Through the Children's Gate (31 page)

T
he trouble with the classic business-school account of the decline of the department store is that some version of it has always been true—or has been for at least fifty years, which in retailing is the same as always. “When I was at Harvard Business School in 1949, just after the war, my professor showed us clearly why the department store was dead, and was shocked when I said I wanted to work in one,” Marvin Traub says, frostily if genially. It is the second week of August, and the dining room of the Regency at seven-forty-five is filled with the great merchants of New York. They wear Italian suits, tropical-weight wool, but wool all the same, and gleams of sweat appear as they walk from limo to booth, and become gleams of virtue. All of them stop to genuflect to Traub, the godfather of the New York department store. In the 1950s, he started work in the bargain basement of a discount department store on Lexington Avenue and turned it into Bloomies, and even now, a dozen years since he left, his legend compels retailers to bow to the older man with the single red thread of the Légion d’Honneur in his buttonhole.

Traub thinks that there is no problem of the department store that a good merchant can't solve. He uses the word “merchant” in an old-fashioned way, as distinct from “businessman” or “salesman”—“and he's a fine merchant, too,” he will say of some protégé now enmeshed
in the upper reaches of a giant retail firm, and he means, clearly, not merchant as in “merchandise” but merchant in an almost medieval sense, as one might say “monk” or “summoner” or “pardoner,” an ancient calling, not a job. A businessman is someone who knows how to make money, where he doesn't care, and a salesman is someone who knows how to sell, what hardly matters, but a merchant is someone with a gift for where and what—the specifics and particulars are the whole of his craft. He is himself a shopper of the higher kind, a man who knows how to order his shop. (It is a significant distinction: Wanamaker himself always said that he was a merchant, not a capitalist.)

“The department store is a function of its leaders,” Traub says. “All the great department stores had great merchants at their head: Stanley Marcus at Neiman Marcus, Adam Gimbel at Saks Fifth Avenue. Each one had a vision and an understanding of the connection between the department store and the shopper, and that connection is emotional and even theatrical.

“The first thing that happened to damage the department store was that the role of the buyers was diminished. In the fifties and sixties, to be a buyer at Bloomingdale's or Saks was a highly prestigious and highly important job. Buyers felt passionately about their work, and they knew their clientele intimately. They knew their sizes and insecurities, and they could sense instantly what to buy from a vendor.”

The buyers, many of them women, were an elite group; Doris Salinger, J.D.'s sister, was a buyer of designer clothing at Blooming-dale's. “Nowadays, of course, no ambitious person would stay as a buyer for any length of time,” Traub says. “It would be regarded, understandably, as merely a stop on the way to an executive position. The buying is all done at the corporate level, and so the connection between the customer and the product is damaged. They order from the central headquarters with, say, twenty to thirty percent for the individual store. The department store depends on trust and belief, and if you knock down the reasons for belief, you damage it.”

But at the heart of Traub's complaint, and his diagnosis, is the now quaint-sounding problem of short-termism. Stock price dictates value, and quarterly profits determine stock price, so, where the department
store's construction of trust and emotional connection depends on having areas of the store that are profit centers, and areas that lead you to the profit centers, the short-termer dreams only of profit centers. “What is a department store?” Traub asks rhetorically. “It's simple: It's a place where you can get everything under one roof. Books and
/raises des bois,
dishwashers and Prada bags, everything under one roof. That was the excitement of the department store.” Little by little, he explains, the things that were not profitable have been shed, and these are precisely the things that conspired to create trust and confidence and an attachment.

“When we flew
fraises des bois
to the Bloomingdale's gourmet shops, it created greater traffic and excitement,” Traub says. “And in the long run, it's those associations, that sense of event, that help to make a great store. If you're under pressure to create profits throughout the store, then it diminishes opportunities for unique and special things that may not be profitable. Bloomingdale 's did not make money flying in the
/raises des bois,
but it appealed to our customers.

“What would you do for a romantic department store today? It wouldn't be the aspirational store we had at Bloomingdale's. Today, for instance, people want computers and electronics and online services, and we need to bring them in. A store that would take in the Web and the Internet would also sell everything. Everything would be under one roof again.”

