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on Advertising. There he made a raft of improving suggestions: that some prominent billboard locations be used as outdoor art galleries, that the Gude Company and the society jointly sponsor a sign design competition, that leading artists lecture Gude employees with the goal of “making advertising displays less offensive and more artistic.” None of this got him anywhere, and he soon quit. Nevertheless, the outdoor advertising industry, with Gude’s leadership, fought the forces of regulation to a draw; the city fashioned a much less restrictive ordinance in 1914, and then incorporated its principles into the new zoning ordinance of 1916. The zoning rules declared many areas of the city off-limits to electric signs, but otherwise placed few limits on their use. Times Square thus became New York’s electric light district, as the Ginza was later to be in Tokyo, or Piccadilly in London. The brilliance and beauty and technical daring of the signs that Gude and others raised along the roofline of Broadway more than justified the city’s ruling.

Gude’s most stupendous achievement came in 1917, at the very end of his career as Times Square’s master spectaculator. One of Gude’s prize locations was the space atop the Putnam Building, on the west side of Broadway between 43rd and 44th Streets. William Wrigley agreed to pay $100,000 a year to lease the space, and Gude designed for him the largest electric sign on the face of the earth, two hundred feet long and almost a hundred feet high. Here is the indispensable Tama Starr on the Wrigley’s sign: “Twin peacocks faced off on a tree branch, their tails forming a feathery canopy over the central portion of the display.” Beneath were the Wrigley’s logo and the actual ad copy. On either side of the text were six “Spearmen” in pointy hats. “Brandishing spears, they comprised a drill team that went through a series of twelve calisthenics the populace quickly dubbed the Daily Dozen. Flanking them were fountains spraying geysers of bubbling water, and the whole spectacle was framed in vinelike filigree.”

Gude, who was in poor health, sold his business in 1918, gave his art collection to the Lotos Club, went off to Europe, and died in Germany seven years later, leaving an estate worth a million dollars. He was much eulogized as “the creator of the Great White Way,” a title he deserved not simply because he lit up Times Square—that would have happened anyway—but because he combined art and commerce to forge the new form known as the spectacular, and thus gave Times Square the look for which it has ever after been known. Gude seems to have left no record of his own process of creation, but this astute and tough-minded businessman devised some of the most whimsical and fantastic works of art ever seen in Times Square. And he was a businessman, and a promoter, like Ochs and Hammerstein and Ziegfeld. In other parts of New York City—in Greenwich Village, for example—the motto may well have been “Art for art’s sake.” Not in Times Square. The motto of Times Square was, and always has been, “Keep the turnstiles clicking.”

5.

“BUY 18 HOLES AND SELL ALL THE WATER HAZARDS!”

ON AUGUST, 13, 1921, Dulcy, a play written by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, opened at the Frazee Theatre. Dulcy was a satire—a genre familiar in European theater from the time of Molière, but quite novel, and even shocking, on Broadway, where authors were not wont to mock their own main characters. Most of Dulcy’s cast of characters either mouth stock inanities or nod sagely at the humbug of the others. Leach, who writes movie scripts, insists on reciting to the guests of a dinner party the ludicrous plot of his latest work, “Sin,” which begins with Noah’s Ark and then proceeds through world history: “And to keep the symbolism at the end, just as Jack kisses Coralie there in Chicago, Marc Anthony kisses Cleopatra in Ancient Egypt”—Leach speaks in capital letters—“And George Washington kisses Martha Washington at Mount Vernon.” The hostess, Dulcy, is modeled on a preposterous character invented by Franklin P. Adams; her