The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [106]
It is not all that easy to make money on 42nd Street. Many of the vendors I came to know had made more money, and lived a distinctly better life, back home, wherever home was, than in Times Square. Many of them talked about leaving, and some of them did abruptly disappear. There were simply too many of them, even given the great size of the crowd. And the trade was tightly controlled. Vendors who deal in artwork enjoy First Amendment protection, but they can be regulated with regard to time, place, and manner of expression. The city prohibits vendors from setting up shop on 42nd Street before seven P.M., in order to give the rush-hour crowd time to dissipate, and then forces them to close up around eleven, as the theater crowd is pouring out onto the street. One night I watched the cops order everyone to close up shop at ten-thirty. I asked an officer what the hurry was, and he said, “The captain says it’s ‘exigent circumstances.’” This was apparently the technical term for dangerous overcrowding. “We don’t want someone to walk out into the street and get hurt.” By eleven, the vendors had vanished, save for a lone sketch artist, squatting, a pad propped on his thigh, while he drew a picture of a little boy whose mother looked on patiently.
Most vendors fail, but few fail tragically. Virtually all of 42nd Street’s sidewalk merchants are young male immigrants, and most of them have the immigrant resilience that has been one of New York City’s defining characteristics for the last century. One slightly chilly evening in the spring of 2002 I met Ivan Ivanoff, the pride of Veliko Tirnovo, in Bulgaria. Ivan was pale, with a blocky face and a determined set to his jaw. He was a man of many professions. He said that when he had first come to New York, he had joined a break-dancing crew, which he had quit in disgust over the group’s spotty work ethic and his low-man-on-the-totem-pole share of the take. I asked whether he had learned to break-dance in Bulgaria. “I have been break-dancing for, like, seventeen years,” he said proudly. Ivan was thirty, and as a teenager he was, he said, “one of the most successful break-dancers in Bulgaria.” He and his friends had learned from American movies and music videos. “We would have break-dancing battles, between different crews,” Ivan explained. “But the problem is, there is no profit in break-dancing in Bulgaria. People do not pay money to see it. Also, nobody dances on the street in Bulgaria.” Ivan opened up a pizzeria, and then a second and a third. “Then I realize,” he said, “is good business, but is local business. I want to do national business.” So Ivan started a factory to produce women’s clothes. “I put in all the money from the pizzeria; and I lose everything.” There had been, apparently, a drastic softening in the Bulgarian economy. And so he had left Bulgaria with his girlfriend, in search of opportunity.
Ivan had now taken up spray painting, and he said he was earning $100 on good days, which this manifestly was not: nobody came by to disturb our conversation. But Ivan was not discouraged. “I have many ideas for what I will do,” he announced. Idea number one was transferring photos onto T-shirts. Ivan had already spent $5,000 to buy a top-quality digital camera, a transfer press, and a printer. But even that wasn’t the big idea. “I want to go back into the food business,” Ivan said, almost conspiratorially. This idea was so powerful that he couldn’t take the risk of revealing it. “It’s a very good product,” he allowed. “The product is new. It will cost only two or three dollars.” He was still refining the concept, but he promised that it did not involve Bulgarian cuisine.
The “street culture” of the new 42nd Street