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By Root 616 0

the First Amendment. But this is scarcely the only imaginable alternative to an equally single-minded defense of antisocial behavior; nor, of course, would any fair observer describe it as the tenor of today’s Times Square. For a theory of the democratic, individualistic middle course, one need only think of a figure like William Whyte, the social theorist who minutely studied the walking, sitting, and talking habits of people in urban places. Whyte spent much of his career trying to encourage what he called “amiable disorder” by advising on the design of parks, sidewalks, atriums, and other public places. He insisted on the crucial distinction between “oddballs” and “freaks” on the one hand, who constitute “a benevolent presence on the street,” and genuinely dangerous people, whom he did not hesitate to call “undesirables.” Whyte made the case for what one might call the bourgeois city—not because he championed the middle class, but because he cared about such bourgeois values as comfort, neighborliness, and charm. And the Times Square of today, though it lacks much in neighborliness, is surely a place of amiable disorder.

TIMES SQUARE STILL HAS a street culture both of suffering souls and of predatory ones; but it is, effectively, subterranean, and only occasionally impinges on the life above. There are at least fifty homeless people on an average warm day in and around Times Square, but a casual pedestrian barely notices them. A few of the regulars, like “Heavy,” a shambling mass of a man who rarely speaks, never bathes, and drags behind him a battered train of carts filled high with garbage, are almost impossible to miss. But most of the homeless men in Times Square live quietly on the cross streets and do as little as possible to draw attention to themselves, save when they’ve had too much to drink. And even most of the drinkers are quiet. A handsome, fine-boned black man named Mark Harris spends most of his day sitting in the lee of a building on 50th Street, just west of Eighth Avenue. He is forty-nine, he says; his goatee has begun to go silver. He has a rhythm guitar, except when he gets fuddled and leaves it somewhere; if you ask, he will plug it into his mini-amp and play a tune like “I Am a Blues Man.” In his younger days, Harris says, he was a studio musician with the Drifters, Richie Havens, Baby Washington. Now he claims that he has a few albums ready to go; his producers are “in the hospital.” This appears to be a fantasy. Harris says, “A lot of my friends, they’re telling me if I slow down on the alcohol, it’ll help me with my music.” He says this with a rueful smile and a slightly vacant expression; there is no reason to doubt him on this score.

Homeless people like Harris—or even like Heavy—fall well within the permissible boundaries of social control in Times Square: they are not disturbing anyone, and they have a right to their spot of pavement. People who work with the homeless, and the homeless themselves, say that there will always be a vagrant population in Times Square, because the crowds of tourists make for top-drawer panhandling, and simply because the buses and subways seem to disgorge a certain number of helpless or disoriented or addicted people onto the streets of Times Square every year. “Outreach” organizations do their best to help them; but even the most mentally stable among the homeless—like Mark Harris—are rarely willing to trade the fellowship of the streets for “three hots and a cot.” The homeless have thus become a Times Square fixture, harmful almost only to themselves and to one another. They lead the “floating existences” of which Baudelaire spoke. It would be heartless to say that they are part of Times Square’s “local color,” any more than the gang-bangers in the arcades are; but the truth is that they constitute the substratum of the local pageant and a kind of guarantee of amiable disorder.

The other branch of the Times Square street subculture is overtly criminal—the “underworld,” in all senses of that term. Even the heightened degree of social control has been unable