The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (36 page)

Sherry dates the decline of Howard Johnson’s, and of the neighborhood, not to the Gulf War but to the administration of Mayor David Dinkins, from 1989 to 1993, whom he blames for a crime wave which, to be fair to Dinkins, actually started three or four mayors earlier. In any case, Sherry understands that he is now the captain of a ghost ship. But he takes his job with the utmost seriousness, for he feels that Howard Johnson’s offers the balm of the past to visitors dizzied by the spinning vortex of the present. “We’ve kept the décor of the eighties, we’ve kept the sense of nostalgia,” he says—as if his boss, Mr. Rubinstein, had committed his fortune to keeping the restaurant just as it was. “You get tourists who come in—the older tourists, of course—and they’re so excited to see a Howard Johnson’s they can hardly believe it. They say, ‘Is the ice cream the same? You still have the same clams?’ We assure them it’s the same. You have no idea how excited they become.” It may be that you have to spend more time at Howard Johnson’s than I have in order to witness such an episode.

IT IS FOR HIMSELF, I imagine, more than for those phantom tourists, that Joseph Sherry preserves Howard Johnson’s in Naugahyde splendor. He’s the nostalgic one—for those bygone days of Lily Tomlin and Jack Dempsey’s and the Latin Quarter. For him, the old and the worn have special claims that the new can never challenge. But of course, that’s his life. Why should we join him? Why celebrate a spot whose sole virtue is persistence in the face of change? Nostalgia is, of course, the easiest, and maybe the laziest, way of discrediting all that is new. Even the most ardent lovers of the Times Square
perdu
recognize the dangers of surrendering to this syndrome. Marshall Berman, the author of
All That Is Solid
Melts into Air,
a fine history of modernism, and himself a famous celebrant of the literature and history of Times Square, once noted that “Times Square has the capacity to engender a ‘discourse of nostalgia’ that floats freely and unites people with radically different views of the Square and the world.” Berman observed that even the
WPA Guide
of 1939 was nostalgic for the Times Square of 1920. One might add that the essayist Benjamin de Casseres was already shedding tears in 1925 over the collapse of the old booze forts of 1915.

In
Times Square Roulette,
the definitive account of the redevelopment of Times Square, Lynn Sagalyn, a professor of real estate at Columbia University, even provides a declension of the “varied voices of nostalgia,” which include the “wistfuls,” the “skeptics,” the “retrogrades,” the “reminders” (low-grade wistfuls), and the “resilients,” who are actually a species of enthusiast about the new Times Square. It is, as Sagalyn writes, precisely because Times Square is a “touchstone” that choosing your orientation toward its redevelopment becomes a means of expressing an attitude toward mass culture, toward corporate monopolization of that culture, toward the role of the past and of memory in a world dominated by the idea of progress and constant change. Wistfulness about the oldest restaurant on Broadway is thus a means of expressing regret; and that regret, Sagalyn would say, is a kind of soft-core critique of the booming new Times Square which has obliterated the past—or rather, many pasts.

But wistfulness does not necessarily, or even usually, express a wish for things to be other than they are (as Sagalyn herself recognizes). It is more like an intuitive reaction to the inhospitality of a world that bears no traces of its own past, or of your own past in it. In its most blissed-out form, wistfulness is the delighted incredulity of those codgers who find that a Howard Johnson’s chocolate sundae with coffee and butter pecan ice cream tastes exactly the way it did in 1962. Joseph Sherry says that Lily Tomlin came back for a plate of fried clams while she was starring on Broadway; it must have been, for her, a madeleine sort of moment (though others have, to tell the truth, found the fried clams distinctly vulcanized).

I am not, myself, a genuine specimen of a “wistful.” I do not really wish that I lived in the era of Rector’s, or of Hubert’s Flea Circus, or that either of those places could somehow be teleported into our own time. Unlike Joseph Sherry, I do not have passionate memories of Times Square when it was swell, and though during my boyhood I must have eaten any number of grilled cheese sandwiches and even ice cream sundaes at various Howard Johnson’s on various thruways, it would never have occurred to me to sentimentalize the place. (In fact, on the basis of a magazine article of mine, Sagalyn cites me as an instance of the optimistic variant of the “resilient.”) And yet I will be very sorry when Kenny Rubinstein finally sells that plot of land to IBM. I will be sorry because the new Times Square is so smoothly engineered, and Howard Johnson’s is so artless. I would go even further and say that Howard Johnson’s appeal has to do with its haplessness: the appeal of Howard Johnson’s is the appeal of genteel failure in the face of the brutally successful.

The truth is that the gentrification of Times Square over the last decade has done wonders for the food, and promises to do still more as the restaurant culture catches up with the new corporate presence. The cuisine at the Blue Fin is infinitely better than it was at Schrafft’s or the Automat, if immensely more expensive as well. I like the Blue Fin, and I even like the almost comically chic bar in the W’s eighth-floor lobby around the corner on 47th Street. I don’t want everything to be Howard Johnson’s, but I don’t want everything to be the Blue Fin, either. I don’t want Times Square to become a totalized, thematically unified place, like the Strip. It seems that I need some atavism; I’m inclined to think that we all do.

