May 27, 2009--Broadway Boogie Woogie

I don’t know about you, but the idea to turn Times Square into a pedestrian mall is to me another example of the blanding of America.

I’m OK once a year when they ban vehicular traffic from Broadway and 42nd Street so that New Years Eve revelers and Dick Clark can stand around in the freezing weather and not have to dodge cars and buses and taxis while the ring out the old. But to permanently declare this sacred piece of cityscape off limits to the very hustle and bustle that rampaging cabbies contribute to its magic and which in turn has inspired poets and novelists and song writers and artists is to take another step in the direction of homogenizing life in America.

Just this past week we had other examples of this cultural adulteration—on America’s two most popular TV shows, Dancing With the Stars and American Idol the winners were best known for being cute and textureless while the runners up were hot and funky and sexy and dangerous.

Times Square before its redevelopment—its malling and Disneyfication--was the home not just to Broadway (the American theater at its historic best and most entertaining) but also to flea and freak shows, strip joints and porn shops, hustlers and street thugs. All of whom rubbed shoulders with local characters of the sort made famous by Damon Runyan and represented in that greatest of musicals, Guys and Dolls. It was where the hoi polloi thrill seekers came to slum among the down-and-out and transgressive and where once the lights began to dim who knew what happened.

It was the kind of place, in other words, that a city needs if it wants to be thought of as someplace special, and to where, if you didn’t want to be in Kansas anymore, you could visit or migrate. Where a little bit of everything is welcome, even the forbidden, especially the forbidden.

So to see pictures in yesterday’s New York Times (linked below) of New Yorkers strolling down the traffic-free Great White Way was so upsetting that it made me wonder what might be happening out there in Kansas. Maybe it was worth a visit. And to see other images of Manhattanites lolling around on the asphalt in beach chairs, no less, where traffic has for more than a century rampaged, caused me to wonder if I want to live here anymore. Or better, since this is still my city, for whomever wants to sit around in a beach chair on Broadway, well for them there’s always Florida.