The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [30]
By the mid-teens, Times Square, when captured at night by a photographer looking north from an upper floor of the Times Tower, already had the mind-boggling look that has long been its trademark: two merging paths of white phosphorescence flanked by innumerable glowing signs for theaters, restaurants, tires, cigarettes, and underwear. O. J. Gude bestrode this narrow world like a colossus. It was Gude who is said to have coined the term “Great White Way,” around 1901. (Broadway was also known for many years as “the Gay White Way.”) A 1907 article in Signs of the Times noted that “there was a time a few years ago when prospective outdoor advertisers were almost if not entirely at the mercy of the O. J. Gude Co., which concern has succeeded in securing control of, or an option on, about every available location that was at all desirable.” Gude had signs up and down Broadway; Gude’s sign for Trimble Whiskey occupied the single prime location in Times Square proper, at the 47th Street apex. Gude not only had the most signs, but the best signs. On the west side of the avenue, at 41st, he built a sign for Corticelli silk that was a masterpiece of playfulness as well as a genuine narrative. A kitten, gamboling on the Broadway side of the sign, became entangled in a length of thread, leaped around the corner to a giant sewing machine, caught up the thread, jumped back to Broadway, and brought the machine to a halt. “The kitten’s tail wagged,” Tama Starr writes, “its ears twitched, and its paws pummeled, pulling the silk off the turning spool in a blur and tangling the kitten in the loops.”
These gigantic, ingenious and blatantly commercial narratives in the sky came to be understood as a new kind of public theater, a theater that was the special province of Times Square. When Harvey Forbes, the hero of Rupert Hughes’s What Will People Say?, sits in his room at the Knickerbocker Hotel at 42nd and Broadway, and gazes out into the night, his view is of “the electric signs working like acrobats—the girl that skipped the rope, the baby that laughed and cried, the woman that danced on the wire,” and “the kitten that tangled itself in thread.” Foreign visitors to New York almost invariably mentioned the fantastic light show of Times Square. “Fabulous glow-worms crawl up and down,” wrote a British visitor in 1917. “Zig-zag lightnings strike an acre of signboard—and reveal a panacea for over-eating!” The English novelist Arnold Bennett described for readers back home “the mastodon kitten playing with a ball of thread, an umbrella in a shower of water,” and then delivered himself of this mighty apostrophe: “Sky signs! In Europe I had always inveighed manfully against sky signs. But now I bowed the head, vanquished. These sky signs annihilated argument.”
Gude himself cited Bennett’s declaration as evidence that even the most majestic arbiters of the traditional media had given their imprimatur to this new one. What Bennett was expressing, in fact, was resignation, not approval. Bennett understood that the marshaling of immense technological, economic, and cultural forces represented by the spectacular made the question of acceptance utterly irrelevant, for the culture of literary judgment suddenly looked like a very small thing next to the raw power of popular culture. Bennett didn’t despise popular culture; he was delighted at the George M. Cohan play he saw during his visit, preferring it vastly to the wooden renditions of classical drama he otherwise watched. He