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| St. Peter's Square has Bernini's developing colonnade, Trafalgar
square has Nelson's soaring column, but Times Square has advertising,
24 hours a day Times Square is more than real estate to a New Yorker. It's the place where the ball drops every New Year's Eve, where fans shove after a pennant or a cup is won, where cliff-hanging movie stars dangle from giant billboards. It's the place where wars end: For many Americans, World War II wasn't over until the Life magazine photographer captured that sailor kissing the nurse under Times Square's news ticker. And maybe that's how you should regard the remarkably popular "new" Times Square--as a sort of end-zone victory dance after America's triumph in the Cold War. It's not as spontaneous as that might sound. The current, much-ballyhooed state of the "crossroads of the world"--with its new restaurants and megastores, refurbished theaters, and fresh-faced bustle--is, in part, the result of 42nd Street Now!, an "interim" plan designed in 1993 by architect Robert A.M. Stern, graphic designer Tibor Kalman, and others for the 42nd Street Redevelopment Proj-ect, a joint effort of city and state redevelopment agencies. Conceived as a stopgap when financing for a more elaborate development plan fell through, the plan didn't call for any new buildings (save one, a pulsing, two-story glass hut rented out to the police department and a bar/restaurant). It changed no street plans, nor did it reroute any subways. What it did promise to deliver was bright lights, and more of them: new neon signs, more giant video monitors, a huge, two-story globe that would hold more than a score of all-new commercial messages. The plan even allowed for giant open-air holograms. "We're going to re-create the old Times Square," then-governor Mario Cuomo announced when the plan was unveiled. "That slightly eccentric, magnificently artful excitement and thrilling variety." Though all the guidelines set by 42nd Street Now! won't be in effect until later this year, they already seem to be working. The area hums with tourists most hours of the day and night. The Lion King, Disney's first big production in its newly restored New Amsterdam Theatre, is sold out for months. And at least a dozen new and updated "spectaculars," as the square's giant electric signs have been called since the 1930s, have gone up. Indeed, the official recognition of the importance of signage to New York's entertainment district has set off a bidding war for space, sending rental prices soaring. New York magazine reported last May that a dozen key sites in Times Square now rent for more than a million dollars a year. Suddenly, it's not unheard of to buy a building not for its rental income inside, but for its exterior advertising potential. Last year, the Times Tower, the slender, 1904 skyscraper that was once home to the New York Times, sold for $110 million. Why so much? Though the cramped building is considered unrentable above the first floor, the four major signs on its north side alone pull in some $7 million annually. (ITT's 35-square-foot video screen, Nissin Foods' steaming 40-foot-high Cup O' Noodles, and Budweiser's giant billboard each rents for between $1.5 and $1.6 million; and the most expensive rental space and largest video screen in the square, the Panasonic Jumbotron, goes for $2.4 million.) And that's not counting income from its other sides, the news "Zipper" at its base, or the rent paid by its new tenant, a Warner Bros. Studio Store. Is all of this delivering the kind of Times Square Governor Cuomo, among others, envisioned? The new Times Square has been greeted with either stunned stares or boosterish gee-whiz approval. But you don't transform a strip of porno joints into an outpost of the Magic Kingdom, anchored by a Disney store and the New Amsterdam Theatre--once the Ziegfeld Follies' home and now a permanent site for live musicals based on animated Disney films--without a few complaints. Most, of course, come from melancholy male journalists who harbor what Rebecca Robertson, the former head of the 42nd Street Redevelopment Proj-ect calls a "nostalgia for the gutter." Besides, porn hasn't really been banished, it's just been moved aside. The Show Follies theater ("Eight New Movies Every Sunday!") still beckons near 48th Street; on 42nd near Sixth Avenue, Peep Land and the Peep-O-Rama continue to wink away; and Eighth Avenue is looking more and more like a debauched Reginald Marsh print. Sin, or at least a glitzier version of it than most American cities would allow, still throbs in Times Square's shadow. Still, at the heart of the plan is a recognition of the romance of the Dionysian city--and of the surreal and sometimes licentious appeal of competing advertising displays. Following the lead of Learning from Las Vegas (by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour), 42nd Street Now! embraces visual overload. Too much, as the neon sign just south of Times Square says, is not enough. "Times Square has always been a pop place, and screaming ads were simply part of the culture of a screaming marketplace, which is what New York City has really represented from its beginnings," says Robertson, who now works with Broadway's Shubert Foundation. "That is where nostalgia crosses over into authentic symbolism--Times Square may not be a pleasant place, but its energies are all but overwhelming, just like the city it stands for." The strength of 42nd Street Now! lies in its willingness to forego the trappings of a typical urban renewal package, which might rely on new construction or try to pull the