The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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M. Christine Boyer
landmarks; they remind the spectator of an earlier time, before the automobile
came to dominate pedestrian spaces such as Times Square and made the
railway station redundant as the major gateway to the city. Unknown to the
film director, however, Penn Station, which frames the narrative in opening
and closing shots, would be destroyed eight years later. Thus it not only
stands as a reminder of the industrial city, but it forecasts the ruination that
the modernist city will spread. Throughout the film, Times Square represents
a landscape of centrality where events emerge either in memory of its
being a site of traditional rituals or in expectation of the deserted center it
would soon become. It is a landscape that has the power to reconcile the
characters and the spectators to the alienating experience of the metropolis.
48 “In an age of suburbanisation,” Dimendberg argues, “the experience of
the urban center cannot escape an ambivalent oscillation between attraction
and repulsion. And as the physical face of the city slowly loses its traditional
landmarks, the psychophysical correspondence we experience in cinema allow
us to redeem the urban environment from a non-existence that is increasingly
real, rather than virtual.” 49
NARRATING A TWICE-TOLD STORY ABOUT TIMES SQUARE
The first-told story relied on a taste for realistic representation that grew out
of a failure of memory caused when the city began to disappear from everyday
experience. But now a distinction must be drawn between these 1940s
and 1950s realistic representations of urban space and our contemporary
representations that display a taste for simulation. We now delight in wax
museums, theme parks, retro-architectural splendors, and the suspension of
disbelief that allows “planning [to] create the appearance of the unplanned”
in the redevelopment of Times Square. 50 In other words, in the contemporary
production of spaces such as Times Square, we are given a twice-told
story that depends on a second memory gap and creates a different effect. We
are no longer searching for photographic realism, for mapping techniques,
for documentary rendering of a city that is beginning to disappear from our
lived experience and collective memory. Now the technical apparatus that
can produce the illusionary reappearance of Times Square or the Great
White Way is foregrounded, and the masterful display of this artistry, with
all of its theatricality, pretenses, and tricks, itself becomes the show. This
reenchanted world depends on the power to simulate, and it distorts the
proclaimed purity and objectivity of representative realism.
In order to explore further this twice-told story, I will turn to the
late nineteenth century, when simulation as a means of popular entertainment
achieved its height. My example is Paris’s famous wax museum, the