The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [74]
The Bright Light Zone documented the enormous volume of crimes committed in the area, but its essential subject was not crime but pathology— a pathology that seems to have defeated all attempts at control. Here is a typical excerpt from one researcher’s field notes:
As I returned south on 8th Avenue I saw an older black man urinating on the sidewalk. This same man has been around this corner of 42nd and 8th for years. He is sick and should be hospitalized. His street name is Cadillac. Year after year I’ve seen him there, drunk, loud, menacing the passers-by. A well-dressed white man appealed to two policemen about the man’s conduct. The police said in effect that there was very little they could do—about a sick, drunken man publicly urinating on the west side of 8th Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets!
The authors note that Cadillac “circulates in a world of bottle gangs”— groups of alcoholics—“and street violence which destroys the civic culture of West 42nd Street as well as the men themselves.”
The Bright Light study is generally quite sympathetic to the police, who appear to spend much of their time reviving wasted derelicts who have collapsed into the gutter, or dealing with the crazies who have come to live on the street. At one point a street character with no legs takes a bite out of a cop’s hand; handcuffed on the floor of the precinct house, he whacks passersby with his bloody stumps. An exhausted patrolman says to his partner, “This job’s like shoveling shit against the tide.” The problem is not even crime so much as rampant antisocial behavior; the drunks and the nuts and the bag ladies and the small-time hustlers have created a self-perpetuating street culture that seems beyond the reach of enforcement. One commanding officer says, “If we could go back to the old style of police work, when men on the beat could enforce standards of public decency and order, we could clean up West 42nd Street in no time.” But at that time neither the city’s judges nor many of its citizens—certainly not elites—would have tolerated such aggressive, and such moralistic, policing; nor was there any willingness to reverse the policy of “deinstitutionalization,” which had released thousands of mentally ill people to the streets with little supervision or care.
The Bright Light Zone was a work of cultural anthropology; the authors were at pains to demonstrate that Times Square served the needs, and satisfied the appetites, of many constituencies. “The heterogeneity of people and their life-ways along West 42nd Street is astonishing even to social scientists who are used to the wonderful layering and stacking of Manhattan neighborhoods,” the authors write. Far from being the “Ghetto Street” imagined by terrified suburbanites, they noted, 42nd Street was filled with a great throng of tourists, office workers, and fun seekers, and at least at midday was among the most crowded blocks in New York City. The cheap movie theaters and restaurants and arcades were a tremendous draw for perfectly law-abiding young people and families, especially from neighborhoods like Harlem with few movie theaters of their own. Forty-second Street was not beyond help. While only 21 percent of respondents to a survey said “I would enjoy” going to West 42nd Street, and 38 percent said “I would avoid” the area, a sizable majority also said that they would come to the street if “legitimate theater and dance” returned there. In other words, if you could somehow end the cycle of pathology,