The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [119]
Giuliani believed that he was waging a battle not only against the forces of social disorder but against an ideology that legitimized that disorder, and that had paralyzed New Yorkers from acting in their own interests. And some adherents of that position now concede, grudgingly or not, that he was right. Gretchen Dykstra, a self-described ex–sixties lefty, succinctly describes the attitude of the bienpensant classes when she says, “There was a tendency to romanticize the gutter.” But it is not enough to say that the critics of the cleanup of Times Square refused to recognize that the “street culture” of the area was predatory, or that it drove “decent” citizens away; it was, rather, that they bridled at the very language of decency and at the idea that some citizens were more decent than others. The argument over social control was really a debate about who it was that urban spaces like Times Square belonged to—who deserved to be considered its “authentic” dwellers and users.
There is a history, stretching back at least to the time of Baudelaire, the bard of mid-nineteenth-century Parisian life, of cherishing the city as the great bulwark against overweening bourgeois propriety, and as home to a culture of deviance and eccentricity. In “On the Heroism of Modern Life,” Baudelaire writes, “The spectacle of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences—criminals and kept women—that drift about in the underworlds of a great city . . . all prove to us that we need only open our eyes to recognize our heroism.” “Fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences”—that is Times Square to a T. What is the poetry of Times Square but one long celebration of the human impulse to subvert propriety—from the glittering underworld of Damon Runyon and Texas Guinan to the penny-ante chiseling of Liebling’s Hymie Katz, and from Allen Ginsberg’s “atomic disease” to the country-boy hustling of Joe Buck and even the sexual Olympics that Josh Alan Friedman narrates? In the Times Square mythos, it is the lawman and his accomplice, the bluenose, who play the heavies. And so it is all too easy to see Rudy Giuliani’s campaign against public disorder as only the latest feverish effort to stem the force of illicit appetite, beginning with Anthony Comstock’s war against prostitution, continuing with Fiorello La Guardia’s against burlesque and, later, the legal assault on pornography; now this. Perhaps the city would be better served by an honest reprobate like Jimmy Walker.
But the analogy is false. By the 1970s and eighties, the Runyonesque, or Baudelairean, characters of another day had exited Times Square and other old urban spaces. The frankly predatory or just plain pitiful figures who came in their stead—the drug dealers and the hustlers, the homeless and the mentally ill—inherited the old mantle of antibourgeois legitimacy. Indeed, in a new twist, their very marginality came to be seen as proof of the failure of bourgeois society; and the impulse to clean up degraded places came to be interpreted as the wish to erase the manifest signs of that failure. As one author wrote in disgust at the rehabilitation of Union Square Park, a few intersections below Times Square, “The same stroke that restored the park’s green statues to gleaming bronze splendor attempted to wipe away the history of homelessness and poverty.” Homelessness and poverty were the park’s—and the city’s—reality; the cleanup was thus a kind of Potemkin fraud.