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By Root 599 0

the neighborhood. Four immense glass office buildings tower above you. None is particularly distinguished as architecture, though the lights and signs they wear make them more playful than their kin on Sixth or Third Avenue. The Reuters Building, on the northwest corner of 42nd and Broadway, even has a bit of V-shaped deco-style trim running around the corner, a wan recollection of the Rialto Building, which once occupied the same spot. The principal tenants of the office towers are law firms, investment firms, and media and entertainment firms, which is to say that they are not much different from office towers elsewhere in midtown Manhattan. The biggest of the towers, at the northeast corner of Broadway and 42nd, houses Condé Nast, publisher of such glamorous magazines as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. Times Square is no longer interesting enough, or chic enough, to be an important subject for these magazines, as it was seventy-five years ago; it is, on the other hand, a far more suitable setting for their corporate headquarters than it ever was before.

Now you may turn back toward Eighth Avenue. Immediately to the west of the office zone is the culture zone, which is also the preservation zone—the lovingly restored New Amsterdam Theatre to the south and the New Victory Theater to the north, as well as the Ford Center, where the play 42nd Street has long been entrenched, and an entirely new building, known as the Duke, which houses studio space as well as the Roundabout Theatre, a highly respected nonprofit theater company. The Duke is a nine-story building that at night lights up with multicolored horizontal neon strips; it is the only aesthetically pleasing new structure on 42nd Street. The street also has a museum. On the south side, where Peepland and, before that, Hubert’s Museum once stood, is Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, an institution that traffics in immaculately reproduced copies.

The remaining two-thirds of the block, where once the all-night cafeterias reigned, and the penny arcades and the shooting galleries and the novelty shops and the hot dog stands, is now a Global Retail, Fast Food, and Entertainment Concept Zone. Moving east to west along the southern blockfront, you would find (as of the middle of 2003) the world’s largest McDonald’s; a food court where the visitor can choose among Applebee’s, California Pizza Kitchen, Chili’s, Cinnabon, and yet others; an HMV music store; and New York’s largest multiplex, the AMC 25. Crossing the street and reversing course to the east, you would first encounter Chevys, a bait-shack-themed restaurant that sells thirteen kinds of margarita, including the Midori and the Lava Lamp, and then a Japanese fast-food place, a Yankees merchandise store, and the Sanrio store, purveyor of the Hello Kitty line. In the middle of the block are the Broadway City arcade and the B.B. King Blues Club, both owned by actual New Yorkers, making this the Indigenous Institutions Microzone.

Richard Simon, owner of the arcade and heir to its traditions, is in fact the last unimpeachably authentic son of the soil left on 42nd Street. Simon is a middle-aged, balding gentleman, slightly querulous, with the classic New York sense of preulcerous aggrievement. “I’m the only legitimate New York entrepreneur who’s not sending the money to the home office in Peoria,” he says. “I’m the quintessential New York guy.” (It takes a quintessential New York guy to imagine that the home office is in Peoria.) The Broadway City arcade is a lineal descendant of the Broadway Arcade, established in the late fifties by Simon’s father, Albert, on Broadway between 51st and 52nd Streets. The old arcade had pool and Ping-Pong tables downstairs, and upstairs pinball, a magic shop, costumes, homemade candy and home-roasted nuts, and of course arcade games—a juicy slice of Times Square, Late Golden Era.

Simon, the son, fondly recalls that far-off time when things were where they were supposed to be and what they were supposed to be: when Lindy’s, Damon Runyon’s old haunt, sat right there on 49th Street. When