Times Square as honky-tonk carnival  (1930s to mid-1990s) vs Times Square as corporate office tower and entertainment complex (mid-1990s to date)

Many New Yorkers deplore the generic and mall-like shops, theaters, and restaurants; the incessantly  glowing advertising signage and digital images;  and the self-consciously histrionic architecture that mark out the area since Disney invested in the New Amsterdam theater. Others point out that the lights, music, disparate mobs, street salesmen and artists, and even a few XXX stores are still in evidence. The music and dancing at B B King's is rumored to be hot and wild on Saturday nights. They add that popular entertainment entrepreneurs always wanted families and women to feel safe in their dance halls, restaurants, and theaters. For example, pre-WWI Lobster Palaces encouraged ladies to attend, and deplored the older "sporting life" rowdiness. On Coney Island the bars and whore houses were relegated to a small area called "the gut," George Tillyou wanted a friendly, benevolent crowd at his shows, and Dreamland was a very upscale, refined place.The theme park, with its shallow, patriotic view of history, was hardly invented at Disneyland. Coney Island had its recreations of great American victories at sea. 42nd Street's Murray's Roman Gardens,  which occupied the building Hubert's Flea Circus later took over, simulated ancient Rome, and the movie palaces of the 20s and 30s made one feel s/he was in a starlit night in Greece, in an Egyptian court, or in a medieval palace.

The phenomenon loosely called "Disneyfication" has been carefully analyzed. Issues of  privatized public space, and of corporate-sponsored entertainment venues, are of major concern to anyone who is concerned about dystopias that 21st century big business, with its technological, financial, and lobbying power, is uniquely qualified to  create. Policed and TV-monitored in a way that scorns privacy, discourages any kind of diversity in dress or behavior,  and enforces the political status quo however (like Bushworld) corrupt and hypocritical, urban public space has become something that makes anyone who remembers "naughty, bawdy, gaudy" night life--or has read 1984--shake his/her head in dismay.

If shop owners, police, politicians, real estate owners, investment bankers treat Times Square and the people who frequent it more respectfully today than before Disneyfication (and they do, by a long shot), it is because today's passing parade is considered a consumer of upscale, if not elite, merchandise. The passing parade is no longer in search of pornography, drugs, booze, gambling opportunities, or prostitutes. Mob presence is gone, as are most pariah capitalists, except for the 8th Avenue porn store owners, mostly Sri Lankans, the latest of the immigrant middlemen. The mega-corporations who own the media, banking, and entertainment giants need the income from Times Square's businesses just as they do from shopping malls, theme parks, stadias, gentrified downtowns. They know how to make their customers feel safe, important, and, by their lights, "American".

Below I list and summarize some of the key statements on the subject by sociologists, historians, and lovers of New York City. But to start, the criminal negligence of  Bushworld (Texas-style cronyism, contempt for "entitlement" programs such as the 2001 proposal for strengthing the levees, bureaucratization, Cheneyistic indifference) is part of this story. What are the plans for rebuilding New Orleans? Well, it needs to be smaller. That is, the poor people need to be, or to stay, disbursed. That's the opinion of NY Times' Business Page reporter Frank Nocera, and it is echoed by other real estate and investment counselors (W. Ribczynski of The Wharton School, for example). Nocera ("To Be Better, New Orleans, Think Smaller," 9/25/05, pp.C1, C5). Nocera believes the tourist entertainment business would be a good fit for the venerable city. That is what occasioned the Disneyfication of Times Square, and Bloomberg--immune from charges of corrupt influence because of his own  bottomless  fortune--has seen to it  that Coney Island and a swatch of Ratner-infested Brooklyn  will  look like the New Times Square in future. Nocera states that the New Big Easy will have need of people who take the low-wage jobs that today's entertainment industry doles out. But it will need 200,000 less than lived in the city before Katrina/Bushworld. It's those poor people who are malleable, and if there were fewer, maybe they could have their ruined houses "replaced with something that will be new and safe and afordable." Gee thanks Frank, who adds "and if the population can stay down, . . . there is a chance that the school system could be good." Well, at least there's a chance. Quoting a mogul in a "New York Investment Bank that specializes in bankruptcy and restructuring deals," Nocera explains that casino gambling would be a part of the new entertainment landscape, trading on the "ribald" past of New Orleans in the way only PR spinners can. Oh yeah, creativity and feral energy can be good for business too, if "managed" the right way.
      The result: "an adult Disneyland." Bottom line: the corp-se suits and the journalists who suck up their self-serving drivel do not see that phrase as an oxymoron.

