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By Root 668 0

your dad took you to lunch there you ate chopped steak and creamed spinach, and never thought to ask for anything else. Simon’s office, in a quiet warren behind a door at the otherwise insanely noisy arcade, is a shrine to his hero of heroes, Mickey Mantle, the blond god of the fifties, and to the slightly ratty pizzazz of his father’s era. In the time even before the Broadway Arcade, Albert sold coin-operated arcade games from an office on Tenth Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia banned pinball as part of his campaign against vice, and Richard has a photo of goons smashing his father’s stock. More authentic than that, you don’t get.

The Broadway City arcade is generally a nice place, which can’t be said of all arcades. The Playland, which flourished for years along the west side of Broadway between 42nd and 43rd, was an ominous dive where both fake driver’s licenses and male hustlers were readily available. I never set foot in Playland, though at one point in my life I walked past it daily. On the other hand, I often go to the Broadway City arcade with my son, Alex, who is always up for a few rounds of virtual boxing (bob, weave, kayo the reigning heavyweight champ). It’s a clean, inviting, and safe place—except late at night, when it isn’t. But you wouldn’t mistake it for the old Broadway Arcade. A sculpture of old-fashioned construction workers eating their lunch on a plank is suspended from the ceiling— a retro touch designed, Simon says, to convey the old-time “warmth and character” that he remembers so well. Of course the very act of evoking that atmosphere italicizes it, makes it a marketing decision rather than an aspect of the place’s character. Perhaps the simple fact that the Broadway City arcade is new, and that it is (mostly) safe and clean, and that it is located in the middle of the new, safe, clean, bright 42nd Street, opens up an immense gulf between it and its progenitor. Simon could serve home-roasted nuts, and it might not matter.

To which one might well say: So what? Simon himself says, “I wanted to be part of the resurgence of Times Square, and especially Forty-second Street.” And he plainly is (though he complains that the rent is stratospheric, the local businessmen don’t patronize his “corporate space,” and he is besieged by the “Eighth Avenue crowd”—that is, black kids). Forty-second Street had become the kind of place where many New Yorkers, and certainly many tourists, wouldn’t set foot in an arcade. Now, on the new 42nd Street, they do. As in so much of modern life, material progress offers itself as compensation for spiritual loss.

IT IS PERFECTLY OBVIOUS that 42nd Street could not have become once again any of its past selves—not, at least, without unintentional self-parody. Neither could it have become the enclosed gallery of futuristic entertainments imagined by the authors of the City at 42nd Street plan. But did it have to be this? Did it have to be Chevys and Applebee’s and Hello Kitty? In 42nd Street Now!, Stern and Kalman had promised that 42nd Street would become “an enhanced version of itself,” not a “gentrified theme park or festival market.” The possibility that it might become a honky-tonk theme park seems not to have occurred to them. New Yorkers tend to view the block as a deracinated fragment of global monoculture grafted into the city’s street plan—a place with none of the characteristics of locality. Couldn’t it have been more . . . real? The Bright Light study had suggested all sorts of exotic entertainment activities for the block, including a “sports exhibition center” where amateur athletes could compete in pickup basketball games, skateboard slalom, karate, and so on; a roller disco; a jazz cabaret; and a gallery of “futuristic electronic amusements.” (Actually, that sounds like the Broadway City arcade.) What’s wrong with that?

The answer is that roller disco doesn’t pay the rent. The 42nd Street Development Project was designed to make the block attractive to private developers, who would lease most of the space on the street. Public