The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [123]
Rivera pointed out the subway landing where a gang leader had gotten his throat slashed in the midst of a chain snatching, and then the path he had staggered down until he had bled to death in front of Chevys. But I had gotten the same tour way back in October. It had been a long time between murders. In fact, Rivera said, even chain-snatching and petty thievery were rare. Violent crime was almost unheard-of. Bob Esposito, the BID’s chief of security and a former police officer who put in many years in Times Square, says, “The kind of call I get now is, ‘The musician’s too loud,’ or, ‘I don’t like what the Black Israelites are saying.’” Rivera said that when he was in junior high, twenty years ago, he used to cut school and watch dirty movies on 42nd Street. “In those days,” he said, “you could never go to Eighth Avenue unless you had a weapon, or you came with twenty of your guys.” Now, forget it. Rivera was hoping, once he became a cop, to be assigned to the most crime-infested neighborhood around. He had just about had it with Times Square; it was too tame.
16.
ASK NOT FOR WHOM THE ANIMATRONIC T. REX ROARS
ON NOVEMBER 15, 2001, a big, excited crowd gathered at the northeast corner of Broadway and 44th Street. This was the exact same spot where Times Square’s very first crowd had gathered, slightly over a century before, to witness the opening of Hammerstein’s Olympia. Since that time, the Olympia had given way to an early movie theater that had in turn been converted back into a legitimate theater; the whole structure had been torn down to make way for a modern movie emporium, which in turn had been joined to the Bond’s Clothing store and to the International Casino, one of Times Square’s biggest and flashiest nightclubs; the entire complex had slid into disrepair, and the whole structure had been demolished once again. Civilizations had risen and fallen, and risen and fallen again, on this one rich archaeological site. And now a new culture, and a new epoch, had come: this crowd had gathered for the opening of the Toys “R” Us flagship store, the biggest, flashiest retail establishment in the history of Times Square. Oscar Hammerstein had hailed the Olympia as “the grandest amusement temple in the world.” And the press managers for Toys “R” Us surely were exercising no more hyperbole than Hammerstein had when they called the store “the Toy Center of the universe.”
Earlier that day, dozens of attractive young people wearing lime-green T-shirts that said “Xbox” on them had fanned out across Times Square; they were handing out cards that would entitle the bearer to stand in line at midnight and buy the new $299 Microsoft video game machine. Bill Gates himself had agreed to come to the store and sell the first Xbox in the world. And so here, at midnight, were five thousand people calmly and casually snaked around the building. The crowd flooded into the store, bought their games, and happily dispersed. It was a far more professionally managed opening than the Olympia’s had been. But the sale of the video games was, in a way, a pretext for a yet larger event. Over fifty media crews from all over the world came to cover this mind-boggling convergence of global brand names. Afterward, Microsoft’s marketing team calculated that the event created one hundred million “impressions” worldwide.
This beguiling accident of location, in which an early-twenty-firstcentury temple of entertainment is built atop the ruins of a late-nineteenth-century one, leads one to measure the course of history through comparison. The Toys “R” Us flagship store is an exciting, energetic, crowd-pleasing place, as the old