OK, maybe not this noir.
The cycle of urban renewal is always the same. Always. Set your watch by it, count off the paces. A run-down block looks ominous and debauched; developers pitch a new vision with shiny glass walls and lots of chic retail and people walking around having a Pedestrian Experience — that’s a good thing, not a dull thing; means the streets are friendly to low-carbon-impact activities. Eminent domain is applied if the owners balk; money gushes; the ball swings; a new complex arises, and the old ugly block, with its piecemeal storefronts and variegated buildings and venerable architectural styles, is replaced by a big Thing. It’s packed with Chili’s and Applebee’s and a book store and a place that serves premium ice cream. Look ahead five years, and it’s dead. Perhaps the local magazine has a Bygone Days section that runs old photos, and when they show the picture of the block everyone was anxious to raze, well, it looks . . . interesting. It looks cool, in a seedy sort of way. Lick of paint, sandblast the buildings, get a flatfoot to patrol and move along the pervs and bums, and you’d have the very sort of urban environment the new plans promise we’ll get, but never get around to providing.
42nd Street in 1993. Photo by author.
New York isn’t completely regretting the massive clean-up of Times Square, but they’ve finally conceded one of the lingering, stinging critiques: it’s too clean. C’mon, this is New Yawk. Times Square is supposed to be gritty. (“Gritty” usually means hookers.) If you never saw it at its worst, you probably think the visions in Taxi Driver look almost . . . well, romantic. All those marquees, jutting into the stream of pedestrians like the prows of once-great ocean liners. The vibrant community of hustlers, pornhounds, streetwalkers, square-johns down for a walk on the wild side. Animated neon signs that drew pictures in the night, instead of great blaring walls of color that make you feel trapped in a Blade Runner remake.
But no. Those were the bad old days. That was Beame-time, Kojak-land, an age of sagging civic fortunes and needle-park panic and grindhouse theaters showing chop-’em-up horror films for mouthbreathers who would have to wait years for Quentin Tarantino to tell them how this movie was actually art, man, art. No wants to go back to that. Any other historical references we can slather on the place, then?
Why yes. The New York Post reports:
A new $27 million plan to redesign Times Square’s famed “bow tie” calls for an atmospheric “film noir” look for the five-block area . . .
Of course. The Forties! Times Square in its full glory. Men in hats, women in hats, men in suits, women in . . . okay, suits, but also dresses, and lots of black cars gliding under the marquees, the lights reflected in their shiny hoods. Except that you can’t drive in the area as much as you used to, and no one wears hats that aren’t backwards, but otherwise, great. So how are they going to do it? Dress code? Ban color? Put in some dime-a-dance parlors and some all-night hash-houses and hire guys to walk around dressed as sailors? Require cabbies to be cynical and call the passenger “Mac” and step on it when asked to do so?
If only. The area will feature…
…permanent pedestrian plazas with a smooth, dark pavement studded with reflective metal disks designed to recapture the gritty feel of the city’s past.
“It’s not taking its cues from some pretty little things in Europe or something,” said Craig Dykers, an architect with Snohetta Design, the firm that also designed the 9/11 Museum downtown.
“Our design has a film noir feel to it; it’s more muscular. Paris or London can have these little benches, but New York has a toughness to it,” he said during a presentation to Community Board 5’s Transportation Committee Monday night.
What does that mean, bench-wise? Spikes? Hard to see how reflective metal disks in the pavement stand for the city’s grit-related past, and in fact it’s the opposite of the way things were. Pavement was light, and there were dark blotches everywhere, probably formed by gum spat out by antisocial idiots who couldn’t troubled to dispose of it in a civilized way. If you’re reducing “noir” down to an element of set design, pass the mandatory Venetian Blinds act and you’re done.
Noir isn’t really a New York thing anyway. It’s L.A. It’s the corruption under the sun and the palms, the private detective in the downtown office building (Marlowe was LA; Spade was in Frisco, as you could call it then.) Noir is all about moral choices in an amoral world, fate and finality, the cruel cosmic wheel turning in a place that was supposed to have reinvented the old ways. It’s cars, not subways. Rude new money, not ancient fortunes. Perhaps the quintessential New York detective was Nero Wolfe, who never left the house and sent a servant out to do the grunt work. Not to say you can’t make noir out of Times Square — Stanley Kubrick’s early film, Killer’s Kiss, uses Times Square to great effect, but there’s simply too much light and life in the place to give the place a Noir mood.
Perhaps the attempted noirification is is just their way of admitting they cleaned it up too much:
Times Square, 2011. Photo by Songquan Deng / Shutterstock.com.
Could have been worse: Philip Johnson’s horrid 1983 redesign of Times Square would have cleaned up the area, alright, but its gimcracky post-modern geegaws just swapped ho’s for faux’s, and would have deadened the area for decades. If there’s a balance between soulless overdevelopment and a high grit content, it’s yet to be discovered. Best to ignore Daniel Burnham’s advice when it comes to city planning: dream no big dreams. They may not stir men’s souls, but you won’t get a chain restaurant, either.
