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By Root 556 0

imagine any comparable event today, for we have lost the habit of congregating, and television has become our town square. But up until the age of mass suburbanization—which is to say, up through the end of World War II—urbanites were in the habit of gathering in central places at moments of high importance, and they derived comfort and reassurance from the massed presence of fellow citizens (or, in the case of the mob, from the sense of massed fury). And Times Square was the agora of our greatest urban culture. Ever since the beginning of the twentieth century, New Yorkers had been collecting in Times Square not only for the festivities of New Year’s but for the more somber business of presidential elections, and for the great prizefights, and for the seventh game of the World Series. The photographs of the time, with great seas of men in dark suits and gray fedoras, their necks craned up toward the “zipper” on the Times Tower, remind us of this moment of mid-century urban glory.

The photograph that memorialized V-J Day, and indeed the one picture of Times Square that occupies a secure, everlasting place in the national pantheon of received images, is the one the Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt took of a sailor in his dress blues scooping up a white-clad and wholly unsuspecting nurse and planting an ardent kiss on her lips. What the picture is principally about is the historic moment—the immense relief, the jubilation, the abandon, the no-strangers-in-New-York. But it is also about a place. Eisenstaedt captured a Life magazine version of Times Square, a place of vast crowds, of incongruous meetings, of freedom and expressiveness and cheap thrills—a kind of all-American urban playground. The Times Square of that era, as the writer Jan Morris remarks, “had a frank and jolly air to it, and there was an impudent naivete even to its naughtiest activities.”

A new, middlebrow Times Square emerged in the 1940s, a Times Square neither gracious nor derelict. Elegant nightlife had migrated to Fifth Avenue and to the East Side; the great clubs of the twenties and thirties had given way to shabby little basement boîtes, or to such giant emporia as the Latin Quarter or Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe, where a sailor could take his girl for dinner and a gaudy show. Ripley’s Wax Museum had opened up on the west side of Broadway between 43rd and 44th. Forty-second Street was now lined with big late-night cafeterias and pinball arcades and gimmick shops and even a few bookstores selling girlie magazines. The great old theaters of 42nd Street had been converted to “grinder houses,” showing cheap action movies (but not pornography) until deep into the night. The street hosted forms of naughtiness that passed far beyond impudent naïveté, including drug dealing and male prostitution, but visitors who weren’t looking for the criminal underside rarely encountered it.

Times Square had become a place of benevolent eccentricity. America was a country on the move in the years after World War II, and the square came to be seen as the great junction point through which much of the vagrant population of the country passed, a place epic in its variousness and its sheer oddity. Jack Kerouac caught this spirit in his first novel, The Town and the City, published in 1950. Times Square, he wrote, “was the one part to which all the ‘characters’ eventually migrated across the land at one time or another in their lonewolf scattering lives.” The young Kerouac, still very much in the grip of Thomas Wolfe, then looses a cataract of the incongruous: “The Broadway weisenheimer-gambler glancing at the old farmer with bundle wrapped in newspaper who gapes and bumps into everyone. . . . The mellow gentleman in the De Pinna suit headed for the Ritz Bar, and the mellow gentleman staggering by and sitting down in the gutter, to spit and groan and be hauled off by cops. . . . The robust young rosy-cheeked priest from Fordham with some of his jayvee basketballers on ‘a night of good clean fun,’ and the cadaverous morphine-addict stumbling full of shuddering