• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

How can you not feel ambivalent about the Toys “R” Us flagship store? To repudiate it is to repudiate mass culture itself, with all its vitality and its electric fantasies and its relentless wish to entertain. To embrace it is to embrace mass culture, with its numbing sensationalism, its two-dimensionality, its gigantism. That Ferris wheel is probably the biggest, and cheapest, attraction in Times Square, but it’s also a reminder of a Ferris wheel that never got built—the one at the heart of the City at 42nd Street project, stillborn in 1980. This was the plan that Mayor Ed Koch dismissed by saying, “People do not come to midtown Manhattan to take a ride on some machine.” The Ferris wheel, to an echt New Yorker like Koch, was strictly Disneyland. And that ride, which bore so heavy a symbolic burden, was an educational device designed to evoke the verticality of the city, its infinitely stratified texture. This one is a marketing device intended to spread out a giant store’s wares from basement to ceiling.

You don’t have to be a dogmatic critic of corporate culture to find the Toys “R” Us store at least faintly sinister; you just have to feel the bombardment of the cheerful booming music and the video monitors and the elevators in the Barbie house and the giant, looming Monopoly board, all of it a minutely orchestrated simulation of the spontaneous life of the place whose brand identity it is so ingeniously exploiting. An adult of only moderately melodramatic sensibility might contemplate the store with the apocalyptic alarm that the new generation of urban critics brings to shopping malls and planned communities. On one particularly insanely crowded day, I saw a friend who had come to buy a Lego for his nephew; he clutched at me like a drowning man in the wild eddy of the crowd and shouted, “It’s hell!” before lurching onward to a cash register.

But of course, the store wasn’t for him; it was for kids. Children are now in the picture in a way they were not before; the functional unit of popular entertainment is no longer “the grown-up,” but “the family.” Times Square, even more than Las Vegas, has surrendered to the hegemony of the family. I saw Toys “R” Us through Alex’s eyes. He and I generally treated it as an amusement park, though the experience sometimes included the purchase of a game for Alex’s GameCube system (which the supremely efficient Toys “R” Us had in stock at Christmastime when every other toy store was out). Once we made the mistake of coming on the Saturday afternoon before Easter, which a salesperson informed us was the second busiest day of the year. We wandered through the pulsing—but not shoving—crowd, pulled ever forward from one sales area to the next, little recking that the “racetrack format” was working its magic on us.

I noticed that about half the customers were black or Hispanic; this was, after all, an inexpensive store with free entertainment, and thus a fulfillment of those democratic traditions to which Bruce Ratner had raised a metaphorical glass. We came to a crowd gathered around a table; it was the display for Rumble Robots, little battery-operated fighting machines. Teams of green bots and red bots were squaring off against each other, with kids clutching controllers on either side. The bout was managed by two cool young guys in black hooded capes—the Rumble Masters. Alex would not leave. Finally he took over a controller for a green bot. And the Rumble Master shouted, “Three . . . two . . . one . . . Rummmble!” It was an eleven-year-old peak experience.

We came back again two weeks later—and the Rumble Robots were gone, as were all the permanent-looking fixtures in the department. Here was capitalism in the raw: all that is solid melts into air. Now an entirely new set of fixtures had been installed to display Sega electronic games. The sales assistant at the display was Deryck Clarke, a thirty-nine-year-old black hipster who plays the French horn in Broadway musicals. He wore a ribbon that said, “I speak German.” Clarke was a New Yorker, and he said, “When I was