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BRUCE RATNER, THE DEVELOPER responsible for Madame Tussaud’s and Applebee’s, is all too familiar with the complaint that New Yorkers—at least New Yorkers in his class—make about 42nd Street. And so he was at first inclined to be defensive when I asked him about all the mass-produced dreck on the block. But the more he thought about it, the less inclined he was to be apologetic. Ratner is not a native New Yorker with a New Yorker’s possessiveness over the city’s past; his father had started the family real estate business in Cleveland, and he remembers visiting the city as a boy. “Look at it in 1960,” Ratner said, sitting in his office in the renovated business district of Brooklyn. “It would have had arcades. I remember the arcades; I remember the movie theaters. Now there are arcades with electronic games in them; twenty-five years from now, people will remember that.” Ratner began to pick up speed as he warmed to his topic and perhaps saw his way clear to his own position in the new 42nd Street. “Applebee’s and Chevys—they’re what America is today. I’m not saying that’s good or bad, any more than Bond Clothes was.” Bond, on Broadway and 44th, was Times Square’s biggest retailer in the forties and fifties. “That’s what it has been for seventy years. I would argue it’s more of a mirror of America. In 1900 it was a mirror of that genteel way that America was: it was ruled by a small group of people who went to see plays and stuff like that. For the last seventy years, it’s been for the average person. It’s a reflection of America.”

Ratner’s implicit point was that 42nd Street was being true to its own past precisely by virtue of being dominated by McDonald’s and the ESPN Zone. Forty-second Street was the home of popular entertainment, and in our own time mass culture is produced by giant companies. The elite can afford the local and the particular; ordinary folks consume less expensive, franchised products. And so a “corporate” 42nd Street was a democratic 42nd Street. Ratner’s aides were now chuckling with some embarrassment at the boss’s swelling oratory, but he plunged on, the bit between his teeth. “It’s always been a place to go out for the lower-middle-income New Yorker. You go out on a Saturday night, and it’s basically people of low-middle-income means, from the boroughs, from New Jersey, from Long Island, out for a date. If you think about all the great streets in the world, it’s about seeing people from that culture. And it does that. And you know what? Maybe at the end of the day, that’s what a successful street is. Should it be Applebee’s or should it be someplace else? Who knows? It’s a great place.”

Is 42nd Street a great place because it’s a mirror of America? If that’s so, then the average shopping mall is a great place, too. When 42nd Street really was great, it stood for something larger than itself—glamour, excess, sex appeal, decadence. The one thing 42nd Street stands for now is the power of global marketing—and perhaps “the corporate dominance of public space.” Forty-second Street is not a great place anymore; on the other hand, it hasn’t been one for a very long time. Throughout the sixties, seventies, and eighties, 42nd Street mattered only as a case history in urban decline. Perhaps what one should say of this new 42nd Street is simply that it worked: it drew people to the heart of the city. People wanted to stand on the sidewalk and watch Ayhan paint; they wanted to hang out in front of the subway and even, alas, at Applebee’s. Perhaps that was enough.

14.

YOUNG HAMMERSTEIN MEETS DARTH NADER: A DIALOGUE OF THE DEAF IN FIVE ACTS

ACT I

IN THE MID-1970S, Show World, the biggest and easily the most professional of the Times Square sex shops, opened on the northwest corner of 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue, in a spot previously occupied by a Chemical Bank. A vivid contemporary description of its operation comes from Josh Alan Friedman, the Damon Runyon of Times Square’s pornographic