Times Square marks 100 years

By Greg Morago
The Hartford Courant

	STEPHEN CHERNIN / GETTY IMAGES Members of the performance group Anti-Gravity perform during the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Times Square in New York. The crossroads remains a special place for many New Yorkers.
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Not all of Times Square's street vendors sell knockoffs. Some sell the real Manhattan itself, romantic black-and-white photos of the city's most beloved structures: the Chrysler Building, the Empire State, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Plaza Hotel. But rare in these photographic collections is the very neighborhood of Times Square. Perhaps the decrepit Howard Johnson's, brooding Marriott Marquis hotel or hulking Port Authority bus terminal are nowhere near as photogenic as, say, Central Park.

Or maybe it's just that most tourists aren't interested in vintage Times Square portraits because Times Square itself is such a stunning visual anachronism, a jarring, loud, incongruous mess of antique dust and laser-light glow. But it is that mess — the naughty, bawdy, gaudy hurly-burly known as Times Square — that will be celebrated today. Give your regards to Broadway, for Times Square turns 100.

It was on April 8, 1904, that Mayor George McClellan proclaimed that the area surrounding 42nd Street and Broadway would drop the moniker of Longacre Square and henceforth bear the name of Times Square (after The New York Times, then at the triangular point where Seventh Avenue and Broadway scissor at 42nd Street). Times owner and publisher Adolph Ochs understood that the new subway system would make the area the city's epicenter (Ochs years later also devised dropping an electric ball from the top of the building on New Year's Eve).

"Times Square quickly became New York's agora, a place to gather both to await great tidings and to celebrate them, whether a World Series or a presidential election," James Traub wrote in "The Devil's Playground: a Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square," a new history of America's most storied neighborhood. "In the minds of New Yorkers, Americans, and the people all over the world, Times Square became associated with a particular kind of crowd — a happy crowd, made up of merrymakers rather than troublemakers."

Oh, the troublemakers eventually would come in droves: hustlers, shysters, pornographers and assorted wisenheimers who (along with shooting galleries, pinball arcades, grind houses and peep shows) would drag it into squalor.

But, as Traub's book charts, Times Square evolved from grandeur to decrepitude and back. Traub suggests that Times Square's very meaning evolves with the popular culture.

"Times Square was the place that an awful lot of American culture arose," he said. "Going back to the origins — ragtime music, all that Irving Berlin stuff — that was Times Square. The dance crazes; cabaret was invented there; and theater was the great national artistic medium. So from the very beginning, you could make the case that Times Square was the engine driving popular culture. Why? Because it was an incredibly democratic entertainment place: all the varying influences whose incongruous coming together made American culture possible."

Traub's is not the only study of Times Square published on its anniversary: "Ghosts of 42nd Street: A History of America's Most Infamous Block," by Anthony Bianco, traces the history of "the Deuce," the area between Seventh and Eighth avenues once chockablock with derelict movie palaces, porn shops and underworld entrepreneurs. Both books are testament to America's, indeed the world's, fascination with the neon-choked tourist magnet steeped in the romantic and the sentimental.

"It matters to tourists much more than it does to New Yorkers. For New Yorkers, Times Square is a place you go for a specific purpose, but it doesn't have anything like the kind of resonance it did once upon a time," Traub said.

Still, he acknowledges that for many people, Times Square remains a special place.

"People of a certain age are deeply sentimental about it," he said. "You talk to any lifetime New Yorker in their 50s or 60s, they always have memories of going to theaters, movies, restaurants. There's a vast store of memories. Yes, it still lives very strongly in people's memories and their imaginations."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company