The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [157]
IT IS FOR HIMSELF, I imagine, more than for those phantom tourists, that Joseph Sherry preserves Howard Johnson’s in Naugahyde splendor. He’s the nostalgic one—for those bygone days of Lily Tomlin and Jack Dempsey’s and the Latin Quarter. For him, the old and the worn have special claims that the new can never challenge. But of course, that’s his life. Why should we join him? Why celebrate a spot whose sole virtue is persistence in the face of change? Nostalgia is, of course, the easiest, and maybe the laziest, way of discrediting all that is new. Even the most ardent lovers of the Times Square perdu recognize the dangers of surrendering to this syndrome. Marshall Berman, the author of All That Is Solid Melts into Air, a fine history of modernism, and himself a famous celebrant of the literature and history of Times Square, once noted that “Times Square has the capacity to engender a ‘discourse of nostalgia’ that floats freely and unites people with radically different views of the Square and the world.” Berman observed that even the WPA Guide of 1939 was nostalgic for the Times Square of 1920. One might add that the essayist Benjamin de Casseres was already shedding tears in 1925 over the collapse of the old booze forts of 1915.
In Times Square Roulette, the definitive account of the redevelopment of Times Square, Lynn Sagalyn, a professor of real estate at Columbia University, even provides a declension of the “varied voices of nostalgia,” which include the “wistfuls,” the “skeptics,” the “retrogrades,” the “reminders” (low-grade wistfuls), and the “resilients,” who are actually a species of enthusiast about the new Times Square. It is, as Sagalyn writes, precisely because Times Square is a “touchstone” that choosing your orientation toward its redevelopment becomes a means of expressing an attitude toward mass culture, toward corporate monopolization of that culture, toward the role of the past and of memory in a world dominated by the idea of progress and constant change. Wistfulness about the oldest restaurant on Broadway is thus a means of expressing regret; and that regret, Sagalyn would say, is a kind of soft-core critique of the booming new Times Square which has obliterated the past—or rather, many pasts.
But wistfulness does not necessarily, or even usually, express a wish for things to be other than they are (as Sagalyn herself recognizes). It is more like an intuitive reaction to the inhospitality of a world that bears no traces of its own past, or of your own past in it. In its most blissed-out form, wistfulness is the delighted incredulity of those codgers who find that a Howard Johnson’s chocolate sundae with coffee and butter pecan ice cream tastes exactly the way it did in 1962. Joseph Sherry says that Lily Tomlin came back for a plate of fried clams while she was starring on Broadway; it must have been, for her, a madeleine sort of moment (though others have, to tell the truth, found the fried clams distinctly vulcanized).
I am not, myself, a genuine specimen of a “wistful.” I do not really wish that I lived in the era of Rector’s, or of Hubert’s Flea Circus, or that either of those places could somehow be teleported into our own time. Unlike Joseph Sherry, I do not have passionate memories of Times Square when it was swell, and though during my boyhood I must have eaten any number of grilled cheese sandwiches and even ice cream sundaes at various Howard Johnson’s on various thruways, it would never have occurred to me to sentimentalize the place. (In fact, on the basis of a magazine article of mine, Sagalyn cites me as an instance of the optimistic variant of the “resilient.”) And yet I will be very