The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (24 page)

It is, in short, the barely contained energies of that crowd, and the noise and the blur of the traffic, and the huckstering along the sidewalk, that save 42nd Street from the Disneyesque. The life of the place is on the streets. As I walked westward one Saturday night in late October 2001, I joined a big crowd watching a spray painter at work. The painter was a wiry young man with a red cap pulled low over his eyes, the bill expertly rolled. Another spray painter, farther down the street, stood idly by his wares, but here the crowd was two or three deep. When they finally moved away, I stayed to talk. The painter’s name was Ayhan Colak; he had come to Times Square from Istanbul three years earlier. Ayhan said that he always attracted a crowd because he understood something about his setting. “It’s very hard in New York,” he said; “there’s so much competition. But here I am on Forty-second Street; everybody is performing, and I give a performance, too.” And he did. Ayhan was swift, nervous, intent; as he moved rapidly with his spray cans over the surface of his cardboard canvas, he bristled with some of that manic energy you see in footage of Jackson Pollock, though it is probably fair to say that his work did not quite aspire to the same level of art, or for that matter to any level of art.

Ayhan had, in fact, never studied art at all; he was a street performer. But he was a virtuoso street performer. He wielded his paint cans like a master chef: sometimes he upended the can and popped the nozzle a few times against the canvas to produce a wedge of paint, or, by angling the can a little lower, a thick stream of paint. His tools also included a piece of crumpled newspaper, a pot lid, a chisel, and a palette knife. Ayhan had a limited repertoire; his big seller—and everyone else’s—was a painting of the pyramids of Giza superimposed on an imaginary Manhattan skyline, with the earth, the moon, and maybe Saturn suspended above in a black sky—a kind of spiritualized fantasy designed to lift the viewer above the neon bath of 42nd Street. The performance was free, and the work itself was available for $20. On this particular evening, the crowd burst into applause when Ayhan straightened up. A customer stepped forward to pay; one of the customer’s friends, overwhelmed in the face of genius, timidly asked Ayhan if he had anything else left in his portfolio.

I was on 42nd Street again two weeks later, on a chilly Sunday afternoon, and there was Ayhan once again surrounded by a crowd, which included three Hasidic men, a sailor, and a young woman from New Jersey named Michelle who had bought four of Ayhan’s works. I asked Michelle whether she had asked for a special bulk price, and she looked at me reprovingly: “You can’t tell an artist what to do.” They made, we agreed, perfect Christmas gifts.

Yet even Ayhan is not exactly “authentic,” at least not if authenticity requires indigenousness. Street culture has become almost as globalized as retail culture. Ayhan, who speaks Russian, Bulgarian, and German in addition to Turkish and English, traveled a circuit that includes Tokyo and Houston, and he learned his art from a Mexican guy he met in San Francisco; another spray painter I met learned in Paris, and also worked in Miami, where, he said, he was expected to paint fish rather than office towers. You can buy the same caricatures and the same Chinese calligraphy that you find on 42nd Street on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, and probably in Kathmandu as well. The street population is globally mobile and transitory; few people return to the block year after year. And so even the vendors and artists do not “belong” to 42nd Street much more than the shops do. By the time you read this, Ayhan will have been replaced by someone else. Does it matter? Indigenousness is an anachronism in a global city like New York. Creativity and spontaneity should be enough.

One of the few aspects of the street’s culture invented and practiced by natives is break dancing, which is featured in the Times Square subway station and up and down Broadway and Seventh Avenue, wherever a large enough parcel of sidewalk makes performance possible. With their one-handed handstands and standing somersaults and dizzying head spins, the break-dancers are arguably the most talented performers in Times Square. And, like Ayhan, the dance crews understand the need for theatricality in the world’s epicenter of the theatrical. One afternoon I encountered Rasheem, who comes down from Harlem with a crew of younger kids, on the traffic island between 44th and 45th Streets. He had recruited four volunteers from the crowd, who would, when so instructed, line up side by side and bend over at the waist; a crew member anchored the group. Rasheem strutted around the gathering crowd, explaining that he was going to jump over “all six”—well, actually five—and land on the other side. “First, I want everyone to hold up a ticket,” he cried. “Everyone know what a ticket look like?” Rasheem held up a dollar bill. Then he cranked up the rap music from his boom box, went to the far end of the island, and commenced to flex and twist. “Everybody outta the way!” he shouted. “I don’t got no insurance.” Another crew member went around with a bucket; Rasheem wasn’t going anywhere until the audience had deposited major tickets. This turned out to be a very long process. Finally, Rasheem began to trot, picked up speed like a broad jumper until he hit his mark just in front of the first person, launched himself into a somersault, and landed clean on the other side. It was the human equivalent of Evel Knievel on his motorcycle. Rasheem later admitted to me that though he had never landed on a volunteer, he did occasionally hit a crew member. Such mishaps, he added, were the fault of an uninspiring audience.