Samuel Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (NY: NYU Press, 1999.)
"The Times Square renovation is not just about real estate and economics . . . . Because it has involved the major restructuring of the legal code relating to sex, and because it has been a first step not just toward the moving, but toward the obliteration of certain business and social practices, it has functioned as a massive and destructive intervention in the social fabric of a noncriminal element in the city . . . ." (193-94)
    Delany frequented the gay porn theaters and found companions and friends there. He describes the atmosphere of tolerance, existing no where else in the city, for people's sexual kinks, however bizarre. Delany finds of carnival-like touch of anarchy essential to human expression.  He also praises the contact between races, social classes, and ethnic groups. In Times Square, porn made sex "friendlier, more relaxed, more playful" -- for those who could overcome the guilt and revulsion they had been taught to express for "deviance" and for tabooed sex's equation with disease and criminality. It was the antithesis of "family values."
    One of the most interesting passages is the description of the "working class residences and small human services (groceries, drugstores, liquor stores, dry cleaners, diners . . . electronic stores . . . retailers of theatrical equipment . . . inexpensive hotels . . . bars and the sexually oriented businesses . . .)" What has taken their place are the theaters, restaurants, tourist hotels, and skyscrapers.
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    Neil Gabler's Life the Movie (1998) describes the way entertainment in a monolithic, technologically-advanced society provides leisure time entertainment which is passively enjoyed and escapist. Films, TV shows, musical and melodramatic theater entertain by making spectators avoid thinking about themselves, their circumstances, their own responsibilities, or those of their employers or elected officials. The way corporate "news" covers events is a good example: as a contest between opponents instead of discussing the reasons, for example, of opposing views on a Supreme Court nominee or a political advisor under fire for revealing the identity of the wife of an administrative critic. "Human interest" not talent or message is the way to generate automatic reactions and melodrama. Thus personalities become famous not for talent but for how personable or outrageous they appear. Enforced stupidity is the result, if "dazed" and "shocked"  are the definition of stupid.  In this connection, we should say that the technological breakthrough which convinced  distributors of consumer items such as clothes, cell phones, vacations, cars, and computers to advertise in the new Times Square was the digital open air TV screens.

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Guy DeBord's The Society of the Spectacle (1967) is the key text about commodity fetishism. The capitalist economy makes people desire products because they are advertised as holding the keys to happiness and  empowerment.  The citizen is made to confuse false needs with personal and even spiritual fulfillment, through the media of film, radio, newspapers, photographs, genre fiction, stage entertainment. S/He is also made a passive spectator, alienated from any sense of individuality ("be different, like everybody else"), politically complaint, and part of a mass  behavioral consensus, even if s/he is alone in home. "The spectacle proclaims the predominence of appearances and asserts that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere appearance. . . . It is the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity."

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Frank Rose, "Can Disney Change 42nd Street?" Fortune 24 June, 1996, p.95-104. Extremely informative piece. In 1995, the investment seemed financially negligible for Disney, but was an innovation. "Festival marketplaces" in Boston and Baltimore were flourishing. And Starbuck's was a surprise, proving that "people want to be with people."  Disney wanted a vibrant, authentic environment, not a slick and synthetic one. The transportation and entertainment center that had been Times Square for a century was a rich source of excitement, lights, music, fun, and adventure. It also supported a Gap and McDonald's lucrativeely, despite the area's shabbiness.


If Disney could make Times Square tourist friendly, with the kind of mid-level clothing, electronic, and accessory stores that had drawn people in the 1950s, then they could be a bellweather for the return of the center city to commerical prominence. Good theater was important too--thus the New Amsterdam ("a glance into fairyland, said Michael Eisner, envisioning the refurbishing), The Lion King, and backing for musical comedy at new and renovated 42nd Street theaters.

