Volume 49, Number 2 · February 14, 2002
The Land of the Naked Cowboy
By James Traub
Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon
by Lynne B. Sagalyn
MIT Press, 620 pp., $59.95
Times Square, 'the crossroads of the world,' is the main archaeological site of urban commercial culture; the novelties and crazes and spontaneous art forms of the last century are buried there, one generation on top of another. It was in and around Times Square, in the years before World War I, that a new cosmopolitan class first heard ragtime music, and ogled chorus girls, and danced dangerous Harlem dances like the black bottom, and sat right on stage in the thrilling Parisian import known as the cabaret. 'Instead of letting gentility define the limits of their public lives,' writes Lewis Erenburg, a scholar of urban culture, 'respectable urbanites were realizing they could enter a wider world of spontaneous cosmopolitan gaiety and experience 'the whirl of life' itself.'[1]
Review, 4568 words
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