eye of the store’s merchandise. It is also, at $2.50 a head, just about the cheapest form of entertainment in Times Square.

Newbold gave me a tour of the store several weeks after the opening. It quickly became plain that she is not only a highly professional store designer but a student of retail engineering. As we stood at the head of the escalator looking down toward the basement, with people pouring past us onto the main floor, she said, “Originally we thought we would use a merry-go-round or something like that. Then we thought, What a great way to make people look up, look down. As you cycle up, you can look around and see what’s on the floor.” The Ferris wheel was also a marketing device of its own. The names on the cars—
Toy Story,
Pokémon, Nickelodeon, and so on—represented not just familiar toys but “branding partners.” Each one was a brand of its own, sharing in the new Toys “R” Us brand and adding their luster to it, as Microsoft had done. Toys “R” Us charged each firm $250,000 for the “naming rights” (though the actual proceeds from the ride go to charity).

Newbold explained that a ride originating in the basement had an additional advantage. “Besides coming in and saying, ‘Oh, wow!,’ in order to board the Ferris wheel you have to go down to the lowest level, which traditionally in New York is very hard to get people down to.” We took the escalator down to the lower level and walked along a path to the edge of the “R Zone,” the electronics area that is any toy store’s highest-volume selling space. Everything in the R Zone was zapping, bonking, and blinking all at once. Newbold had to raise her voice. “If you’re interested in electronics,” she cried enthusiastically, “you’re going to get sucked right in!” It was the Christmas season, and the crowd in the store was swelling; the sound system boomed out “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” and then “Feliz Navidad.” A magician at a station was demonstrating card tricks. Images were flashing across video screens. The Ferris wheel, with its great red neon spokes, was rolling. Noise, lights, crowds, motion— everything was happening at once. It all felt like 42nd Street under glass.

And yet at the same time the store had been ingeniously engineered so as to channel the feverish energies it released. The selling floors are organized in a “racetrack” format so that, Newbold said, “you get pulled from one department to another by seeing something ahead of you.” Every other Toys “R” Us store has an armada of shopping carts parked near the front entrance, but shopping carts would take up too much room in this dense urban setting; instead, shoppers get big shoulder bags. This could pose a problem of its own, but the store specializes in what Newbold calls “affordable portables.” Newbold obviously had given a good deal of thought to the problem of traffic management in what was destined to be the busiest toy store in the world. As we stood looking into the R Zone, she said, “We only have eight Play Station positions, so it won’t become an arcade. What we tried to do was have the
perception
of interactivity without real interaction. Knowing that the traffic would be as dense as it is, we didn’t want people pushing buttons on things, and starting things and stopping them, because they would break in a day, and people would come the next day and they wouldn’t work. That would be negative.” For all its theatricality, the store continuously instructs shoppers that it is, after all, a store.

We rode an escalator back upstairs and continued on to the second floor. This is the store’s most dazzling retail area. Immediately to the right of the escalator were twenty-foot-high versions of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building made of Lego. Beyond them was the pièce de résistance—an animatronic
Tyrannosaurus rex
that emitted a mighty roar, just scary enough to give little kids a mild fright and make them come back for more. The roar cycle can be adjusted, so that on busy days the dinosaur can roar faster to keep the kids moving along. The
T. rex
marked the selling area for Steven Spielberg’s
Jurassic Park
toys, with which the company has an exclusive relation. Next came the silver space-ship of
E.T.,
along with an animatronic version of the lovable alien. Then there was a Candyland that looked like the board game come to life, at least if you were four. Continuing on to the other side of the floor, we came to the Fisher-Price area, which, in a nice touch, had a little tableau of Times Square itself, looking very calm and sensible, with its little plastic people waiting at traffic lights. And then there was a giant Monopoly board, and a giant train set, and at the back of the floor an entire house for Barbie, with its very own elevator. Newbold explained that the displays had been designed so as to be understood from the Ferris wheel. “These are like instant visuals for kids. They don’t have to read a sign; they don’t have to read a graphic. It’s just like, ‘I see that dinosaur; when we get off, I’ve got to go over there.’” The whole store was semiotics for the preliterate.

Within weeks of its opening, the new Toys “R” Us store became one of the great tourist destinations of Times Square. It was a familiar name, whether you came from Decatur or Beijing, in an unfamiliar setting; and of course the kids loved it. It wasn’t unusual for the store to attract 100,000 visitors in a day, or to do $1 million worth of business—thirty truckloads’ worth of toys, as Elliott Wahle, the store manager, proudly pointed out to me, with each truck having to maneuver its way into Times Square, pull into the cramped loading dock, and then make a rapid exit. Vast crowds surged through the store even during the fallow season after Christmas. Wahle said that he was often asked whether it bothered him that so many people came to the new store to gawk rather than buy. “And the answer,” he said, “is, ‘Not in the least.’ This is a $13 billion business focused on a name. And the visit reinforces our brand in the minds of every single one of those visitors.” Wahle described the store as “the single greatest execution of the retail-tainment idea.” The store could lose money and still be an immense success, because it would make shoppers more inclined to go to the Toys “R” Us back home.

BUILDINGS, AND BUSINESS VENTURES, in Times Square have risen and fallen over the decades like so many stage sets; one of the few persistent elements in this rootless and transitory realm has been the dynastic real estate families, who never sell anything if they don’t have to, and thus pass their property intact from one generation to the next. The Moss family, which owns the parcel on 44th Street that Toys “R” Us leased, has had a presence in Times Square since the heyday of Oscar Hammerstein. B. S. Moss, the family patriarch, started building nickelodeons in Times Square in 1905; his peers were the Jewish entertainment moguls who went west and founded Hollywood. (It was his brother Paul who closed down burlesque as Mayor La Guardia’s license commissioner.) B.S. opened vaudeville theaters, which he ultimately folded into the Keith-Albee syndicate. Then he expanded into movie theaters. He bought the parcel on 44th Street when the Olympia came down, and in 1936, he and a partner opened up the New Criterion, a thoroughly modern movie house that they called “The Theatre of Tomorrow.” Engineers in a “tone-control booth” controlled “the slightest variations or modulation in sound volume,” while a “four-unit cooling system” maintained a constant, pleasant temperature. The New Criterion, the flagship of the B. S. Moss empire, was a self-conscious symbol of an elegant, streamlined modernity. Many of the blockbuster movies of the next three decades opened there, including
The Ten Commandments, Lawrence of Arabia,
and
Funny Girl.