The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Double Erasure of Times Square
taller and bulkier skyscrapers from Time Square to Columbus Circle along
the Broadway spine, killed Times Square and turned it into a corporate office
park. Or we could stress that in competing with the Wall Street area in
lower Manhattan, Times Square was favored as a new office park because it
lies near the city’s most densely populated mass transit hub, close to commuter
rail lines at Grand Central Station and Penn Station. And of course
the city’s economic development policies have pushed family-style entertainment
for the masses as a tourist incentive and have demanded that the
gutter sordidness and notorious vice of Times Square be erased by relocating
sex to safety zones on the periphery of the city. Since this rezoning went
into effect in November 1996, Times Square together with its architecture
of ludic pleasures has been considerably diminished. It will keep, for the
sake of nostalgia, six to ten of its original porn shops—but more than ten
evidently would tip the scales and produce repugnant secondary effects such
as crime, drugs, and declining real estate values.
NARRATING THE STORY OF DISAPPEARANCE
Real estate values alone do not explain why a void exists in Times Square
that allows its improvers to tell tall tales about crime, prostitution, drugs,
and illicit businesses. Perhaps, instead, the role this public space has held in
the popular memory of the city needs to be examined, for we will find that
two gaps have occurred—one in the late 1940s and another in contemporary
times—facilitating the telling of twice-told tales. These ruptures enable
a distinction to be made between realistic representation and simulated
effects. And this distinction, in turn, engenders a twice-told story that
lingers nostalgically over the memory of Times Square, attended by those
who would keep it from change and destruction.
Deleuze argues that “any-space-whatevers” began to proliferate after
World War II—they were demolished or reconstructed towns, places of
undifferentiated tissue, or underutilized and fallow lands such as docklands,
warehouses, or dumps. 22 Represented in film, these any-space-whatevers became
spiritual spaces: an amorphous set that eliminated what had happened
and acted in it, a nontotalizable space full of shadows and deep black holes. 23
They were pessimistic sites, offering no promise of comfort or retreat. Times
Square as a vortex of negation and indeterminacy was a quintessential anyspace-whatever.
In postwar America, when the first memory gap occurred and the
first story was told, central places such as Times Square were beginning to
be threatened with disappearance. Seldom experienced directly, these places
were retreating into abstraction. As a result, Times Square and other im-