Taming Times Square

Walking through Times Square today, amidst upscale chain stores and expensive office towers, it is hard to imagine that this area was once a very different place. Just 20 ago, before the large-scale redevelopment project that began under Mayor Koch had a chance to take hold, tourists and commuters alike avoided 42nd Street like the plague: The street was permeated with drug dealers, sex shops and venues for pornography. If Times Square was once about sex, it is now about money.

Recent critiques of this stark transformation, such as the literary theorist Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (2001) or the anthropologist Daniel Makagon’s Where the Ball Drops: Days and Nights in Times Square (2007), portray private development as a contaminating force responsible for ruining the uniqueness, authenticity and character of Old Times Square. By contrast, the anthropologist Benjamin Chesluk argues that redevelopers were not exclusively driven by a desire for economic profit. They also saw themselves as “ethical subjects” who used urban redevelopment as an opportunity to transform the lives of the many “undesirables” who occupied the spaces of Times Square and were responsible for much of the crime that deterred corporate investors. If the transformation of 42nd Street was the outcome of open and free economic competition, it was also the result of a large-scale effort toward social control and engineering, through both architecture and social programs. 

The portrait of Times Square that emerges in Chesluk’s account is an area under constant surveillance; New Yorkers walking through the Square are like mice making their way through a neon maze. He even compares Times Square to the Panopticon prison designed by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. Bentham’s Panopticon was intended to solve the problem of controlling prisoners’ behavior in the prison through architecture rather than direct force. A central guard tower was placed in the center, and prisoners’ cells were arranged in a surrounding circle. As a result of architectural design, prison guards could see all without being seen, and prisoners would be vigilant of their own behavior as a result of the constant feeling that they were being watched. Similarly, Chesluk argues, redevelopers aimed to solve the problem of crime in Times Square through “defensive architecture.” For instance, in the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a glass wall was installed to expose criminal activity in a stairway, and a guard stand was taken out of hiding and placed in a more conspicuous position. On 42nd Street, a blue construction wall deterred graffiti writers with no intervention from police.

Chesluk’s analysis is grounded in the methods and theories of anthropology. He carried out numerous interviews with people who were deeply involved in the process of redeveloping Times Square. Chesluk also spoke with residents of Hell’s Kitchen, a residential area just west of Times Square, and participated in Times Square Ink., a job training program for misdemeanor offenders created by the Midtown Community Court. At Times Square Ink., he found that participants were not only taught job skills — they were encouraged to transform themselves in order to integrate into corporate culture; the instructors of the program saw their task as one of bridging the gap between two distinct groups that each had their own values and customs. For Chesluk, Times Square Ink. presents a prime example of the attempts at social engineering that were part-and-parcel of this redevelopment project.

It is hard to reconcile Chesluk’s discussion of the redevelopers’ attempts to reform the “undesirables” who occupied the spaces of Times Square with the ultimate consequence of the redevelopment project. Due to rising real estate prices, many low-income residents, as well as small business owners, were permanently driven out of the area. Times Square is a symbol of the practice of social exclusion that has become part-and-parcel of the alliance among private development, urban planning, and architecture in cities throughout the United States. Whether future developers will look to Times Square as a model to reproduce or a failure to avoid remains to be seen.