E
verything under one roof. The great question in the theory of retailing, one learns as one reads the texts and talks to the mavens, is not “Why buy it?,” a question that belongs, if anywhere, to the theory of life, but “Why buy it here?” All merchants try to answer this question by creating a sense of fate. Why buy it anywhere else? Most luxury merchants create this attachment by appealing to the customer's sense of insecurity. (Buy it here and you will be envied and admired.) The discount store does it by appealing to your intelligence. (Buy it here and you will be shrewder than your neighbor.) The department store does it, or did it, uniquely, by appealing to the customer's sense of trust, to a long cycle of safety. Everything can be found, and everything
can be returned. You shop at Bergdorfs not because it is cool—no one will know—but because it is yours.

All life in a mercantile society, one sometimes feels, is dedicated to the disguises of wanting. The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it. The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic. The urge of the great department stores was to hide acquisition as sociability, to disguise acquisitiveness as membership, so that one entered them not as one entered a store—with one eye on the beseeching salesgirl, one hand on the knob of the door, just looking—but as one entered a library or a club: striding in with pleasure. The department store was the cathedral of that material aspiration, and its diminishment leaves us with one less place to go and hope in.

T
his year marks the hundredth anniversary of the decision to take an hourglass-shaped traffic funnel between Forty-second Street and Forty-seventh Street on Broadway, which had been called Longacre Square, and rename it after
The New York Times,
which had just built its office there. This was less an honor than a consolation prize. The other, then bigger and brighter newspaper, the
New York Herald,
had claimed the other, then brighter and better square, eight blocks south, which still bears its ghostly name. Nine years later, in 1913, the
Times
scurried off to a prim side street and a Gothic Revival bishop's palace, where it has been lifting its skirts and shyly peeking around the corner at its old home ever since.

No other part of New York has had such a melodramatic, mood-ring sensitivity to the changes in the city's history, with an image for every decade. There was the turn-of-the-century Times Square, with its roof gardens and showgirls; the raffish twenties Times Square of Ziegfeld and Youmans tunes; the thirties Times Square of
42nd Street,
all chorus lines and moxie; the forties, V-J
On the Town
Times Square, full of sailors kissing girls; the wizened black-and-white fifties Times Square of
Sweet Smell of Success,
steaming hot dogs, and grungy beats; and then the sixties and the seventies Times Square of
Midnight Cowboy
and
Taxi Driver,
where everything fell apart and hell wafted up through the manhole covers. No other place in town has been quite so high and quite so low. Within a single half decade, it had Harpo Marx in the Marx Brothers’ valedictory movie,
Love Happy,
leaping ecstatically from sign to sign and riding away on the flying Mobilgas Pegasus,
and, down below, the unforgettable image of James Dean, hunched in his black overcoat, bearing the weight of a generation on his shoulders.

Now we have the new Times Square, as fresh as a neon daisy, with a giant Gap and a Niketown and an Applebee's and an ESPN Zone and television announcers visible through tinted windows, all family retailing and national brands. In some ways, the square has never looked better, with the diagonal sloping lines of the Reuters Building, the curving Deco zipper, even the giant mock dinosaur in the Toys “R” Us. There are people who miss the old Times Square, its picturesque squalor and violence and misery and exploitation. Those who pointed at the old Times Square as an instance of everything that capitalism can do wrong now point to the new Times Square as an instance of everything that capitalism can do worse. Where once Times Square was hot, it is now cold, where once varied, now uniform, where once alive, now dead.

Whatever has been gained, something really is missing in the new Times Square. The forces that created it, and the mixed emotions that most of us have in its presence, are the subject of James Traub's
The Devil's Playground,
which is both an engaged civics lesson and a work of social history. The book begins with an ironic moment—Traub takes his eleven-year-old son to the new Forty-second Street to see the old
42nd Street
—and then spirals back into history, moving decade by decade over the past century.

