The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [27]
If one looks back even further, to the Broadway of 1895, the difference is even more drastic. “Broadway” barely appears in the upper-crust literature of the 1890s; in novels like Brander Matthews’s His Father’s Son, mentioned earlier, the reader has, in fact, almost no sense of street life, of crowds, of a “public,” for the action is largely confined to parlors. But Broadway is a topic of never-ending fascination for the New York writers of twenty years later—for Julian Street, for Rupert Hughes, and for George Bronson-Howard, the author of Birds of Prey: Being Pages from the Book of Broadway. For these writers, Broadway is life itself—the speed, the lingo, the cynicism, the brittleness, the desperation. Bronson-Howard, for example, writes story after story about the relationship of mutual exploitation between chorus girls and the men who pursue them. The only moralists on Broadway—the only people who think like the characters in a Brander Matthews novel—are fools. It’s a cold, glittering, gorgeous world. “Remember,” Julian Street writes, “New York is the national parlour for the painless extraction of ideals; get a new set made of gold.”
4.
SKY SIGNS
IN THE CLIMACTIC SCENE of Sister Carrie, Hurstwood, Carrie’s luckless consort, having spiraled downward into beggary and despair, trudges south on Broadway to 42nd Street and sees the “fire signs” blazing in the snow. This is Dreiser’s portentous term for the electric signs that announced restaurants and theaters up and down Broadway, a technology too new to have a proper name. Hurstwood pauses before a restaurant— Shanley’s, perhaps, or the Café de l’Opera—and there, too, a “fire sign” illuminates the giddy whirl of merrymakers. The snow in front of the Casino, where Carrie is starring, and which in fact had the biggest and shiniest electric sign of all the Broadway theaters, is also “bright with the radiated fire.” Here is something new in the world, a glowing, glittering kind of speech that attracts nighttime revelers with a promise of excitement and warmth (and repels the likes of Hurstwood, who proceeds to trek through the darkness to a flophouse, and to suicide). The lighted sign, which came into being just as Times Square did, was quickly established as its visual signature and the symbol to the entire world of its dazzling nightlife.
At the time Dreiser was writing, in the last years of the nineteenth century, electric lighting was only twenty years old; Edison had perfected the incandescent lightbulb in 1879. The ability to turn night into day seemed miraculous. The world’s fairs that were in such vogue in the last decades of the century were essentially festivals of light, with an Electric Building, or Electric Tower, their featured attraction. At many of the fairs, an anthropological exhibit designed to feature the evolution of the arts and sciences ended with a dazzling display of light. Electric light was not the home convenience we think of it as today, but rather a spectacle, used to illuminate streets, restaurants, theaters, and fairgrounds, and to draw country folk into the city.
Electric streetlights began to line Broadway almost as soon as they became commercially available, in the early 1880s; they reached 42nd Street in 1895. Theaters had long used gas lamps to light their marquees; now they began to switch to electricity. Advertisers at first continued to favor billboards, which were plastered over every available space on major thoroughfares and often stacked one atop another. And so the first electric signs were essentially billboards made of light. In 1892, the president of the Long Island Rail Road hired the Edison General Electric Company to erect an electric sign at the wedge-shaped corner of 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue beguiling passersby to “BUY HOMES ON LONG ISLAND SWEPT BY OCEAN BREEZES.” The sign, located at