But the arrow of time is pointing unmistakably forward, and there can be no two ways about the destiny of that corner plot on Broadway and 46th Street. When I told Kenny Rubinstein that I planned to include the Howard Johnson’s in my book on Times Square, he said, “I wouldn’t wait too long if I were you.”

21.

ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR

YOU CAN COUNT ON seeing the Naked Cowboy almost any afternoon on the little concrete island between Broadway and Seventh Avenue at 45th Street. The Naked Cowboy is not, in fact, literally naked, like the holy Jains of India. He wears a pair of undies that say “Naked Cowboy” on the butt, and a cowboy hat and a pair of cowboy boots, and he carries a guitar. As for the rest, he’s all magnificent muscle and flowing blond locks. The Naked Cowboy spends a lot of time in the gym; he is the healthiest, handsomest, and possibly wholesomest street person in the history of Times Square. He appears to have descended directly from the Tommy Hilfiger billboard that looms far above his head, or perhaps from the electronic sign on the World Wrestling Entertainment store down the street—like a god come down to earth in human form. He is an icon of cleaned-up sex for the sexy, cleaned-up Times Square—a daytime cowboy rather than a midnight one. (He had never heard of
Midnight
Cowboy
until a reporter asked him about it.)

The Naked Cowboy is an actual, individual person; his name is Robert Burck, and he hails from Cincinnati, Ohio. But he bears only a passing resemblance to the famous eccentrics who once haunted Times Square, such as the religious crank Rose Harvel, who preached a garbled gospel from the very same concrete island forty or fifty years ago. He has a persona, or a gimmick; and that gimmick, and the splendid expanse of gym-hardened flesh the gimmick is designed to expose, has made him a media figure. “I’ve been on
Howard Stern
thirteen times,” he said when I first approached him, in the late fall of 2001. At the time, he had literally wrapped himself in the American flag, patriotism then being very much in vogue. “I’ve been on
Letterman,
I just finished doing German TV, I’ve been on
Good Morning America
three times. I’m on CNN all the time. When someone does Times Square, they pretty much always include me. I’ve got my own movie going to Sundance. It’s a ninety-minute documentary about my life called
Legend of a Naked Cowboy.
”

The Naked Cowboy had done his routine—which basically consists of standing in his underwear and singing horribly—all over the country, but he had settled in Times Square because of the exposure it gave him. Like the hosts of
Good Morning America,
he was known to millions of people who had never seen him in person. When I told Alex that I had met a singing cowboy in underpants, he looked at me with the supreme condescension of the truly eleven, and said, “That’s the Naked Cowboy. He’s on
TRL
”
—Total Request Live,
MTV’s most popular show—“
all the time.
” And so he was. But for the Naked Cowboy, as for the other products advertised in Times Square, media exposure is a means to an end. He operates a website, which sells the trademarked underpants for $15, as well as the Naked Cowboy guitar and boots and CDs and the Naked Cowboy autobiography.

The Naked Cowboy makes pretty good money as an actual person in an actual place: whenever anyone asks to take a picture, he says, “You gotta put a dollar in my boot.” (“I’m only kidding,” he would add, feebly.) His boottops are stuffed with bills even on an ordinary weekday. At the same time, he is a merchandising phenomenon, a brand name, a self-created cartoon character—an emanation of the new Times Square of global marketers and global media. The Naked Cowboy isn’t a virtual street character, but he is the first street character of Times Square’s virtual age.

TO SAY THAT TIMES SQUARE has a “virtual” dimension is to say nothing more than that it is known through representations of itself as well as through direct experience; and that, of course, has been true since people started sending postcards of the place or, for that matter, listening to songs about the place. Thanks to FPA and Irving Berlin and touring shows, millions of Americans have known all about Times Square without ever setting foot in it. Broadway’s favorite subject has always been Broadway. But the production of images of itself is much more central to the new Times Square than it was to the old. When “the media” meant signs, songs, popular magazines and movies, one could say that the media played a central role in transmitting the life of Times Square to the world. But the media are now inextricable from that life. Disney or MTV, and even in their own way Reuters and Condé Nast, do not simply transmit popular culture; they
are
popular culture. These media institutions want to be in Times Square because Times Square is the center of popular culture; but the very fact of their choosing to be in Times Square is what makes it the center of popular culture, just as it is the Toys “R” Us flagship store that makes Times Square “the center of the toy universe.”

