The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [158]
The truth is that the gentrification of Times Square over the last decade has done wonders for the food, and promises to do still more as the restaurant culture catches up with the new corporate presence. The cuisine at the Blue Fin is infinitely better than it was at Schrafft’s or the Automat, if immensely more expensive as well. I like the Blue Fin, and I even like the almost comically chic bar in the W’s eighth-floor lobby around the corner on 47th Street. I don’t want everything to be Howard Johnson’s, but I don’t want everything to be the Blue Fin, either. I don’t want Times Square to become a totalized, thematically unified place, like the Strip. It seems that I need some atavism; I’m inclined to think that we all do.
But the arrow of time is pointing unmistakably forward, and there can be no two ways about the destiny of that corner plot on Broadway and 46th Street. When I told Kenny Rubinstein that I planned to include the Howard Johnson’s in my book on Times Square, he said, “I wouldn’t wait too long if I were you.”
21.
ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR
YOU CAN COUNT ON seeing the Naked Cowboy almost any afternoon on the little concrete island between Broadway and Seventh Avenue at 45th Street. The Naked Cowboy is not, in fact, literally naked, like the holy Jains of India. He wears a pair of undies that say “Naked Cowboy” on the butt, and a cowboy hat and a pair of cowboy boots, and he carries a guitar. As for the rest, he’s all magnificent muscle and flowing blond locks. The Naked Cowboy spends a lot of time in the gym; he is the healthiest, handsomest, and possibly wholesomest street person in the history of Times Square. He appears to have descended directly from the Tommy Hilfiger billboard that looms far above his head, or perhaps from the electronic sign on the World Wrestling Entertainment store down the street—like a god come down to earth in human form. He is an icon of cleaned-up sex for the sexy, cleaned-up Times Square—a daytime cowboy rather than a midnight one. (He had never heard of Midnight Cowboy until a reporter asked him about it.)
The Naked Cowboy is an actual, individual person; his name is Robert Burck, and he hails from Cincinnati, Ohio. But he bears only a passing resemblance to the famous eccentrics who once haunted Times Square, such as the religious crank Rose Harvel, who preached a garbled gospel from the very same concrete island forty or fifty years ago. He has a persona, or a gimmick; and that gimmick, and the splendid expanse of gym-hardened flesh the gimmick is designed to expose, has made him a media figure. “I’ve been on Howard Stern thirteen times,” he said when I first approached him, in the late fall of 2001. At the time, he had literally wrapped himself in the American flag, patriotism then being very much in vogue. “I’ve been on Letterman, I just finished doing German TV, I’ve been on Good Morning America three times. I’m on CNN all the time. When someone does Times Square, they pretty much always include me. I’ve got my own movie going to Sundance. It’s a ninety-minute documentary about my life called Legend of a Naked Cowboy.”
The Naked Cowboy had done his routine—which basically consists of standing in his underwear and singing horribly—all over the country, but he had settled in Times Square because of the exposure it gave him. Like the hosts of Good Morning America, he was known to millions of people who had never seen him in person. When I told Alex that I had met a singing cowboy in underpants, he looked at me with the supreme condescension of the truly eleven, and said, “That’s the Naked Cowboy. He’s on TRL” —Total Request Live, MTV’s most popular show—“all the time.” And so he was. But for