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That Eisenstaedt photograph captured a Times Square poised on a kind of pinnacle. The census of 1950 was the last one showing that more Americans lived in cities than in towns or the countryside; the suburbs were soon to change the balance. New York was holding steady at eight million people, most fully assimilated and middle-class or at least working-class; the “urban crisis” was somewhere over the horizon. Most of the country’s wealth was still in the cities; most of its poverty was still in the countryside. Most cities were safe, clean, and orderly. And Times Square was the last word in seedy, thrilling urbanity at a moment when urbanity itself was still prized. Yes, it could feel dangerous, but usually just in the shivery way a funhouse did. As late as 1959, the cops in the fabled 16th Precinct, which covered 42nd to 50th from Fifth Avenue to the Hudson River, reported virtually no drug arrests (perhaps they weren’t looking too much harder than the tourists) and relatively little serious crime. Their worst problem, they said, was street peddlers.

THE IRONY OF THIS booming, bustling, frank, and jolly postwar Times Square is that it no longer made a cultural product that the rest of the country really cared about. The cross streets between Broadway and Eighth Avenue were still lined with theaters, but the numbers both of playhouses and of plays continued to shrink in the years after the war. People went to the movies instead; and then, increasingly in the fifties, they were staying home to watch TV. Much of the theatergoing and nightclub-going population had decamped for the suburbs. And since old fire codes had prevented the building of skyscrapers on top of theaters, though not of movie houses, the theaters became increasingly poor competitors in the Darwinian struggle of real estate values. Along 48th Street, known as the Street of Hits, first one theater, then another, closed up. By 1948, 80 percent of Broadway actors were said to be unemployed; by the 1950–51 season, only eighty-one shows were mounted in Times Square theaters. Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams were writing widely admired plays, and people were going to see them; but, as Brooks Atkinson remarked, “To go to the theater was like going to a minor, subsidiary social event.”

Yet, at the same time, live entertainment retained its old prestige. The great stars established themselves on the stage before the new gods, Hollywood and radio and TV, swept them into the ether. What’s more, the stars needed to reaffirm their bond with an adoring public through regular public appearances. And Times Square was still the capital of live entertainment. Ever since the twenties, the great movie theaters of Broadway—the Paramount, the Strand, the Capitol, the Rivoli, Loew’s State—had been showcasing the comedians and dancers and divas and leading men in the elaborate shows they mounted between movies. Of these, the greatest was surely the Paramount, a lavish Xanadu that Adolph Zukor, the czar of the studio, had reared on the west side of Broadway between 43rd and 44th, as a showcase for its talent. The theater, which opened in 1926 at a cost of $16.5 million, sat beneath Times Square’s tallest office building, which in turn was topped by a glass globe twenty feet in diameter. The globe was intended to signify “the world conquest by the motion picture,” a conquest soon to become all the more indisputable with the introduction of the talkie. A clock, facing in all four directions, had been incorporated into the globe, and it was well known that you could always tell the time in Times Square by looking up at the Paramount clock. The Paramount was a behemoth that seated almost four thousand patrons (proportions nevertheless rendered modest by comparison with the Roxy’s 6,200), and was widely admired for its splendid acoustics. All the great stars under contract to the studio played there in the twenties and thirties—Maurice Chevalier, Gloria Swanson, Gary Cooper, Eddie Cantor, Fred Astaire, Mary Pickford, Ginger Rogers, Rudy Vallee, Ray Bolger,