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officials would establish design guidelines, but the marketplace would decide who would occupy the space. And the marketplace was going to supply the lowest common denominator. Bruce Ratner, a former city official who had become a major real estate force in Brooklyn, ultimately purchased the lease on the south side of the street, while John Tishman, a member of one of the city’s great real estate clans, took over the north. Both men believed that immense crowds would flock to the new 42nd Street; that these tourists and office workers and passersby constituted a tremendous new market; and therefore that they could charge tenants stratospheric rents. And the kind of tenants who pay $1 million a year for a modest storefront are not normally adventurous.

Ratner says when he sought tenants in 1997, he received proposals from the Hard Rock Café, the Rainforest Café, the Moulin Rouge nightclub, Cirque de Soleil, Fred & Busters game rooms, Universal Walk, the ESPN Zone, and so on. It was, he says, “the era of entertainment concepts.” None of these chains had even existed twenty years earlier, when the CUNY researchers had suggested their charmingly homemade entertainments. In the interim, Disney and Warner Bros. and Viacom had transformed the very nature of entertainment, while the Gap and Barnes & Noble and HMV had similarly transformed the nature of retailing. “Popular culture,” that localized, handcrafted thing, had become “mass culture,” an extrusion from mighty corporate ovens. These entertainment and retailing leviathans roamed the globe in search of sites suitable to their brand. To see how mass culture has changed the places where it is situated, you need only think of Las Vegas. As recently as the 1970s, Las Vegas had consisted of the eccentric and largely family-owned casinos that so fascinated the authors of Learning from Las Vegas; by the nineties it had turned into a giant Monopoly board of entertainment concepts. So with 42nd Street.

The idea that the city is the home of intense particularity, of the untrammeled individual—the idea at the heart of so much of Balzac and Dickens and Dostoevsky, and then of Dreiser and Howells—has given way, in recent years, to a new and alarming idea of the city as the site for a deracinated, universalizing popular culture: the city as Las Vegas. The architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas calls it “the generic city”—“the city without history,” “the city liberated . . . from the straitjacket of identity.” (Koolhaas likes—or straight-facedly claims to like—the generic city.) Another architecture critic and urban theorist, Michael Sorkin, writes, “The new city replaces the anomaly and delight of [the old] with a universal particular, a generic urbanism inflected only by appliqué. Here, locality is efficiently acknowledged by the inclusion of the croque-monsieur at the McDonald’s on the Boule Miche or the Cajun Martini at the airport lounge in New Orleans (and you’re welcome to keep the glass).” In other words, authenticity has been reduced from a touchstone of value to a marketing concept, a salable commodity the up-to-date city traffics in.

Along 42nd Street, locality is acknowledged by the sculpture of the workingman in the Broadway City arcade, and of course by the lights and signs that line the street. The most common epithet that critics, and for that matter contemptuous New Yorkers, apply to 42nd Street is “Disneyesque.” In fact, the very first sentence of a recent critique of the redevelopment process reads, “The cheerful face of Mickey Mouse now greets visitors to Times Square from atop a Disney superstore.” Used as an epithet, the word “Disney” conjures up the image of a meticulously engineered, and thus secondhand, and thus spurious, form of fun. It must be noted, in all fairness, that if anyone has Disneyfied 42nd Street in this sense, it’s not Disney, which has meticulously re-created the archaic splendors of the New Amsterdam Theatre and has used it to present The Lion King, an exercise in avant-garde puppetry that has confounded the company’s critics with its insistent modernity