Traub, who is the son of Marvin Traub, has a gift for filtering social history through a previously invisible individual agent. As always, the vast forces of mass culture turn out to be the idiosyncratic choices of a few key, mostly hidden players. The character of the signs in Times Square, for instance, was mostly the invention of O. J. Gude, the Sign King of Times Square. Gude, a true aesthete with a significant art collection, was the first to sense that the peculiar shape of Times Square—a triangle with sign-friendly “flats” at the base and the apex—made it the perfect place for big electric national-brand signs, or “spectaculars,” as they were called, even before World War I. In 1917, when Gude put up a two-hundred-foot-long spectacular, on the west side of Broadway between Forty-third and Forty-fourth, featuring
twelve gleaming “spearmen” who went through spasmodic calisthenics, it was as big an event in American pop culture, in its way, as the opening of
The Jazz Singer
ten years later. Gude also had the bright idea of joining the Municipal Art Society, the leading opponent of big signs, and later helped shape the zoning ordinances that essentially eliminated big electric signs anywhere in midtown except in Times Square.

Times Square is famous for what used to be called its “denizens”—Damon Runyon, George S. Kaufman, Clifford Odets, A. J. Liebling—and Traub writes brief lives of a lot of them. But the history of the place isn't really a history of its illuminati; it's a history of its illuminations. Though social forces and neon signs flow out of individuals, they don't flow back into individuals so transparently. George S. Kaufman, to take one instance, was exclusively a creature of the theater; if, like the galleries in Soho in the 1990s, the Broadway theater had in the thirties picked up and moved to Chelsea, Kaufman would have followed it blindly and never would have been seen on Forty-second Street again. Even Runyon has about as much to do with the history of Times Square as P. G. Wodehouse does with the history of Mayfair: His subject is language, not place, and in all of Runyon's stories, it would be hard to find a single set-piece description of Times Square, a single bulb on a single sign. Individual artists help make cities, but cities don't make their artists in quite so neatly reciprocal a way. Dr. Johnson's “London” is a poem; “The London of Dr. Johnson” is a tour-bus ride.

O
ne must not give a false gloss to the decay of Times Square; it was really bad. The neighborhood declined to a point where, by the mid-seventies, the Times Square precincts placed first and second in New York in total felonies. (Harlem had a third as many.) These were crimes of violence, too: A rape or an armed robbery or a murder took place nearly every day and every night. Stevie Wonder's great 1973 song “Living for the City” has a spoken-word interlude in which the poor black kid from the South arrives on West Forty-second Street
and in about five minutes is lured into the drug business. This was a song, but it was not a lie.

Traub's account of the area's transformation is lit from behind by another, still longer and larger one—Lynne B. Sagalyn's masterly
Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon.
Sagalyn teaches real estate at the University of Pennsylvania, and her book, the fruit of over a decade of scholarly labor, is as mind-bendingly detailed an account of the relations of property and culture as one can find outside Galsworthy or Trollope. It's full of eye-opening material, if one can keep one's eyes open long enough to find it. Sagalyn's book is written, perhaps of necessity, in a prose so dense with city acronyms and cross-referential footnotes that it can defeat even the most earnest attention. Nonetheless, its material is the material of the city's existence. Reading it is like reading an advanced-biology textbook and then discovering that its sole subject is your own body.

Traub and Sagalyn agree in dispelling a myth and moving toward a history, and the myth irritates them both—Traub's usual tone of intelligent skepticism sometimes boils over here into exasperation. The myth they want to dispel is that the cleanup of Times Square in the nineties was an expression of Mayor Giuliani's campaign against crime and vice, and of his companion tendency to accept a sterilized environment if they could be removed, and that his key corporate partner in this was the mighty Disney, which led the remaking of West Forty-second Street as a theme park instead of an authentic urban street. As Traub and Sagalyn show, this is nearly the reverse of the truth. It was Mayor Koch who shaped the new Times Square, if anyone did, while the important private profit-makers and players were almost all purely local: the Old Oligarchs, the handful of rich and mostly Jewish real estate families—the Rudins, Dursts, Roses, Resnicks, Fishers, Speyers, and Tishmans, as Sagalyn crisply enumerates them. Mayor Giuliani, basically, was there to cut the ribbon, and Disney to briefly lend its name.