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By Root 683 0

towers and the megastores, was justified in no small part as a way of preserving the old: that is, the Broadway theaters. The theaters evoke powerful feelings, and not only because of the shows mounted inside but because of the sense of antiquity, of unbroken tradition, provided by the buildings themselves. Disney bought itself immeasurable goodwill, perhaps especially among those otherwise inclined to deplore its presence in Times Square, by its meticulous and loving renovation of the New Amsterdam Theatre, even though the city footed the bill.

There are other places in Times Square famous for being old, beloved spots that bear the fossil traces of an all-but-vanished civilization. Most of these places are restaurants, like Sardi’s, on 44th Street, where tourists have been coming for decades to ogle show folk, or what they suppose must be show folk. These sites have a special status as living proof that the indwelling spirit of the place hasn’t died out. Perhaps the granddaddy of all such nostalgia magnets is the Edison Coffee Shop, universally known as the Polish Tea Room (a joke on the grandiose and self-important, and now late and lamented, Russian Tea Room). The playwright Neil Simon, a habitué, even wrote a play about the place, Forty-five Seconds from Broadway (the title a spoof of one of George M. Cohan’s, Forty-five Minutes from Broadway). Located on 47th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, the coffee shop was originally a salon of the posh Edison Hotel and is decorated like a giant Wedgwood tea set—blue for the ceilings, pink for the walls and columns that march incongruously down the middle of the coffee shop. The truncated remains of a grilled balcony look out over the luncheon counter, where a sign lists the featured specials of a bygone age of Jewish heartburn-producing cuisine—kasha varnishkes, blintzes, whitefish, gefilte fish, and so on. The cast of ancient regulars sipping tea at the counter looks like a lineup of George Segal sculptures. The actual Broadway folk sit in front, near the windows. You might be able to get a better pastrami on rye elsewhere, but the Edison is less an eatery than a tableau vivant, a show where lucky tourists are invited to mingle, as at audience-participation plays like Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding. Stubborn archaism and a kind of slapdash gemütlichkeit turn out to exert a tremendous atavistic appeal. The Edison is, in its way, a terribly fashionable place, and the tables are often filled with editors from The New York Times and masters of the universe from Morgan Stanley.

The Edison Coffee Shop teeters on some ontological knife-edge between the unself-conscious and the italicized, and thus between the lovable and the quaint. What is lovable—what you are willing to attach your emotions to—is not simply the old, but the unrenovated, the thoughtlessly preserved, the effortlessly itself. This, of course, is what no theme park can achieve. And the persistence of the unrenovated is the source of such charm as Times Square still has. This is especially true in what might be called Times Square’s private spaces: the cross streets and the northern reaches, where the great crowds peter out. These are the places still patronized principally by actual New Yorkers. Irish bars still line both sides of Eighth Avenue. McHale’s, a dark little pub on the northeast corner of 46th and Eighth, opened up in 1935 as the Gaiety Café, and in 1953 passed into the hands of the McHales, who ever since have been serving large hamburgers, modestly priced beer, and televised ball games. Upper Times Square still bears strong marks of the jazz and popular music culture that radiated from there half a century ago. Colony Music, at 49th and Broadway, opened up a few blocks to the north in 1948, at the site of the old Alvin Hotel, where Billie Holiday used to perform. The owner, Richard Turk, grew up in the store, where his father worked as the accountant. Irving Berlin, aged ninety, once accosted him to ask, “How’s ‘White Christmas’ doing?” To which Turk said, “It’s doing fine, and ‘Easter Parade’ isn’t doing