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touching rather than absurd. “Some of Miss Barnell’s less gifted colleagues are inclined to think that she is haughty,” Mitchell writes, deadpan, “but she feels that a woman with a beard more than a foot long has the right to be haughty.” A time would come, a few decades hence, when Hubert’s was a dive; but Mitchell’s Hubert’s is the New Amsterdam of the dime museum. Professor Roy Heckler, maestro of the flea circus, drops his flock, one by one, onto his forearm, “where they browse for fifteen minutes,” while he smokes, reads the paper, and shares a quiet moment with his friend Lady Olga. “Taciturn herself,” Mitchell writes, “Miss Barnell does not care for talkative people.”

Mitchell and Liebling created a Times Square that lives today—and not merely through the golden haze of memory. When we mourn the passing of a Broadway that once was and never will be again, few of us try to wish back the top-hatted and white-tied Broadway of Ziegfeld and the Castles, and Fitzgerald and his Princeton pals. Those images are not only too remote in time, they are, in a way, too contaminated by privilege and wealth. We are all populists now, and few of us would wish back a place so gaudy, so deluxe, so unattainable. That Times Square does not feel authentic to us in the way that the Times Square of Hubert’s and the Jollity Building does. That Times Square is a populist place—the home of carny populism. People like Izzy and Marty and the Count de Pennies and Lady Olga have a kind of proprietary right to Times Square; what we most wish for Times Square is that it be hospitable to eccentrics like them. And we wish that because Liebling and Mitchell made these characters so very alive, and somehow endowed them with the life of the place, as if they were its indwelling genius. Most of us, had we been alive then, would have passed through Times Square without even noticing the I. & Y. cigar shop; Times Square would not have been to us what it was to Liebling and Mitchell. But we live with their Times Square, as surely as we live with the Times Square of Guys and Dolls or Broadway Melody of 1929.

We want to have a Times Square that is hospitable to Izzy Yereshevsky—even though Izzy’s grandchildren probably now live in Westchester. In the debate over what Times Square should be, the pull of carny populism was, and remains, powerful. We can’t help feeling inauthentic in the face of the vital, tawdry Times Square of 1938. But we cannot have it back; we cannot have a Times Square that Joe Liebling would have loved.

8.

A WORLD CONQUERED BY THE MOTION PICTURE

AT 7:03 P.M., August 14, 1945, the words America had been waiting for flashed across the news ribbon running round the Times Tower: “Official—Truman announces Japanese surrender.” At that moment, according to a news account the following day, the half-million people packed into Times Square sent up a mighty roar that surged across the great open space for a full twenty minutes. Workers in the buildings around the square unleashed a mighty shower of paper and confetti. “Men and women embraced—there were no strangers in New York yesterday.” And then something happened that seems yet more remarkable to us today: people all over New York left their homes in order to flood into Times Square. They certainly didn’t need to read the news on the Times Tower; they could have learned a great deal more by staying home and listening to the radio. But they wanted to share this moment of sublime emotion with their fellow citizens; and so they converged on the central spot of their world. By ten P.M., the crowd had reached two million, the largest gathering in the history of Times Square, and possibly in the history of the republic. The area from 40th to 52nd Streets, and from Sixth Avenue to Eighth, was one solid mass of joyful humanity, kissing, hugging, sobbing, or simply gazing in wordless relief and delight. And they did not want to leave. Half a million people were still jammed into Times Square at three A.M, which means that many had stayed on their feet for seven or eight hours.

It is hard to