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By Root 677 0

consists of pavement dwellers like Ayhan and Ivan, and the middle-aged Chinese ladies who glumly peddle their photographs of the Flatiron Building and the World Trade Center, and the great tides of pedestrians passing this way and that, and also the visitors who roost long enough to be described as loiterers. And that population consists largely of black teenagers. This is a peculiar irony, for critics of 42nd Street redevelopment described it at the time, and have continued to describe it, as a gentrification process designed to erase the street’s minority population in order to lure back white professionals. If you ask kids, they will tell you that 42nd Street is a good place to pick up girls, that you can hang out for free as long as you don’t mind being moved around by cops, that you can see a movie at the AMC 25 and then have a cheap meal at Applebee’s—just what William Kornblum, the principal author of the Bright Light study, said that kids had been doing back in the 1970s. The Broadway City arcade attracts a heavily minority, and of course young, clientele. And 42nd Street tends to become less white later at night; sometime around eleven P.M., the movie theaters shift from a largely white to a largely nonwhite audience.

The arcades, and the kids who hang out near them, have had the effect of restoring a soupçon of the old 42nd Street sense of menace—perhaps just enough to satisfy critics who fear wholesale embourgeoisement. One Saturday night I waited in line to be admitted to Bar Code, an arcade on Broadway and 45th that closed up in early 2003. A sign prominently posted in the window announced that no one wearing “colors,” “do-rags,” “skullies,” sports jerseys, or “velour suits” would be admitted. In front of me were four high-school-age boys from Sussex County, apparently a rather pastoral zone of New Jersey. A tall, skinny kid with his cap on backward asked what “colors” were, and I explained that the word referred to gang insignia. He blanched. He worried that his high school football sweatshirt would fall afoul of the rules.

I had never heard of banning sports jerseys, and when I got to the front of the line I asked the security official. “Let’s say you come in wearing a Giants jersey, and the other guy, he’s wearing Jets,” he explained. “That’s enough to start a fight.” Velour suits? They were banning sweat suits, and so they had to prohibit the far more expensive designer track suits to prevent an aggrieved kid from saying, “How come me and not him?” Once inside, we were forced to empty our pockets, and then each of us was very briskly patted down, our shoes squeezed, a metal wand waved over us, before we were allowed to pass upstairs to the arcade itself. Bar Code seemed to have reached a DEFCON 4 level of antigang alert: once I finally got inside, it was so quiet and modestly populated that you had to wonder if the place was scaring away its own clientele. Perhaps that’s why it closed.

The Broadway City arcade had a much less rigorous security system, and was a much more wild and woolly place late at night. For all his distaste for the “Eighth Avenue crowd,” Richard Simon understood perfectly well that they were his clientele, and he had opened up a dance space on the second floor for the late-night weekend crowd. At 2:40 one morning, as rap music shook the walls, a mêlée broke out between two groups of black teenagers from the same neighborhood in Queens; there had been “a look across the dance floor,” a detective later said. Weapons, undetected at the door, were suddenly brandished; eight people were shot and two stabbed (none fatally) before the police were able to rush in and quell the violence. Here was a sudden and terrifying reminder of 42nd Street as it once had been. The overwhelming irony of the event was that the violence had issued from the street’s most “authentic,” least Disneyesque, spot. This was more authenticity than even the most single-minded opponent of development could have wished. It also constituted an implicit argument for the virtues of embourgeoisement, of regulation, even,