The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [104]
And yet . . . somehow, 42nd Street doesn’t feel like a simulacrum, or like a “site” of global entertainment culture—at least, not only like that. Take that subway once again to the IRT station, but this time at night. Now the generic street is suddenly alive. When you stand in front of the station and sight down the block, 42nd Street looks like the inside of one of Richard Simon’s arcade games, glowing red and blue and green. The buildings, with their inane products and cardboard food, seem to subside behind the wildly flashing signs, just as Stern and Kalman hoped they would. The sense of arid calculation subsides as well beneath the great tides of humanity eddying up and down the block. On a warm summer’s night, 42nd Street is a kind of fiesta, a commercial carnival. Teenagers, mostly black, loiter in front of the subway station on the northern side of the street. An impromptu audience, gathered in a semicircle, watches a spray painter make moons and pyramids and skyscrapers on his little square of oaktag. A pedicab cycles past with a passenger, charging a hundred times the going rate in Calcutta, and then a great white limo slides by like a submarine before it plunges beneath the waves. The doors open up at the Ford Center, and the audience for 42nd Street spills out for intermission, forming little knots that block the sidewalk as they chat blithely about that last tap number.
Further along, another crowd waits for the late show at B.B. King’s, and a line of less patient teenagers wait to be patted down before gaining entrance to the Broadway City arcade, the bright white lights running around its jukebox façade. Three cops on horseback keep watch on the entrance. Sketch artists sit in folding chairs, waiting for customers for their portraits and caricatures. More cops; more swirls of tourists; more teenage boys, leaning against the wall, staring out at the passing show, enjoying a night out for the price of a subway token. It’s as if an electric current that was carrying the life of the great city all around had been strung just beneath the sidewalks. The street, which felt vapid and almost too wide in the daytime, isn’t big enough now, and you wonder how 42nd Street can contain the kids, the tourists, the cops, the vendors, the traffic, the noise, the lights, and the sense of possible violence that sometimes lies just below the surface.
It is, in short, the barely contained energies of that crowd, and the noise and the blur of the traffic, and the huckstering along the sidewalk, that save 42nd Street from the Disneyesque. The life of the place is on the streets. As I walked westward one Saturday night in late October 2001, I joined a big crowd watching a spray painter at work. The painter was a wiry young man with a red cap pulled low over his eyes, the bill expertly rolled. Another spray painter, farther down the street, stood idly by his wares, but here the crowd was two or three deep. When they finally moved away, I stayed to talk. The painter’s name was Ayhan Colak; he had come to Times Square from Istanbul three years earlier. Ayhan said that he always attracted a crowd because he understood something about his setting. “It’s very hard in New York,” he said; “there’s so much competition. But here I am on Forty-second Street; everybody is performing, and I give a performance, too.” And he did. Ayhan was swift, nervous, intent; as he moved rapidly with his spray cans over the surface of his cardboard canvas, he bristled with some of that manic energy you see in footage of Jackson Pollock, though it is probably fair to say that his work did not quite aspire to the same level of art, or for that matter to any level of art.
Ayhan had, in fact, never studied art at all; he was a