The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Double Erasure of Times Square
schemes? Or has a grand mistake been made, and has this dysfunction junction
been mauled by disimprovement policies amending its authentic nature
instead of addressing its corruption? Has Times Square/42nd Street
become another “non-place” instantly recognizable from the images that
circulate on television and cinema screens, but a space that is never experienced
directly? 1 Is it in danger of extinction or disappearance, reduced to
“any-space-whatever”? Gilles Deleuze claims that “any-space-whatever is
not an abstract universal, in all times, in all places. It is a perfectly singular
space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its
metric relations or the connections of its own parts, so that the linkages can
be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual conjunction,
grasped as pure locus of the possible.” 2 Certainly, Times Square/42nd Street
appears to be a postmodern any-space-whatever—a heterotopic space juxtaposing
in a single real place several types of spaces. This open-ended disjunctive
set of sites coexists simultaneously as a retro-theater district, a
media center, a Disneyland, a suburban-style shopping mall, an advertising
zone, a corporate office park, a movie but also a song, a novel, a play, a street,
and a way of life—a place where prostitutes, pimps, hucksters, or teenagers
rub shoulders with out-of-town conventioneers, theater audiences, corporate
executive secretaries, tourists, and families. Can it also be a center for
the visual arts, a place of emerging electronic industries, a truly plugged-in
space connected to the rest of the world?
Even the “Great White Way,” the razzle-dazzle electronic wizardry
of great neon signs that have turned the night lights of Time Square into a
midtown Coney Island since the mid-1920s, has been tampered with by requiring
that neon signage now adorn every new structure. Lutses have been
turned loose in the square—a 1987 ordinance mandates the amount of illuminated
signage and the degree of brilliance that new buildings must carry.
The first luts appeared on the giant juke box exterior of the Holiday Inn
Crowned Plaza Hotel at Broadway and 48th street in 1989. The city wants
these new signs to be as flashy as possible, and advertising is clearly allowed,
hoping to cover over the fact that Times Square has become a dull and dark
canyon of overlarge skyscraper office towers, the unintended result of zoning
bonuses that operated in the territory around the square between 1982
and 1987.
Artkraft Strauss Sign Corporation has kept the competitive glow of
Times Square alive since the first animated ball dropped in 1908. It has been
responsible for the famous Camel ad that belched rings of smoke into the
square, the moving-headline “zipper” around the Times Square Tower created
in 1928, and even the Fuji Film panel on 43rd Street. Artkraft has put
up about 99 percent of the signage in the square—more than 200 miles of