The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [127]
At the same time, B.S.’s brother Joe, along with a group of investors, built the International Casino on the northern corner of the old Olympia site. The International was the last word in refinement, luxe, and swank. Here is how a reporter described the opening, in September 1937: “Hollywood on Broadway—a glittering gallimaufry of chromium and glass, crystal fountains, sliding doors, revolving stages, staircases which descend from heaven (when they work), a stainless steel escalator and a three-story spiral bar, where you can drink your way up and fall your way down, or vice versa, as befits your mood.” Life magazine did one of its “ Life Goes to a Party” series about the International soon after it opened, and the author noted, with what seems admirable candor for a family magazine, that “most people go to the International Casino to see a hundred-odd youngish girls in various states of undress.” The article’s opening photo spread shows a glistening chrome escalator with a tuxedoed headwaiter standing at the top, and then half a dozen beauties in two-piece bathing suits balancing spinning plates on long rods. Inside, Life offered pictures of bathing beauties descending from the ceiling in an elaborate trapezelike contraption and another riding bareback on a revolving stuffed horse.
And then, of course, this swanky, sexy, air-conditioned culture crumbled away just as surely as Hammerstein’s opulent Gilded Age culture had done before it. The Bond’s Clothing store booted out the nightclub in the forties, and in the sixties the New Criterion became just another movie theater (though it never stooped to porno). Times Square embarked on its long, slow slide into irrelevance and decay. B.S. and Joe Moss’s son sold the parcel in 1968, and then his son, Charles, bought it back ten years later. By that time, the block was a huddle of tacky variety stores. The parcel seemed about as valuable as it had when Oscar Hammerstein bought it in 1893. And then, suddenly, by the mid-eighties, with the building boom provoked by the new zoning laws, property along Broadway was worth a very great deal. Moss held out for a long time. He didn’t want another office building to go up where the New Criterion and the International Casino had stood—although it is also true that many of his proposed deals fell through. And when he finally agreed to lease the property to Toys “R” Us, he felt that he had found a tenant worthy of his family’s history.
Had he? Not exactly. All those other Times Squares, the Times Square of the Olympia and the New Criterion and the International, catered to a cosmopolitan taste, a taste for elegance and nocturnal drama, the drama of grand settings and fine clothing and unpredictable experience. They were for grown-ups seeking a grown-up fantasy. And it is that grown-up sense of fantasy, the fantasy of the spiral bar and the umpteen tiers of box seats rising into the upper air, that has vanished from the spanking-new Times Square. There is fantasy aplenty, at Madame Tussaud’s and the ESPN Zone and the Hershey’s candy store; but not for grown-ups. The drama of open-ended experience still lives on the streets; but indoors, fun has been ingeniously, minutely, engineered. Here is the difference between popular culture and mass culture. For a global entertainment firm like Toys “R” Us, Times Square is now a “site,” a branding opportunity, a marketing strategy. It has, amid these vast calculations, been reduced in size and stature. And its particularity has been diminished as well: Toys “R” Us’s very presence makes Times Square more like the other places where Toys “R” Us is present. The Ferris wheel is site-specific “appliqué,” to use Michael Sarkin