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"A Certain Age"
In her best work in years, the author shows she's been studying at the Wharton school.
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[08/10/99]

Dear Mr. Blue
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"A Short History of Rudeness"
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[08/06/99]

Ivory Tower
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[08/06/99]

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By Charles Taylor
[08/05/99]

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As it happens, I've worked in this neighborhood for much of my adult life. Twenty years ago it was scuzzy and disgusting and no place to hang out at the end of the work day (though sometimes I would quietly return several hours later). But I've never despised it as I do now. For all the talk of a renewal, the streets are a nightmare. Forget about beauty -- until the sun sets, anyway, and the hallucinatory signage overwhelms the buildings. The new skyscrapers are faceless at best, like the one I work in, and at worst they're like the Condé Nast building, so dispiritingly ugly that they might have been thought up by a New York hater as an act of revenge.

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue By Samuel R. Delany New York University Press 203 pages Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York Written by Samuel Delany Drawn by Mia Wolff Juno Books 55 pages Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

What bothers me more, though, is the void down at street level. The restaurants and the shops are of the generic kind you can find anywhere harried families go on vacation. There's nothing here to lure a New Yorker -- not even the peep shows, now that the mayor has chased them out. And the crowds! Like Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, Times Square is one of those world-famous sites that only tourists flock to -- they all want to see the place where the ball drops on New Year's Eve. A local guy summed it up recently in words the Times chose as its Quotation of the Day: "It is really inconvenient and really unsafe. I remember when we had the muggers and the pimps. It was dangerous, but it wasn't like having some tourist push you in front of a bus."

He didn't quite get it right, though. I remember the pimps, too -- and the hookers and the hustlers and the scam artists dealing three-card monte on every corner -- but not the muggers. Not violent crime. In the bad old days you had an excellent chance of getting your pocket picked on Times Square, and you still do. But held up? No -- there were too many hookers and hustlers and junkies and pimps. The dangerous streets in New York were (and are) the deserted ones. You're not likely to get mugged in a crowd.

Yet this is one of the central myths -- safety! in New York City! -- being promulgated by a not exactly faceless They (the developers, the mayor's office, the Times), who crow louder each day about their victory, which is, of course, a class victory -- the poor have been pushed out. But there's a crucial variation here from the standard model of urban gentrification, which Samuel R. Delany points up in his remarkable new polemic, "Times Square Red, Times Square Blue." The area used to harbor a raffish community of bartenders and blue-collar Joes and the small-time businesses that catered to them. It was a neighborhood you might not have wanted to live in (I wouldn't have) but, as Delany demonstrates, a neighborhood nonetheless. It isn't now. The new Times Square is a purely commercial zone, a business venture, scrubbed up and dead.

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