But it is not enough to say that the great firms that traffic in imagery have a dominant presence in Times Square. The megastores and global retailers that have settled there are also, effectively, creatures of the media. They depend on Times Square to help shape their brand identity, as John Eyler of Toys “R” Us puts it. They want to be associated with the new Times Square brand—with that sense of unthreatening urbanness, contained exuberance, family fun. The power of the Times Square brand inheres in the fact that it is infinitely reproduced, and thus fixed in the minds of millions of potential consumers. This, of course, is precisely what Eyler understood when he booked Bill Gates for Toys “R” Us’s opening night event, thus exploiting the media power of three global brands: Toys “R” Us, Microsoft, and Times Square. It is, in fact, only the media, with its blizzard of images, that makes it possible to instantaneously create or retool a brand.

What makes Times Square so powerful a place, at least in the calculations of global marketers, is that it is so intensely
there—
so dense with people, lights, buildings, history, emotion—while it is also one of the central nodes of the worldwide media network. It is Times Square’s actuality that makes its virtuality possible, for McDonald’s or Toys “R” Us as much as for the Naked Cowboy. When newscasters need an image that says “urban throngs” they often use a clip of Times Square. In the middle of the Oscars, ABC, which is owned by Disney, showed a clip of crowds watching the telecast on the big screen above the Disney studio in Times Square. ABC’s
Good Morning America
broadcasts from the studio every day, sometimes showing images of the crowd from the ground floor, sometimes of the buildings from the second floor. NBC’s
Today Show
broadcasts from Rockefeller Center;
Good Morning America
positions itself in a different way through its association with Times Square.

Total Request Live,
MTV’s version of
American Bandstand,
airs every afternoon at three-thirty from the MTV studio on the second floor of the Viacom Building, at Broadway and 45th Street, directly above the Naked Cowboy’s patch of concrete. The outer wall of the studio is made of glass, so the studio audience and the performers, and the million or so kids watching at home, can see out to the street, and the people on the street can see in. When the Baha Men, or the Backstreet Boys, or Busta Rhymes, or No Doubt perform on the little bandstand, the camera shoots over their shoulders at the Pepsi billboard across the street featuring Britney Spears wearing a red garter saucily over her hip, or Pamela Anderson vamping for Pony, or Nelly at the Virgin Megastore. You could say that MTV is giving those brands—the human ones as well as the institutional ones—a free ride, or you could say that those brands are so central to MTV’s identity that the show is exploiting its connection with them. The implicit message is that
TRL
is coming to you from the head office of the brands you love.

But the show has a much more complicated relationship to Times Square than that; or, rather, it offers a much more complex version of Times Square than is conveyed only by the billboard forest. Every weekday afternoon, usually starting around three, the show’s adolescent fans, often with their parents, begin to gather on the sidewalk below the studio. On a low-profile day, just a hundred or so kids will stand under the studio; on a big day, the fans will fill the space inside the police barricades on the pavement, and then spill over to the sidewalk in front of Toys “R” Us, directly across the street and a good two hundred feet from the glass wall. When the Backstreet Boys came, in the fall of 2001, an estimated five thousand people choked the sidewalks, and the police were forced to close several lanes of traffic on Broadway. The crowd is real, their passions are real, and Times Square is reality itself; the relationship with the fans on the street gives
TRL
a special sense of authenticity.

But from the point of view of the crowd, it’s the show that’s real. The kids, and their parents, have parked themselves on the sidewalk in order to participate in a world they’ve only experienced indirectly, on TV. The show wants access to the crowd, but the crowd is only there because it wants access to the show—because it wants to be part of TV. The high point of the show comes when a star walks over to the window, strikes a pose or mimes a greeting or plays air guitar—and the crowd screams as one, and the kids frantically wave their hand-lettered signs: “I love you, Ashanti!” “I am your fatha’, Ja-Rule.” Sometimes a star even descends from the electronic realm to their own. Mariah Carey once waded out into the crowd and nearly caused a riot. And so there is a continual back-and-forth between the “inside” world of the show itself and the “outside” world of Times Square.

Total Request Live
is staggeringly popular for a program that appears on cable television in the middle of the afternoon; and there is little question in the minds of the people responsible for the show that the feverish crowd on the street has a great deal to do with the program’s cachet. And the fact that it was a happy accident adds to the program’s air of uncalculated calculation. Bob Kusbit, the senior producer, says that when Viacom, the parent of MTV, first moved to Times Square, MTV executives thought the second-floor space overlooking the street would make a fine gym. Even when the studio was built, and
TRL
was launched as a live show featuring music videos (that was in September 1998), Times Square was expected to serve as a picturesque and demographically appropriate backdrop. “We never said, ‘Come on down to Times Square,’” says Kusbit. “It just started to happen where you looked out the window the first week of the show and there were twenty people standing outside with a sign saying, ‘Hey, Carson’”—for Carson Daly, the show’s thoroughly adorable young host—“or ‘Megan Says N Sync Is Number One.’ So we invited somebody up. The next week there might have been fifty, then the next week it might have been a hundred, and pretty soon it started to become this sort of mecca for music fans to show up outside the studio.” Kusbit and his colleagues knew they were onto something big when they conducted their “You Wanna Be a Deejay?” contest, and five thousand kids, accompanied by a battalion of TV cameras, showed up at the front door.

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.