On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square
Marshall Berman, Random House, 2006, ISBN 1400063310, RRP $52.95, website
A century ago, New York’s Longacre Square made the transformation from urban neighbourhood to Times Square and came to define the urban experience with its panorama of lights, signs and people. In his new book, On the Town: One Hundred Years of Times Square, Marshall Berman takes in the history of Times Square’s music and spectacle in an overflowing and diverse narrative well suited to its subject.
Berman is a professor of political science at the City College of New York and, having lived and worked all his life in New York, his work reflects the accumulation of personal experience intertwined with wider culture and society. As with his previous book, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Berman traces how modern life energises and enables our development through the modern world while sometimes threatening to overwhelm us.
In tone and perspective, Berman writes from the democratic and libertarian stream of the 1960s New Left. This is seen initially in the way he invests popular culture with the seriousness of high art and universal value. An early chapter celebrates Al Jolsen’s The Jazz Singer for defining the look and sound of America’s 'vulgar modernism'. He describes The Jazz Singer as 'the great American Bildungsroman', depicting the struggle of Jewish Americans to simultaneously connect with and transcend their immigrant families and 'make it.'
While he professes to be wary of nostalgia there are moments in this book when he can’t seem to help himself. The 'great noon' comes with the famous Life magazine photo of a sailor and nurse embracing on Times Square on the day victory was declared in the World War II. The sailor is representative of a new community looking to the future: brave, democratic, modern. This couple evoke the justice and purpose of the war against fascism. America and New York would never seem so energised and united.
Berman’s characteristic optimism sees popular culture morph, too easily perhaps, into the culture of the popular front. The figure of the sailor carries this into Broadway musicals like On the Town and Fancy Free. Berman shows us a Times Square that made people not only want to embrace but also to dance and sing. Astonishingly, in 1945, at the height of a brutal war with Japan, the Japanese