The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [31]
The poet Rupert Brooke came to New York in 1914 and described “the merciless lights” of Times Square in accents Theodore Dreiser would have understood very well. “A stranger of another race, loitering here, might cast his eyes up, in a vague wonder what powers, kind or maleficent, controlled or observed this whirlwind,” he writes. And the terrible, ludicrous answer is that the gods of the heavens have retreated before the gods of commerce. A “divine hand” writes its “igneous message to the nations, ‘Wear Underwear for Youths and Men-Boys.’” And then “a youth and a man-boy, flaming and immortal, clad in celestial underwear, box a short round, vanish, reappear for another round, and again disappear.” Nearby, Orion “drives a sidereal golfball out of sight through the meadows of Paradise.” Here, in Times Square, modern man had orchestrated the sky itself, the region that teems with the divinities of Western mythology, to sell toothpaste. This was a death of the gods which Nietzsche had not anticipated. Brooke could still summon a deep sense of dread at the thought; but Arnold Bennett’s shrug was soon to become the more familiar response.
The great threat to the electric sign, however, came not from partisans of Olympus but from advocates of the city beautiful. The Municipal Art Society, a civic organization consisting of many of New York’s leading citizens and dedicated to preserving the city’s beaux-arts elegance and decorum from the depredations of popular culture, began a campaign against billboards as early as 1902. By 1912, public outcry had led Mayor William Gaynor to establish the Mayor’s Billboard Advisory Commission. The commissioners turned Gude’s arguments for the virtues of outdoor advertising against the industry, noting that the billboard or electric sign “thrusts itself upon unwilling and offended vision by day,” and “glares and winks and radiates its often uninteresting messages” by night. The commission proposed an ordinance that would prohibit large electric signs in residential neighborhoods and regulate their hours elsewhere, limit the height of roof signs to ten feet, and prohibit virtually all outdoor advertisements on or near parks, squares, public buildings, schools, and boulevards and streets of exceptional character (that is, Fifth Avenue). In short, it would have crippled the sky sign.
It was O. J. Gude, more than anyone else, who came to the industry’s defense. By this time, Gude was one of New York’s leading business figures, wealthy and respectable, an art collector, a horseman, and a clubman in good standing. He was a broad-shouldered man with thick hair, a clipped mustache, rimless spectacles, and a solemn mien. Promoter though he was, Gude was neither a cynic like Willie Hammerstein nor, certainly, a libertine like Ziegfeld. He seems genuinely to have viewed advertising as a source of moral and aesthetic improvement, and he had the gift of using the late-Victorian language of uplift without abandoning commercial candor. He once paid tribute to “19 centuries of the most effective outdoor advertising that the mind of the greatest advertising genius could conceive,” by which he meant the church steeple. When he testified before the mayor’s commission, he unfurled from the balcony an early public-service ad: a poster showing children going off to church, with the caption “Take your children to church, give them the right start.”
Gude believed that the solution lay in the promotion of high aesthetic standards among sign men. He believed that beautiful signs were more effective than plain ones, and he argued that outdoor advertising had “felt and shown the effects of the awakening of the artistic spirit in the people of this country”—a claim that he, at least, had every right to make. In 1913, Gude had the inspired idea of joining the Municipal Art Society and getting himself placed on its Committee