It is not all that easy to make money on 42nd Street. Many of the vendors I came to know had made more money, and lived a distinctly better life, back home, wherever home was, than in Times Square. Many of them talked about leaving, and some of them did abruptly disappear. There were simply too many of them, even given the great size of the crowd. And the trade was tightly controlled. Vendors who deal in artwork enjoy First Amendment protection, but they can be regulated with regard to time, place, and manner of expression. The city prohibits vendors from setting up shop on 42nd Street before seven P.M., in order to give the rush-hour crowd time to dissipate, and then forces them to close up around eleven, as the theater crowd is pouring out onto the street. One night I watched the cops order everyone to close up shop at ten-thirty. I asked an officer what the hurry was, and he said, “The captain says it’s ‘exigent circumstances.’” This was apparently the technical term for dangerous overcrowding. “We don’t want someone to walk out into the street and get hurt.” By eleven, the vendors had vanished, save for a lone sketch artist, squatting, a pad propped on his thigh, while he drew a picture of a little boy whose mother looked on patiently.

Most vendors fail, but few fail tragically. Virtually all of 42nd Street’s sidewalk merchants are young male immigrants, and most of them have the immigrant resilience that has been one of New York City’s defining characteristics for the last century. One slightly chilly evening in the spring of 2002 I met Ivan Ivanoff, the pride of Veliko Tirnovo, in Bulgaria. Ivan was pale, with a blocky face and a determined set to his jaw. He was a man of many professions. He said that when he had first come to New York, he had joined a break-dancing crew, which he had quit in disgust over the group’s spotty work ethic and his low-man-on-the-totem-pole share of the take. I asked whether he had learned to break-dance in Bulgaria. “I have been break-dancing for, like, seventeen years,” he said proudly. Ivan was thirty, and as a teenager he was, he said, “one of the most successful break-dancers in Bulgaria.” He and his friends had learned from American movies and music videos. “We would have break-dancing battles, between different crews,” Ivan explained. “But the problem is, there is no profit in break-dancing in Bulgaria. People do not pay money to see it. Also, nobody dances on the street in Bulgaria.” Ivan opened up a pizzeria, and then a second and a third. “Then I realize,” he said, “is good business, but is local business. I want to do national business.” So Ivan started a factory to produce women’s clothes. “I put in all the money from the pizzeria; and I lose everything.” There had been, apparently, a drastic softening in the Bulgarian economy. And so he had left Bulgaria with his girlfriend, in search of opportunity.

Ivan had now taken up spray painting, and he said he was earning $100 on good days, which this manifestly was not: nobody came by to disturb our conversation. But Ivan was not discouraged. “I have many ideas for what I will do,” he announced. Idea number one was transferring photos onto T-shirts. Ivan had already spent $5,000 to buy a top-quality digital camera, a transfer press, and a printer. But even that wasn’t the big idea. “I want to go back into the food business,” Ivan said, almost conspiratorially. This idea was so powerful that he couldn’t take the risk of revealing it. “It’s a very good product,” he allowed. “The product is new. It will cost only two or three dollars.” He was still refining the concept, but he promised that it did not involve Bulgarian cuisine.

The “street culture” of the new 42nd Street consists of pavement dwellers like Ayhan and Ivan, and the middle-aged Chinese ladies who glumly peddle their photographs of the Flatiron Building and the World Trade Center, and the great tides of pedestrians passing this way and that, and also the visitors who roost long enough to be described as loiterers. And that population consists largely of black teenagers. This is a peculiar irony, for critics of 42nd Street redevelopment described it at the time, and have continued to describe it, as a gentrification process designed to erase the street’s minority population in order to lure back white professionals. If you ask kids, they will tell you that 42nd Street is a good place to pick up girls, that you can hang out for free as long as you don’t mind being moved around by cops, that you can see a movie at the AMC 25 and then have a cheap meal at Applebee’s—just what William Kornblum, the principal author of the
Bright Light
study, said that kids had been doing back in the 1970s. The Broadway City arcade attracts a heavily minority, and of course young, clientele. And 42nd Street tends to become less white later at night; sometime around eleven P.M., the movie theaters shift from a largely white to a largely nonwhite audience.

