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The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square, by James Traub
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As Times Square turns 100, New York Times Magazine contributing writer James Traub tells the story of how this mercurial district became one of the most famous and exciting places in the world. The Devil’s Playground is classic and colorful American history, from the first years of the twentieth century through the Runyonesque heyday of nightclubs and theaters in the 1920s and ’30s, to the district’s decline in the 1960s and its glittering corporate revival in the 1990s.
First, Traub gives us the great impresarios, wits, tunesmiths, newspaper columnists, and nocturnal creatures who shaped Times Square over the century since the place first got its name: Oscar Hammerstein, Florenz Ziegfeld, George S. Kaufman, Damon Runyon, Walter Winchell, and “the Queen of the Nightclubs,” Texas Guinan; bards like A. J. Liebling, Joe Mitchell, and the Beats, who celebrated the drug dealers and pimps of 42nd Street. He describes Times Square’s notorious collapse into pathology and the fierce debates over how best to restore it to life.
Traub then goes on to scrutinize today’s Times Square as no author has yet done. He writes about the new 42nd Street, the giant Toys “R” Us store with its flashing Ferris wheel, the new world of corporate theater, and the sex shops trying to leave their history behind.
More than sixty years ago, Liebling called Times Square “the heart of the world”—not just the center of the world, though this crossroads in Midtown Manhattan was indeed that, but its heart. From the dawn of the twentieth century through the 1950s, Times Square was the whirling dynamo of American popular culture and, increasingly, an urban sanctuary for the eccentric and the untamed. The name itself became emblematic of the tremendous life force of cities everywhere.
Today, Times Square is once again an awe-inspiring place, but the dark and strange corners have been filled with blazing light. The most famous street character on Broadway, “the Naked Cowboy,” has his own website, and Toys “R” Us calls its flagship store in Times Square “the toy center of the universe.” For the giant entertainment corporations that have moved to this safe, clean, and self-consciously gaudy spot, Times Square is still very much the center of the world. But is it still the heart?
From the Hardcover edition.
- Sales Rank: #795541 in Books
- Published on: 2004-12-21
- Released on: 2004-12-21
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .50" w x 5.50" l, .55 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
From Publishers Weekly
The first part of Traub's learned cultural history focuses on Times Square (originally Longacre Square before it was renamed in 1904) when it was the center of New York'sâ€"and the nation'sâ€"entertainment industry. Evoking the Runyonesque worlds of vaudeville, burlesque, speakeasies, gangsters and molls, the author provides lots of glamorous information about old Times Square and its most recognizable inventionâ€"oversized electronic signs or "spectaculars." Part two opens in the 1970s after Hollywood, suburbanization and television had marginalized live entertainment and its capital, turning Times Square into a haven for drug dealers and prostitutes, "a disease to be cured." This section, on the rebirth of Times Square, is particularly valuable for showing how private interests and the public sector joined forces to create a capital for corporatized fun. In part three, some readers may become impatient with Traub's tortured indecision about whether to enjoy this weird, overblown world, as his 11-year-old son does, or to decry it as a plot by global capitalism, as well as with his tendency to obsessively analyze the place (he visits Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum with a professor who's "a deconstructionist, or perhaps a postdeconstructionist"). Despite the sometimes overly intellectual approach, this book should appeal to those looking for some of the joy and excitement that even the new "sanitized" Times Square has to offer.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Traub has made a career out of writing about New York and its institutions. He has the right: he lives and breathes the city, and his prose tumbles out sparkling and effortless. His history of Times Square--its name was changed from Longacre Square in the spring of 1904 for the newspaper headquartered there--is a vivid and remarkably nonjudgmental tale. The "iron law" of Times Square, he writes, is "real estate turned to its most profitable use," and he carries that idea from rooftop gardens, vaudeville, and the magical year of 1927 through the speakeasies and nightclubs of the 1930s to the sinkhole of the 1970s and the square's current incarnation as the site of a family carnival. He doesn't miss a character--what made Times Square happen were personalities from reporter Walter Winchell and nightclub queen Texas Guinan to designer Tibor Kalman and the real estate Dursts. He segues smoothly from the assignations of boxer Primo Carnera at the Forrest Hotel to the effect of crowds on MTV's Total Request Live. He pauses in his archaeological reconstruction long enough to marvel at the length and depth of Irving Berlin's career and to admire the Ferris wheel inside the Toys R Us store. A fabulous read that quite nearly captures the "gorgeous disarray" and "epic higgedly piggedly" of the world's gathering place. For other slices of New York life, see Donna Seaman's Read-alike column, "Walkabout, New York Style," in the February 1, 2004, Booklist. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
praise for James Traub's previous works:
City on a Hill
“An excellent if sorrowful study of what City College has become
since open admissions...informed, sympathetic, a heartbreaking picture
of New York today.”
—Alfred Kazin, The New York Observer
“This is a deeply reported, lucidly written and clearly thought-out book—a book
of merit.”
—A. M. Rosenthal, The New York Times Book Review
Too Good to Be True: The
Outlandish Story of Wedtech
“Traub...brings a novelist’s sensibility to the vastly complex story; his characters
are so alive and the narrative so vivid that you feel like washing your hands
every time you put the book down.”
—John Schwartz, Newsweek
From the Hardcover edition.
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Wonderful book but good heavens where are the pictures??
By Buckeye
This is a hugely entertaining read that I enjoyed primarily from a 'history of New York City' perspective. Others with interests in the history of culture, broadway, etc. will also find this a great book to read. It's informative, very well-written and a hell of a lot of fun. But if there was ever a book that NEEDED pictures, this is it. The fact that there aren't is immensely disappointing. So many colorful people, places and events so well described and not a single photograph of anything. Very, very puzzling. I'd give it five stars were it not for this glaring omission.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Well Done
By R. J. Marsella
This book really captures the characters, glamour, degradation and rebirth of Times Square since it's beginnings in a very entertaining and informative way. The story is weaved together wonderfully incorporating social, political , cultural and architectural details in a lively narrative that was a pleasure to read. From the Lobster Palaces to Flo Ziegfield to the speakeasys of the 20's to Irving Berlin to the tawdry porno theaters and massage parlors of the 70's to todays tourist mecca....it's all here. Traub has done a great job of researching and documenting the history of a place that does it's best to bury it's past. You can walk those mid-town streets after reading this and recognize historical significance that is all too easy to take for granted in a place as busy and bustling as Times Square.
10 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Long is the road and broad is the way...
By A Customer
James Traub has penned an energetic paean to the world's most famous (and occasionally infamous) "square."
Although some readers may be put off by a sometimes dry and overly-academic writing style, Traub more than makes up for it with a dazzling synthesis of sociological history, political intrigue, architectural evolution and brilliant sketches of the giddy early days of advertising. It may surprise some to know that the Square was awash in luminous and neon-drenched marketing mirages as early as the first decade of the 20th century.
Through it all, the pulsing adrenaline charge experienced by a walk through Times Square saturates this unique work. This reviewer was reminded of Saul Bellow's incomparable descriptive flourish from Seize the Day:
"On Broadway it was still bright afternoon and the gassy air was almost motionless under the leaden spokes of sunlight, and sawdust footprints lay about the doorways of butcher shops and fruit stores. And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every age, of every genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence -- I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally. The sidewalks were wider than any causeway; the street itself was immense, and it quaked and gleamed and it seemed ... to throb at the last limit of endurance."
Amen.
You'll feel all of that and more in this worthy book.
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