The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [15]
Ochs, like Hammerstein—and like Rudolph Aronson, for that matter—was a German Jewish immigrant with a flair for ballyhoo; he became the very first entrepreneur to market his Times Square location. That first year, Ochs held a giant outdoor New Year’s Eve party featuring a fireworks display at the Times Tower. The account of the festivities in The Times the following day emphasizes the symbolic importance of the event: “From base to dome,” the paper reported, “the giant structure was alight—a torch to usher in the newborn, a funeral pyre for the old, which pierced the very heavens.” The crowd, pouring in through the new subway system, was estimated at 200,000, and the tremendous roar they made at midnight with their rattles and noisemakers could be heard miles away. Three years later, the fireworks display having been banned, Ochs dreamed up the idea of dropping an electric ball from the top of the building, an ingenious bit of publicity that swelled the New Year’s Eve crowd yet further. Times Square quickly became New York’s agora, a place to gather both to await great tidings and to celebrate them, whether a World Series or a presidential election. In the minds of New Yorkers, Americans, and people all over the world, Times Square became associated with a particular kind of crowd—a happy crowd, made up of merrymakers rather than troublemakers.
THE OLYMPIA HAD BEEN a folly, a giant ocean liner moored in a remote backwater. Hammerstein’s next move showed a much shrewder sense of the emerging market. In 1899 he scraped together $80,000 to build the Victoria Theatre, a slapdash structure of secondhand bricks and scavenged lumber on the northwest corner of 42nd and Broadway. Hammerstein stuffed rubbish in the empty spaces between floors or within walls, and bought carpeting from a defunct liner for 25 cents a yard. For the first few years, he offered high-minded drama such as Henri Bataille and Michael Morton’s Resurrection, based on the novel by Tolstoy. But with such fine new theaters as the New Amsterdam, the Lyric, and the Liberty suddenly surrounding him on 42nd Street, he decided to explore the lower reaches of the market. In February 1904, Hammerstein announced that he was going vaudeville. It was an appropriate change, both commercially and symbolically. An estimated five million people passed through the Times Square subway station in its first year of operation. Those vast crowds were making Times Square radically different from any of its predecessors—more crowded, more turbulent and volatile, more democratic. Men and women, the middle class and the poor, were all flung together on the subway, as they were in the other rising institutions of the early part of the century—the department store, the office building. Barriers that had long seemed impermeable, and that had been treated as moral principles, were rapidly being lowered, if scarcely eliminated.
And then there were the facts of urban geography. Times Square could never be as genteel as Madison Square had been. Madison Square was, after all, a park, a grassy spot with fountains and flowers and tables, which in turn attracted the city’s finest hotels and theaters and restaurants. Times Square, by contrast, was a great, eddying mass of people and vehicles, already, in the early years of the century, said to be the busiest street corner in the world. And so the ethos of Times Square always included a glorification of the inevitable mixing. The restaurateur George Rector liked to say, only a little bit hyperbolically, that his establishment attracted both Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred and O. Henry’s Four Million.
Oscar turned the Victoria over to his son Willie, who had learned the vaudeville trade from the famous agent William Morris. At first Willie featured