The arcades, and the kids who hang out near them, have had the effect of restoring a soupçon of the old 42nd Street sense of menace—perhaps just enough to satisfy critics who fear wholesale embourgeoisement. One Saturday night I waited in line to be admitted to Bar Code, an arcade on Broadway and 45th that closed up in early 2003. A sign prominently posted in the window announced that no one wearing “colors,” “do-rags,” “skullies,” sports jerseys, or “velour suits” would be admitted. In front of me were four high-school-age boys from Sussex County, apparently a rather pastoral zone of New Jersey. A tall, skinny kid with his cap on backward asked what “colors” were, and I explained that the word referred to gang insignia. He blanched. He worried that his high school football sweatshirt would fall afoul of the rules.

I had never heard of banning sports jerseys, and when I got to the front of the line I asked the security official. “Let’s say you come in wearing a Giants jersey, and the other guy, he’s wearing Jets,” he explained. “That’s enough to start a fight.” Velour suits? They were banning sweat suits, and so they had to prohibit the far more expensive designer track suits to prevent an aggrieved kid from saying, “How come me and not him?” Once inside, we were forced to empty our pockets, and then each of us was very briskly patted down, our shoes squeezed, a metal wand waved over us, before we were allowed to pass upstairs to the arcade itself. Bar Code seemed to have reached a DEFCON 4 level of antigang alert: once I finally got inside, it was so quiet and modestly populated that you had to wonder if the place was scaring away its own clientele. Perhaps that’s why it closed.

The Broadway City arcade had a much less rigorous security system, and was a much more wild and woolly place late at night. For all his distaste for the “Eighth Avenue crowd,” Richard Simon understood perfectly well that they were his clientele, and he had opened up a dance space on the second floor for the late-night weekend crowd. At 2:40 one morning, as rap music shook the walls, a mêlée broke out between two groups of black teenagers from the same neighborhood in Queens; there had been “a look across the dance floor,” a detective later said. Weapons, undetected at the door, were suddenly brandished; eight people were shot and two stabbed (none fatally) before the police were able to rush in and quell the violence. Here was a sudden and terrifying reminder of 42nd Street as it once had been. The overwhelming irony of the event was that the violence had issued from the street’s most “authentic,” least Disneyesque, spot. This was more authenticity than even the most single-minded opponent of development could have wished. It also constituted an implicit argument for the virtues of embourgeoisement, of regulation, even, perhaps, for the corporate dominance of public space. You never heard about gang violence at Applebee’s.

BRUCE RATNER, THE DEVELOPER responsible for Madame Tussaud’s and Applebee’s, is all too familiar with the complaint that New Yorkers—at least New Yorkers in his class—make about 42nd Street. And so he was at first inclined to be defensive when I asked him about all the mass-produced dreck on the block. But the more he thought about it, the less inclined he was to be apologetic. Ratner is not a native New Yorker with a New Yorker’s possessiveness over the city’s past; his father had started the family real estate business in Cleveland, and he remembers visiting the city as a boy. “Look at it in 1960,” Ratner said, sitting in his office in the renovated business district of Brooklyn. “It would have had arcades. I remember the arcades; I remember the movie theaters. Now there are arcades with electronic games in them; twenty-five years from now, people will remember that.” Ratner began to pick up speed as he warmed to his topic and perhaps saw his way clear to his own position in the new 42nd Street. “Applebee’s and Chevys—they’re what America is today. I’m not saying that’s good or bad, any more than Bond Clothes was.” Bond, on Broadway and 44th, was Times Square’s biggest retailer in the forties and fifties. “That’s what it has been for seventy years. I would argue it’s more of a mirror of America. In 1900 it was a mirror of that genteel way that America was: it was ruled by a small group of people who went to see plays and stuff like that. For the last seventy years, it’s been for the average person. It’s a reflection of America.”