The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [0]
Title Page
Dedication
Praise
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE - THE RISE AND FALL OF FUN
1. - THE CHILDREN OF NECESSITY
2. - THE FOUR HUNDRED MEET THE FOUR MILLION
3. - NOTHING BUT GIRLS
4. - SKY SIGNS
5. - “BUY 18 HOLES AND SELL ALL THE WATER HAZARDS!”
6. - THE PADLOCK REVUE
7. - “COME IN AND SEE THE GREAT FLEA CIRCUS”
8. - A WORLD CONQUERED BY THE MOTION PICTURE
9. - THE POKERINO FREAK SHOW
PART TWO - MAKING A NEW FUN PLACE
10. - SELTZER, NOT ORANGE JUICE
11. - SAVING BILLBOARD HELL
12. - DISNEY EX MACHINA
PART THREE - CORPORATE FUN
13. - A MIRROR OF AMERICA
14. - YOUNG HAMMERSTEIN MEETS DARTH NADER: A DIALOGUE OF THE DEAF IN FIVE ACTS
ACT I
ACT II
ACT III
ACT IV
ACT V
15. - DEFINING DEVIANCY UP
16. - ASK NOT FOR WHOM THE ANIMATRONIC T. REX ROARS
17. - PLAYS “R” US
18. - THE DURSTS HAVE SOME VERY UNUSUAL PROPERTIES
19. - A SIGN OF THINGS TO COME
20. - à LA RECHERCHE DES FRIED CLAMS PERDUS
21. - ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Acknowledgments
About the Author
ALSO BY JAMES TRAUB
Copyright Page
TO ALEX,
MY SPARRING PARTNER,
AND BUFFY,
MY PARTNER
Praise for THE DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND
“Both an engaged civics lesson and a work of social history . . . On every page you learn something about how the city really happened, and how it really happens now. [Traub] is particularly good at wrestling complicated history into a few tight pages. . . . Traub also has a gift for filtering social history through a previously invisible, individual agent.”
—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
“The Devil’s Playground is far more than a potted history of a piece of New York geography. It offers, among other things, an entertaining survey of the showmen and women who made The Great White Way a mecca of popular culture; a perceptive analysis of the struggles over money and values that marked the area’s degradation and recovery; and an intelligent running commentary on what this whole business of cultural icon-dom is about anyway. . . . [Traub’s] judgments are grounded in a common-sense tolerance for honest points of view, however unfashionable they may be.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Compact and sparkling . . . [Traub] is a sharp and lively stylist, and he approaches history as a reporter, burrowing through mounds of fact to emerge with the telling anecdote or cinematic description.”
—Newsday
“Today, when the complaints against Time Square can be summed up in the single word ‘Disney,’ there is even some lingering affection for the Peep Land, Travis Bickle dystopia of the 1970s. As Mr. Traub writes, ‘the layers sit atop one another like geological strata.’ The Devil’s Playground drills through those strata with Mr. Traub’s characteristic intelligence and brio.”
—The New York Sun
“The charm of The Devil’s Playground . . . rests on the author’s determination not to romanticize the most over-dreamed plot of real estate this side of Eden. The narrative combines a wonkish fascination for contemporary deal making with glamorous tales from the days of lobster houses, Runyonesque gangsters, and naked chorines on glass platforms.”
—Time Out New York
“Well-written . . . mellifluous and reflective.”
—The New York Review of Books
“In eloquently detailed prose, enlivened by stories of myriad Broadway personalities, Traub’s narrative reviews the area’s history and poses complex questions. . . . Traub is a fair, careful reporter and an engaging writer.”
—Library Journal
“Traub has made a career out of writing about New York and its institutions. He has the right: he lives and breathes the city, and his prose tumbles out sparkling and effortless. His history of Times Square—its name was changed from Longacre Square in the spring of 1904 for the newspaper headquartered there—is a vivid and remarkably nonjudgmental tale. . . . A fabulous read that quite nearly captures the ‘gorgeous disarray’ and ‘epic higgledy-piggledy’ of the world’s gathering place.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
INTRODUCTION
ONE NIGHT IN THE FALL OF 2002 I took my son, Alex, then eleven, to see the play 42nd Street,