I first met Times Square when I was only 6.
To my untutored eye, it was simply a bright noisy place that housed magical stages where people sang and danced and performed. My parents called it Broadway, even though it hovered somewhere between Broadway and Seventh Avenue and between 42nd and 47th Streets. To get to Broadway theaters, you had to traipse through Times Square.
As a neophyte adult escaping my college’s pastoral campus in Hanover, N.H., I saw Times Square as a tacky stop on the 1 Broadway local while heading for the much hipper Greenwich Village.
But by 1983, my perceptions of this at once mythical and all too real place changed forever. I graduated from college and was transformed from a pampered student into a very broke wannabe modern dancer. Like scores of others, I arrived in the Biggest of Apples with $300 and a one-way plane ticket.
And there was Times Square, home to all my dancing dreams–where many a career was launched–glittering and sparkling and waiting with open arms.
A dozen years later, I’m an outsider. And it seems that this pantheon of American theater and American excess is evolving into something unrecognizable. Like a funhouse mirror, it reflects back changed, distorted, yet the same.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. There was a time not so long ago when Times Square, with its neon extravagances that lit up the night, New Year’s Eve dropping ball and stultifying filth, was the focal point of my life.
Granted, I never lived in Times Square. But Times Square was where I did my living. It was where I, like most of my peers, first got into showbiz–hawking theater tickets over the phone.
It was where I scarfed down $1 cheese pizza slices before heading for work. It was where I pretended not to see homeless people lying in bundles alongside the glitzy Lunt-Fontanne Theater. It was where I, along with countless tourists, runaways, executives, actors, three-card monte hucksters and celebrities intermingled amid a bouquet of cheap incense, garbage, street-vendor pretzels and smog.
It was where I nurtured my craft in modern-dance classes at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center, far removed from the convoluted traffic jams below. It was where I chanced riding the subway at midnight, praying I’d go unnoticed by some enterprising mugger.
Sure it was grubby. Sure it was dangerous. But it was home.
Day after day, I strutted through Times Square as The Artist Then Known As Prince screamed in my ear through tinny earphones. Like all the other dancers there, I paraded up Broadway, my feet splayed in the trademark dancer’s duck walk. The mammoth dance bag slung over my shoulder protected the most precious commodity in town: personal space.
Each day, I walked past the Sony Jumbotron with its glaring video images, stopping for a croissant at the shop on Broadway around the corner from the New York Times building on 43rd Street, or batteries for my Walkman at a Korean-run newsstand sandwiched between the Pizza Hut and Roy Rogers restaurants.
The other sights along the tour-the prepubescent breakdancers, the seedy electronic stores operated by swarthy fast talkers, the tourists queuing up outside the TKTS booths, the Triple X porno theaters, the Africans peddling guaranteed-to-stop-the-minute-you-buy-them watches-were not part of my destination. So after a while I blocked them out.
Or tried to. Spend enough time in Times Square, and you know this to be true: No one is immune to the underbelly of New York. It reaches up and grabs its victims, pulling them into its abyss.
But Times Square is a fluid place, a place where people come and go like the tide. No one notices their absence. Or their presence. It’s just that kind of place. I, like others before me, left Times Square–and dancing.
Now that I’m traveling on an expense account, New York doesn’t seem so oppressive. Times Square seems spruced up, less belligerent, more likely to give its inhabitants a hug than consume them in one big gulp. But then again, I look at Times Square now through the haze of relative financial security.
But I can’t help feeling that this place I alternately loathed and loved has lost something. It’s still a bright and noisy place, with magical stages. But I don’t see quite as many duck-walking dancers toting giant-sized bags. The Walt Disney Co. is restoring the New Amsterdam Theater and is planning to build a $300 million entertainment complex, complete with hotel and vacation time-share units–smack in the middle of Times Square.
Other plans include combining the Lyric and the Academy, two historic theaters, into a mega 1,850-seat musical theater.
I can’t find the greasy pizza stand where I spent so much time; now I satisfy my cravings at the Sbarro pizza chain. There’s even an Olive Garden on Broadway, for pete’s sake.
Time will tell if Times Square will survive the malling process with its tawdriness intact. In the meantime, I can take comfort in the fact that as I have grown and changed over the years, so has the chimerical Times Square.
One can only hope that the flavor will stay the same.
