On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square - Hardcover

Berman, Marshall

3.32

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9781400063314: On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400063310 ISBN 13: 9781400063314

Publisher: Random House, 2006

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Described as “a continuous carnival” and “the crossroads of the world,” Times Square is a singular phenomenon: the spot where imagination and veracity intersect. To esteemed scholar and author Marshall Berman, it is also the flashing, teeming, and strangely beautiful nexus of his life. In this remarkable book, Berman takes us on a thrilling illustrated tour of Times Square, revealing a landscape both mythic and real. On the Town is a unique look through the lens of the ideas and works of art that inspired–or were inspired by–this landmark’s allure.
Times Square pulses with life, drawing countless millions who long to be surrounded by too many in the midst of too much. Beyond the immense crowds, the intoxicating lights, the imposing architecture, and even the recent incursion of corporate headquarters that limn the Square’s present boundaries, there is an indefatigable humanity (and undeniable sexual tension) that, for more than a century, has nourished creative expression.
Interleafing his own recollections with astute social commentary, Berman reveals how movies, graphic arts, literature, popular music, television, and, of course, the Broadway theater have reflected Times Square’s voluminous light to illuminate a vast spectrum of themes and vignettes. Berman shows us Times Square as it is seen in Alfred Eisenstadt’s iconic photography, the movies of Busby Berkeley, John Schlesinger, and Martin Scorsese, and the stage choreography of Jerome Robbins.
Conversely, we see how Times Square’s distinctive aura finds its source in a stunningly diverse list of performers, writers, and impresarios, including Theodore Dreiser, Florenz Ziegfeld, Ethel Merman, Al Jolson, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen. Berman also celebrates the unsung heroes of Times Square–the artists, engineers, and hucksters behind the Square’s landmark signs that, throughout the decades, re-created raging waterfalls, blew smoke rings, bathed onlookers in the Square’s eerily welcoming light, and projected the image of what Americans want to be against a surface of who we really are.
Part love letter, part revelatory semiotic exposition of a place known to all, On the Town is a nonstop excursion to the heart of American civilization, written by one of our keenest, most entertaining cultural observers.

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About the Author:

Marshall Berman is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at City College of New York and CCNY Graduate Center, where he teaches political theory and urban studies. He writes frequently for The Nation and The Village Voice, and serves on the editorial board of Dissent. He is the author of The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society and All That Is Sold Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity.

CHAPTER 1

Home Fires Burning: Times Square’s Signs

“I’ll just go down Broadway,” he said to himself. When he reached 42nd Street, the fire signs were already blazing bright.

—Hurstwood, near the end of Sister Carrie

Great signs—Bigger! Than! Life!—blink off and on. And a great hungry sign groping luridly at the darkness screams:

F*A*S*C*I*N*A*T*I*O*N

—John Rechy, City of Night

Signs Square

All through the century, whenever people have talked about Times Square, they have talked about its giant signs. Those signs were there at the Square’s very start, and for its whole life they have been designed and arranged to overwhelm the people on the ground. “A spectacular” is the word for these signs. Over the years they have run fifty, sixty, seventy feet high, sometimes a whole block long. They have been extravagantly lit with whatever the state of advertising art allows: with thousands of bulbs, with lovely neon calligraphy, with tremendous spotlights, with throbbing and exploding computer graphics; any style, any technology will do if it can knock us out. I don’t mean to say that all Times Square signs are giants bent on knockout blows. Most are not; most are likely to be much smaller and more nuanced. But the Square’s ecology is such that the smaller signs are experienced in relation to the big ones. The manager of the Arrow Shirts shop said, “We’re just below the waterfall.” They make limited claims on the universe, but “Side by side, they’re glorified” by the unlimited claims being made just above and around them.

In its effusion of signs, New York has never been alone. Early in the twentieth century, every city had its “Great White Way.”1 Most of these went dark after World War Two, when the Federal Highway System engineered the destruction of downtowns all over the country; New York alone survived to tell the tale. Many American cities, especially in the Sun Belt, developed prosperity based on highways and cars, and created spaces with signs as big and bold as Times Square’s. But those spaces tend to be strips (Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Mexico City) where people come in cars and drive straight through. Their signs are laid out in straight lines, meant to be seen one or at most two at a time by drivers or passengers on the road. The deployment of signs in Times Square is far more complex. Here people are on their feet, enveloped by crowds of walkers in a hundred directions, impeded from moving straight ahead even if they want to. The signs come at us from many directions; they color the people next to us in complex blends, and we become colored, too, all of us overlaid with the moving lights and shadows. We metamorphose as we turn around, and we have to turn around to make any headway in this crowd. The development of Cubism in the early twentieth century was made for spaces like this, where we occupy many different points of view while standing nearly still. Times Square is a place where Cubism is realism. Being there is like being inside a 1920s Cubist experimental film: “The Man with the Movie Camera” as a home movie. Signs are the essential landmark, yet generally what grips our hearts is less any one sign than the complex, the totality, the superabundance of signs, too many signs, a perfect complement for the Square’s too many people. Since the 1890s, being attuned to Times Square’s overfullness has been one of the basic ways of being at home in New York. Even the most wretched people can feel at home with the Square’s signs. “ ‘I’ll just go down Broadway,’ ” Hurstwood says. “When he reached 42nd Street, the fire signs were already blazing bright.” This man is starving, freezing, dressed in rags, delirious, one foot in the grave. But he can’t stay away from the “fire signs.” He is drawn to their warmth and light like a moth to a flame.

