Eye Magazine

In 1972, postmodern architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi proclaimed they were ‘learning from Las Vegas’. But decades before the Vegas Strip was a gleam in mobster Bugsy Seigel’s eye, Times Square in New York City was a crucible for American design. Times Square Style celebrates the centenary of the 1904 opening of the New York Times Building on 42nd Street from which the area (formerly Longacre Square) gets its name. The book surveys visual culture from the 100-year history of the Crossroads of the World.

Times Square Style is a companion to Cuba Style: Graphics from the Golden Age of Design (Princeton, 2002), also by Levi and Heller, the former a writer and co-founder of the Atlantic City Historical Museum and the latter senior art director of The New York Times and one of America’s most prolific design historians (see Heller’s ‘Truth and distortion’, pp.57-64). As with their earlier volume, Levi and Heller find that God is in the details: they reproduce advertisements, brochures, theatre programmes, luggage tags, period photographs and dozens of other examples of the American design vernacular and its genres. In keeping with its subject, the book mixes tasteful and tacky, high and low. The content ranges from the splendid and spectacular to the sordid and squalid. Running through it all is America’s commitment to consumerism.

No book could possibly capture the experience of actually being in Times Square, of the sensory overload of noise, movement, visual clutter and the sheer mass of humanity. To its credit, Times Square Style doesn’t even try, opting instead to offer slices of life from different worlds – the entertainment palaces, bawdy houses, advertising spectacles and so on – that have co-existed in the area since the nineteenth-century fin de siecle.

Heterodoxy has always been the governing principle of Times Square; so it hardly surprising that no single aesthetic defines its style. Levi and Heller ruminate through examples of Victorian, Art Nouveau, Art Deco and a host of other twentieth-century popular design practices. One aesthetic that is missing is the high Modernism of the Bauhaus – a result, say the authors, of being too severe and understated for the pragmatic design patrons operating in Times Square and environs.

Yet one might argue that a true form-follows-function aesthetic reigns in the marriage of democracy, technology and commerce in Times Square design solutions. The electrification of the Great White Way and its dedication to unbridled merchandising writ large was a direct consequence of 1916 zoning laws that concentrated billboard advertising in the area. One of its most famous innovations, the Camel cigarettes billboard that blew gigantic smoke rings into the air above the street, was a response to night-time outdoor lighting restrictions during the blackout periods of World War II.

There’s also the image of Times Square circulating worldwide in the popular imagination, transcending space and time. Countless show-tune album covers, movie posters of dreams shattered and fulfilled, and the pulp-fiction dust jackets of urban seediness all bear the mark of Times Square as a brand in and of itself.

The old New York Times Building at One Times Square now sits unoccupied, covered with illuminated signage from top to bottom, its advertising façade more valuable than the vacant office space inside. A hollow shell dedicated to brand image, it is the ultimate decorated shed of Scott Brown and Venturi, the paragon of postmodern spectacle. Thus Times Square style still represents all that is truly American.

Vince Carducci, writer, New York

First published in Eye no. 55 vol. 14 2005