The most romantic visions of Times Square are black and white, but that doesn’t mean they’re noir. They’re real: the interplay between a million lights and a teeming street and the countless small storefronts, the dozens of buildings put up with no thought to a Grand Plan, only commerce, their variegated facades a reflection of the times that produced them and the teams that created them. In a way, it’s sad: the old Times Square motto was Look Up! Isn’t it glorious?
We’re different now. Look down. We hope it reminds you of yesterday.
FRINGE SPRING
It’s finally here, after two and a half years, the long awaited Obama Effect-the offspring of his class warfare rhetoric. The leftist analogue of the Arab Spring: the anti-capitalist FRINGE SPRING. Don’t ask me for analysis. Half my brain disintergrates just thinking about it.
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“but New York has a toughness to it,” he said during a presentation to Community Board 5’s Transportation Committee Monday night.” Good Lord, thanks for the laugh of the day! New York – real tough. The place has become so wussified under the current capo Bloomberg they have to recreate grit. Want to get your “noir” back”? It’s real easy, man. Light up! Pull out yer Lucky’s unfiltered and blow clouds of smoke down 42nd street. When you’re finished smokin’ a couple a cartons, eat somethin’ with a bucketload of transfat and put salt on it. Hell just stand there with a butt hangin’ out the corner of your mouth and that ought to bring on the darkness. Noo Yawk tough? Puhleazzze. Ain’t there a law against it?
Nice piece. Perhaps the city lacks a look because it also lacks a voice, a popular voice from the streets and boroughs, like O’Henry at the turn of the 20th century, Damon Runyon in the Thirties, Mickey Spillane in the Fifties. Those were authentic expressions of the big city’s teeming soul. Of course, the elites looked down on their works, but it was these beloved authors, not the New Yorker magazine fiction, which today strike me as capturing the essence of 20th century Big Apple. Who today speaks for New York?
Bench spikes, at last! Well….it could just be me…..
It’s a treat to see you, Mr. Lileks. I have your Gallery of Regrettable Food and hope you become a fixture here.
Much like a wall sconce. Or a light disk embedded in the pavement.
Ah, Times Square of yesteryear. $.75 bought you two movies, two cartoons, two segments of News Of the Day and half-a-dozen trailers for coming attractions. $.25 bought your choice of two hamburgers or two hot dogs and a soda next door to the theater. Best of all, the movie theaters on Times Square were open 24/7.
A misanthropic immigrant kid, I began cutting school in first grade but I spent my time hiding from cops and truant officers (juvenile delinquents or JDs were the terror du jour back then) in libraries. In fourth grade I discovered Times Square. Spent at least three mornings a week there right into high school. When I ran out of American movies to see, I took in the foreign movies with subtitles.
It didn’t do much for my formal education and I’m lucky to have a high school diploma but it sure gave me an education in movies. Years later, listening to my seventeen year old girlfriend (now my wife) and her college bound friends discussing “film” it suddenly occurred to me that I had seen all those French and Italian films they were so excited about in grade school when they were released.
Didn’t know the names of the directors and actors whose names my future wife and her friends were gushing about but they were all long familiar. And I’d seen their b-films, too, which my future wife and her friends never heard of.
Ah, Times Square.
Left out the delightful sleaze. Times Square was the first place I ever saw a man give another man a blow job in public. Best scene: A man several aisles front of me stands suddenly in middle of a morning movie, silhouetting himself on the bottom of the screen and bellows in a towering rage at the guy seated next to him: “Sorry? You piss on my shoe and you say you’re sorry?
The audience, or more accurately, that portion of the audience that was awake, were often exuberant in their praise of the villains and bad guys on the screen. This especially when the good guys were white and the bad guys were redskins in a western or worse yet, natives in a jungle movie. I’ve seen Cornell Wilde in The Naked Prey half a dozen times but never enjoyed it so much as when the audience were rooting and hooting for his African pursuers.
I misread the Snohetta Design firm’s name as Snobetta Design and thought to myself “Aren’t they all Snob-etta’s but kudos for the truth in advertizing.”
Then I realized my mistake. Silly me.
How gay!
Now there’s a ’40s-era term that’s dramatically changed meaning over the years.
Or, you know, a medieval term (the word ‘gay’ wasn’t invented in the 40s, after all) that changed its name over the centuries. Like a whole lot of other words. I do hope that the people getting peeved about how ‘gay’ now means ‘homosexual’ rather than ‘happy’ are also using ‘nice’ to mean ‘foolish’ rather than, well, nice. Just to be fair. Err, no, wait, that’s an Old English word that originally meant ‘attractive’. Gotta keep all those meanings straight, eh?
Black sidewalks with shiny metal disks.
Sound like people will be chatting up the workin’ girls, trying to position them so they can see an up-skirt reflection in the shiny metal disks.