Further incentives were that the country would only support a few Disneyworld theme parks, that considerable fortunes could be amassed by consumer centers and multiplexes, and that architects' creativity will produce attractive  environments "sharing elements of theme parks." Such ambiences pay off big--especially with the digital moving images on both large screens and small ones that can be put in stores, on subway kiosks, and sides of buildings.
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Vincent Moscov, "New York.com: A Political Economy of the 'Informational' City," http://www.queensu.ca/sociology/Faculty/Mosco/vmny.htm
A network of informational offices set up to sell goods and services online--a "Silicone Alley"-- now exists in Tribecca and the Battery, and in midtown New  York  also, where it coexists with a mas entertianment complex. The latter came of age when Disney insisted that the sex busineses, along with the downscale restaurants, grocery stores, electronic outlets, and bars, had to be razed before it restored the New Amsterdam theater. The skyscrapers are occupied by advertising, media, fashion, banking, and telecommunications concerns. Some consequences of this kind of concentration of corporate power: surveillance by electronic equipment, Business Improvement Districts who have power to privatize previously municipally-funded services, the demise of privacy, and an increasing financial gap between the wealthy and the poor. [editorial addition: That gap is the largest of any city in the nation, and growing every year under the immensely wealthy and consitutionally deaf and dumb Michael Bloomberg, who will, if elected to a second term, impose upon a large area of Brooklyn and Coney Island a corporate entertainment-luxury apartment-office center the sterility of which will equal that of any mall in the nation. Downscale, and often immigrant, neighborhoods will be demolished. This is the Bloomberg who wishes to restict Central Park entertainment to elite and enormously funded public events, while making it off limits to  people of various races, classes, and political persuasions who desire to stage spontaneous events in which they express themselves creatively and politically.]
Bloomberg with the cast of Chicago. You gotta give him credit.

In view of Bloomberg's, and Giuliani's, desire to ban street musicians, incense sellers, portrait artists, and sidewalk book and magazine salesmen from other areas of the city, the presence of all of these people in Times Square is remarkable. Perhaps the BID figures they provide a touch of the "authentic" for the tourists who form part of the background noise at the networks' morning shows, where they can be seen smiling over the shoulders of the mike-clutching "personalities" who call themselves "journalists."

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John Hannigan, Fantasy City: Profit and Pleasure in the Postmodern Metropolis (London: Routhledge, 1998).
     In the early 20th century, the middle classes were nervous about working class behavior in entertainment venues. At Coney Islaand, for example, the middle classes fled when the proles took over. See Robert Caro's The Power Broker for Robert Moses' motivation for replacing hionky tonk Coney with spacious and immaculate Jones Beach. With suburbanization, people stayed at home, focussing life around TV, neighborhood clubs, local or better yet, private swimming pools. Malls developed, multiplexes, and baseball stadia with vast parking lots, away from the urban settings the avoidance of which caused Shibe Park, Ebbets Field, Braves Field, Griffiths Stadium and Forbes Field to be abandoned. Today's "vintage" ball parks double as theme parks, with electronic noise and adverts, theme restaurants, digital scoreboard images, kids' playgrounds, professional cheerleaders--and super boxes, so the elite do not have to sit in stands but rather can eat, drink, and watch the game on large screens while networking with clients!
     Disneyland was not close to a city, and was a new age marriage of moving images, toys, live entertainment, and a shrine to an American  history cleansed of  exploitation, class conflict, and depredation. Umberto Eco: "America demands a hyper-reality, and so has invented the absolute fake."
     As entertainment returned to the inner city in the 1980s, a nostalgic mix of travel and adventure predominated. Although to some degree the inner city revival meant exciting specialty shops, clever restaurant menus, and independent film centres, the larger and more generic event settings predominated. Appeals to a romantic past helped transfer allegiance from history to consumer items. The shopping "experience" became a "stand-in for real life travel and experience." Such inner city travellers could "see" a large city without setting foot in any neighborhoods or sampling their ethnic diversity regarding clothing, food, celebrations, or music.    
Hispanic Newark, NY

Comfort Siutes Inn, downtown Newark, NJ

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