The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Double Erasure of Times Square
restoring the eight outmoded theaters on the block between Seventh and
Eighth Avenues; Rebecca Robertson headed the 42nd Street Development
Project, the state agency in charge of redevelopment along 42nd Street; and
Gretchen Dykstrat was president of the Times Square BID established in
1992, which has $6 million in annual assessments to spend. 6 But will all this
improvement activity salvage the trashy, glitzy, raffish quality of the underbelly
of life that once defined Times Square? Or is that desire only blatant
nostalgia, what Gretchen Dykstra calls “romanticizing the gutter”? 7
As the 1933 movie musical proclaimed, 42nd Street was a “naughty,
bawdy, gaudy, sporty” place already well in decline when it lent its iconic
title to the film that opened at the Strand Theater, five blocks away. 8 Even
so, 42nd Street was still the most intensely imagined yet glamorous street in
the world—it was the hub of the entire theater world for thousands who
dreamed of becoming an actor or dancer. “That little thoroughfare,” in “the
heart of old New York,” invites the spectator to “come and meet those dancing
feet”; and as the heroine begins her tap routine, the chorus line—in one
of Busby Berkeley’s great production numbers—turns its back and mounts
the stairs, enabling the spectators to see the animated image of the New
York skyline. While the buildings sway, the chorus line begins to exit along
the prone body of the Empire State Building. The movie had the lean, hungry,
underlit look of gangster films of the same era—a “hardboiled Musical,”
as Hollywood called it 9 —for it had a social message that spoke to the
times. The spectacle of 42nd Street, the act of putting on a play, or a show
within a show, is largely about securing a job in the theater. In fact, the
movie was called the “Times Square of the assembly line.” 10 The narrative on
which the movie was based emphasizes that “the machine could not pause
to brook over the destinies of the human beings that are caught up in its motion.
Machines are impersonal things not given to introspect and retrospect.
All that driving force was pounding relentless toward one goal—a successful
premier on Forty-Second Street.” 11 The film parodies Siegfried Kracauer’s
1927 comments on the Tiller Girls:
Not only were they American products; at the same time they
demonstrated the greatness of American production.... When
they formed an undulating snake, they radiantly illustrated the
virtues of the conveyor belt; when they tapped their feet in fast
tempo, it sounded like business, business; when they kicked their legs
high with mathematical precision, they joyously affirmed the progress
of rationalization; and when they kept repeating the same
movements without ever interrupting their routine, one envisioned
an uninterrupted chain of autos gliding from the factories of the
world, and believed that the blessings of prosperity had no end. 12