neighborhood together by forcing a common architectural or "period" theme on local businesses. Instead, 42nd Street Now! offers a series of rules designed to re-create, at least where signage is concerned, the social conditions that gave birth to Times Square in the first place--those of unfettered, Machine Age capitalism. According to Kalman, he and the rest of the plan's designers "tried to pretend as if Times Square had gone on, as if TV hadn't put the movies out of business and the movies hadn't put the theater out of business. What would Times Square have become today?" "The concept we managed to sell [Prudential Insurance and the other developers] on was that 42nd Street was not one particular look," Kalman recounts. "We weren't interested in restoring Times Square to some ideal period, the 1920s or the 1930s or whatever your favorite time was; we did not want it to be a reconstruction of the past, like Colonial Williamsburg. Nor was it a uniformly designed space, made by a single hand, like a shopping mall." What it has always been--and what the plan tries to preserve and invigorate--is a chaotic commercial gathering place, where all sorts of overlapping signs have competed for the attention of pedestrians, who number as many as a million and a half a day. So in the 42nd Street Now! plan, each of the 34 buildings surrounding Times Square is required to cede ample space to signs of all types, and new buildings are also required to provide display spaces with every modern convenience--fiber-optic cables, extra electrical capacity, running water--that might be needed for the sign technology of the new millennium. When you think of what the owners of Times Square's prime real estate were originally thinking of doing with it during the boom of the 1980s, 42nd Street Now! seems like a huge improvement. The Prudential Insurance Company of America and Park Tower Realty agreed in 1984 to sponsor four giant office towers (designed by Philip Johnson) that would have "cleaned up" the area by replacing its derelicts and hustlers with battalions of buttoned-down suits. That deal--which would have replaced most of the square's garish signs with those miserable little PoMo windows sunk in slab-like walls--was sealed with a promise that developers would forfeit $241 million to the city if they failed to begin work by a certain date. The first rumbles of protest against this depressingly banal expropriation of New York's fabled theater district were just beginning to be heard when the Eighties' boom went bust, and the bottom dropped out of the market for such enormous office buildings. Prudential, et al., were delighted to get out from under their $241 million obligation in 1993 by handing over the sum of $20 million to 42nd Street Now! That might sound like real money, but $20 million is not enough to do much of anything in New York. Kalman, Stern, and their fellow 42nd Street Now! designers quickly realized they were being asked to come up with a scheme that would first and foremost attract money from the private sector--from people like Disney's Michael Eisner, who had just bought ABC. (Disney's New York headquarters are a few blocks up Broadway.) With this investment, the new plan has tried to encourage already existing market patterns--theaters, small shops, tourist traps, restaurants, and a Babel of signs competing with one another. "[We told the developers]," Kalman remembers, "'The average age of an entertainment lawyer in this town is 30. You guys are all around 70. The people who are going to use the city you build are a lot more hip than you are, and for them, imaginative signage would be a positive draw.'" Times Square has always been the high-tech showplace of the advertising industry. Before neon was introduced in the late 1920s, there were rooftop peacocks with 60-foot-long tails wandering enchanted forests and 15-foot-tall spear-men stabbing the air for Wrigley's Spearmint gum. In the 1940s, the six-foot-wide mouth of a happy smoker blew gigantic rings of Con Ed steam out over traffic, alongside the neon legend, "I'd walk a Mile for a Camel." There was a five-story-tall waterfall, with real water coursing through a block-length ad for Bond clothing stores, and a 100-foot-long bottle of Budweiser topping a giant mock-up of the Grand Canyon, cleverly lit to re-create the day, from dawn to dusk, in just a few minutes. Times Square was surreal before there was Surrealism, the pseudo-architecture of desire fabricated from light and the suspension of disbelief. (Picabia, Duchamp, and Man Ray loved Times Square.) It was the metaphorical crossroads of the big American city, where short-term pleasures assumed pharaonic proportions. Not everyone was favorably impressed. In 1913, "British poet and critic Rupert Brooke saw Times Square and wrote about how a 'Great winking face' was now outshining the constellations," says Mary Beth Betts, a curator who organized "Signs & Wonders," a current exhibition (closing March 8th) at the New-York Historical Society devoted to Times Square spectaculars. (The title is borrowed from a forthcoming book written by Tama Starr, president of Artkraft Strauss, the oldest of three major Times Square sign designers, and by Ed Haymond, the company public relations chief, in honor of the firm's centennial.) Bright lights still define Times Square, but they lack the wit and theatrical bravado that made the old signs so alluring. The most obvious difference between today's Times Square and its previous incarnations are the subjects of the ads themselves; once nearly all the elaborate signs touted movies and consumer products like clothing or