I first came to the US in the summer 1980. I was here to work for the summer, to take beer money back to Ireland in the fall.
On my first day in New York (Shannon to JFK was the cheapest flight I could get), after checking in at the Y on 34th and 7th the first thing I did was head over to Times Square to check out the prostitutes and peep shows. Coming as I did from the west of Ireland, and being only 17, these were sights not to be missed. The first exciting thing that happened was two men started a fist fight right in front of me in the middle of the sidewalk. I could not believe what I was seeing! The same day I ran into some Moonies who tried to recruit me.
When I wasn’t watching fights or being recruited by cults, I wandered around the city with my head tilted back and my jaw hanging open. I’d never seen such a place before. Everything was so BIG. And gritty. This was at the end of the Carter years, after all.
Not too many years later, after joining the USAF, I ended up being sent TDY to New York for training at a DEC facility in the Madison Square Gardens area. First day there, my sidekick A1C Keith Favreau and I headed off to see the UN. Descending into the subway, we came across a demented person screaming and wailing and whirling like a dervish. Emaciated as this poor person was, Keith (6′ 4″, built) backed up against the wall and shuffled quickly by, avoiding eye contact, for fear of provocation.
On more recent trips to New York, I have been struck by how clean Times Square has become. It’s more like Disney World than the New York I first met.
Apologies for my rambling. This note struck a nostalgic nerve.
How about the Times Square Lisa Douglas sang about?
Mr. Lileks: Thanks for a very nicely done piece. You have a feel for the texture of a place like few others.
And yet… I must complain.
WE NEED YOUR SCREEDS.
Bring back the Screed.
We’re in crucial times here.
“Spade was in Frisco, as you could call it then.”
Nope, couldn’t even call it that then.
http://www.sfgenealogy.com/sf/history/hgoe82.htm
From the San Francisco Examiner 1918:
COURT OBJECTS TO WORD ‘FRISCO.
Judge Mogan Rebukes Angeleno for Using Slang in His Petition for Divorce.
Because he referred to this city as “Frisco” on four occasions while testifying before Judge Mogan yesterday in his petition for a divorce, Hal R. Hobbs, Los Angeles automobile dealer, was threatened with internment.
“What do you mean by ‘Frisco’?” asked Judge Mogan.
“Why, San Francisco, of course,” said Hobbs in surprise.
“No one refers to San Francisco by that title except people from Los Angeles,” said the court. “I am the chairman of the County Council of Defense, and I warn you that you stand in danger of being interned as an alien enemy. Don’t do it again.”
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I saw Times Square in the old bad days in the 70s — it really was bad. The present design is a lot better than then. It will decay properly, in time. I saw it at the end of the 50s, too — it was still pretty nice. You can’t design all of this to work. You just have to get the people there & they will make it dynamic. Count of it — whenever it is dynamic, you artsies will be unhappy with it.
In order for Times Square to fade to black (Greek term skotia) you need people, desperate people, lots of desperate people. The dark souls that peopled Times Square in the sixties era squalor, were adults that came of age in the 1920′s and 30′s. The lean depression years. Honestly not everyone who came out of the so called “Greatest Generation” were so great, frankly some of the them were quite perverse and licentious. Anyone remember Midnight Cowboy. That was a recruitment movie for the dregs of humanity to find their full artistic expression in the coal mine black dark shafts of the Times Square movie theatre/peepshow environs. Presently the internet seems to be “the place” were Times Square monster vision can be played out. Do we as a society need a Mecca for the dirty underbelly of our exploitive nuerotic creepy inner self. The 60′s era T Square regrettably served that function. Why are we nostalgic for sleaze? As i recall we called the people who lingered in that world losers.
What was lost in the Times Square cleanup was the honky-tonk. The Camel cigarette ad in the form of a huge camel on the side of a building ten stories up blowing tractor-tire-size smoke rings has been replaced by large format overhead video images that look like something from Bladerunner advertising the joys and benefits life off-world.
Retro is an interesting fashion trend that like good satire, satisfies only if it’s spot on. A hair out of focus and it’s a drag. Are there special conditions that trigger plainly nostalgic retro design?
The first time I set foot in Times Square was in 1988. I saw a man urinating in the middle of the square; I was grabbed twice; homeless and panhandlers were everywhere; grown men wearing garbage bags/newspapers and my personal favourite: an obese black guy wearing a pink ballerina outfit.
Give me clean and SAFE any day….
My husband and I and our boys visited New York in 2005, moving from one duty station to the next. Granted, I never saw it gritty, but I loved Times Square. What amazed me the most was how safe we felt overall and how friendly Noo Yawkers were to us, even with my thickish Kentucky accent. (And here I was anticipating “The Warriors”! I guess it’s no worse than Yankees coming out to our neck o’ the woods and anticipating “Deliverance.”) We wandered around the city for a week or so, gawking at everything like a bunch of hicks. I wouldn’t want to live there–too big! but it would be awesome to visit a couple times a year.