Times Square’s allure springs from the totality, the superabundance of signs, rather than from any one. But it makes sense for a book on the Square to contain at least a brief historical sweep of the Square’s memorable signs, which will also be a sweep through modern commercial mass culture. There is another reason. One important way in which people have always experienced Times Square, and still do, has been to adopt a favorite sign, to be alone with it, to make it part of their inner lives. This means uncoupling the sign from whatever commodity it was meant to promote and placing it in a different system of meaning all our own. If the sign is a human figure, we can talk: “What’s a sweetheart like you doing in a place like this?” The human capacity to give things new names is a capacity not to be swept away by floods of commodities, not to be reduced to passive acquiescence, keeping ourselves inwardly, imaginatively alive. (Yet often, just when we feel at home with our special signs, we come and they are gone. “All that is solid melts into air.”)

One of Times Square’s most arresting early spectaculars was the fifty-foot-tall Miss Heatherbloom, promoting “Heatherbloom Petticoats, Silk’s Only Rival.” The product seems to have been a typical garment-center knockoff of a high-fashion item, marketed to millions of young women of the sort who passed through the Square every day: typists and switchboard operators, schoolteachers and young wives. The sign was built in the 1900s (different sources give different dates) by O. J. Gude, the Square’s first great commercial artist, who painted in bursts and undulations of electric power. It had an elaborately programmed sequence where the heroine walked through a driving rain “depicted by slashing diagonal lines of lamps.” The wind whipped at her dress, lifted her skirt, and revealed the petticoat clinging to her legs and her hips and her thighs. The gale receded, her clothes fell into place, she resumed her high-heeled, mincing walk—only to be swept up in the wind and rain again, and again and again.2

This sign attracted big crowds, and the crowds included plenty of women. Not the most affluent women, who would surely have stuck with silk, a warm and voluptuous material that has been a symbol of class since ancient times. But imagine seamstresses and switchboard operators on their way to work, or schoolteachers and stenographers going to plays. What the ad promised is something that the New York garment industry, just a few blocks south, knew how (and still knows how) to deliver: cheap knockoffs of expensive fabrics and designs; aristocratic fantasies that a plebeian mass public can afford. It was structurally similar to the electrified mass culture embodied in its sign. It sought and found a large body of respectable women who would respond to a public, flamboyant sexual display, and would buy a garment that they hoped would help them change.

One thing that petticoat could mean: women’s disgust with the multiple layers of clothing that then defined women’s wear. In those clothes, nobody would ever see what a woman’s body looked like. (In those days, too, from what we can tell, sex happened in the dark: Touch but don’t look.) Feminism in the early twentieth century demanded “dress reform” from clothes that treated women like prisoners. But not much changed till World War One, when suddenly there was a lot less cloth around, and then things changed fast. Since then, the visibility of women’s bodies has become a primary hallmark of the twentieth century, of the West, of the big city, of modern times. Anyone who doubts this should note the rage against women’s visibility in all the aggressively anti-modern movements around the world. The Heatherbloom product, although marketed to youth, stays firmly within the traditional layered wardrobe. But the Heatherbloom sign performs a leap into the open. It is a curtain-raiser for the century-long drama of women’s exposure and display. This is “legitimate” theater because the girl can’t help it. She does not take her clothes off; she is not stripped by a lustful husband or boyfriend; she is undressed by the primal force of nature itself. But in Times Square it is also comic theater. Its comic irony is defined by the program of the sign: In Act One the heroine is swept up and stripped by the storm; in Act Two the storm abates and her clothes cover her up; in Act Three she is out in the storm again.

Smoke, Water, and America

The discourse of nostalgia in Times Square often gravitates toward the 1940s, the age of World War Two and its prosperous aftermath. Survivors and memoirists of these years portray a New York that may have been physically distinct from the rest of America, but that culturally blended in with it, and that had the capacity to incarnate it. In Alfred Eisenstadt’s Life photograph of the sailor and the nurse embracing in the Square as the Japanese surrender, we see a historical moment free of the tension between “New York” and “America” that marked American culture in the 1960s and 1970s, when I was growing up, and that was nourished by the GOP. (It peaked in President Ford’s “Drop Dead” speech of 1976.) People who yearn for the Square of the 1940s are often, in Paul Simon’s poignant words, “looking for America.” They still feel vast distance between New York and America today, and they yearn for a fusion between them that they think existed yesterday. They often focus on the Square’s spectacular signs, which they feel performed feats of spiritual integration.
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