beverages--especially addictions like tobacco, beer, and whiskey. Today, in place of seductive fantasies, many simply offer flashing corporate logos. There is nothing that compares, for example, to Kleenex's animated spectacular featuring the cartoon character Little Lulu. From 1952 to 1965, its 10-foot-tall letters spelled out "Kleenex" in neon, and another series of lights made Lulu jump from one letter to the next. Each time she landed, the letter would come alive with glowing neon. When she turned the corner, the neon Lulu grabbed a neon Kleenex and slid down the length of it to its neon box, and the cycle would begin again. No pinstripe logo--like Prudential's big, designer's version of the Rock of Gibraltar in Prussian blue--can ever be quite so, well, animated. Even elaborate neon patterns, like those in the giant Canon sign, fail to generate the pizzazz that made Times Square legendary. Advertisers today are convinced that nothing is as animated as television, and with each passing season Times Square gets more video screens. Nothing illustrates the difference TV makes to Times Square better than its largest video screen, the Jumbotron. Back in the 1970s, before such huge video monitors were available, AT&T and Maxwell House sponsored the Spectacolor Board on the Times Tower. The giant light board spelled out words and animated simple figures with old-fashioned incandescent bulbs; every week it was used to introduce (in real time) Saturday Night Live. As a public service it was occasionally turned over to artists, giving many New Yorkers their first glimpse of Jenny Holzer and Keith Haring. Today, the Jumbotron is always tuned--minus the sound--to NBC, MSNBC, or CNBC. And there are at least five other screens in Times Square, the newest being a sports-bar--size picture tube under a one-third-scale replica of the Concorde set up by British Airways over 42nd Street. The 42nd Street Now! plan calls for even more TVs, including a huge, rooftop sphere that would hold dozens of monitors as well as flashing lights and animated signs. (This is the part of the plan that evokes comparisons to Blade Runner). But Times Square is significantly diminished by being treated as a roomy couch, with weather. "Historically, the neon ads that have worked have been short and memorable images, like a kitten chasing a spool of thread over and over," comments Betts. "Those signs have always been about pedestrian traffic, capturing the attention of someone walking through the square with a direct message. Video demands a longer attention span, and Times Square is not supposed to be for folks standing in a museum. I'm not sure how all the video works." The proliferation of TV screens broadcasts a fundamental change in American society that makes Times Square, and perhaps most other such public spaces, much less important to the culture. That same shift might also make the goals of 42nd Street Now! utterly quixotic. In the 33 years since the Lulu-for-Kleenex sign came down, America has been transformed, in large measure due to the personal electronics industry, which has cultivated a more introverted consumer, one whose sense of scale--and of public space--is fundamentally at odds with the heroic vision of the old Times Square. Modern technology--Discmans, computers, the World Wide Web--sells the myth of a personalized world in a pocket-size package, one in which the private and the personal take precedence. Today's diverse and relatively upscale market responds better to the low-key sell than to light shows and carnival barking. When Times Square's signs were at their most inventive, from the 1930s through the 1960s, the minor marvels national marketing gave us--chewing gum and facial tissues and washable shirt collars that didn't lose their shape--were hallmarks of a new, classless, and dynamic society. They made immediate contributions to the physical and social comfort of consumers and, best of all, they could be had by almost anybody. Times Square sold and symbolized the self-confidence of an industrialized democracy prospering through mass production, with a vast array of eye-popping options. The whole idea of niche marketing, of appealing to an upscale clientele with "exclusive" mass-produced goods, was rare, to say the least. Can you imagine a neon Grey Poupon spectacular? The boisterousness of Times Square's old advertising seems foreign to the companies that now pay the stratospheric sign rental costs. And what some of them sell--insurance, financial security--is far more evanescent and removed from the day-to-day desires of the average pedestrian; it's "content" more than product. So, few have dared criticize this new face of advertising, because it is the victory of the marketplace that we are supposed to be celebrating here in the first place. Besides, if the effect of this Times Square is to be a theme park version of its older self, perhaps that in itself is a form of nostalgia that "crosses over to authentic symbolism." The corporations that are lining up to fill the new Times Square are dominated by a theme-park consciousness--Disney invented the idea, after all. But while multibillion-dollar corporations can appreciate the value of old-school spectacle, they can't really create it. "I think the street looks like hell right now," Kalman admits. "Everything is brand-new. It's like a new pair of jeans--stiff and awkward, with everybody just trying to follow the rules. But they will break in with time. The market will create the proper cacophony by itself." DAN BISCHOFF is the arts critic for the Star-Ledger in Newark, New Jersey. |
Keywords:
Times Square, New York City, advertising