Samuel Delany's
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue came up briefly in conversation today, and given that it's one of my favorite books (and the book I wrote about on my [IN]City application), it was suggested that I recommend it here. I realized that we're also hearing Karen Chapple's lecture on gentrification on Monday, so it seems extra apropos. It feels weird to quote myself from my application, but I spent way too much time on those 450-or-whatever words, so I might as well be lazy and use it here in describing the book:
Delany’s book comprises two extended essays that retrospectively explore the sex-centered culture (particularly the adult theaters) of New York’s Times Square and the supplanting of that culture as the area was redeveloped into a “clean” tourist destination. Delany asserts that this sanitizing in the name of “family values” also destroyed a lively arena for interclass contact (both conversational and sexual), a kind of contact that, following Jane Jacobs, he believes helps life at the present stage of capitalism take its most rewarding and productive form.
Okay, so that's a quick enough blurb. The first essay, "Times Square Blue," does indeed run pretty blue--it's a cross between personal narrative and ethnography in which Delany sketches a vivid picture of the encounters he had with or observed between a range of men (gay, straight, etc.) in the area's porn theaters. There's plenty of dirty stuff in there for your reading pleasure, but his discussion does give equal time to social and sexual encounters, and that's really one of the main points of the essay--that underneath the surface of those theaters was a much more complicated social structure that was complexly rewarding for those who were part of it. He doesn't really romanticize it too much--there is indeed some actual skeevy stuff going on under the skeevy porn theater surface, and some really sad stuff too--but there are also real social relationships that formed between people who would have never had the opportunity to do so in other venues. The semi-illicit nature of the proceedings are a big part of what allows that cross-cultural (cross-class, in Delany's words) contact to happen.
Delany writes about a culture that has a lot of meaning for him, and the specificity and strongly felt nature of the content is part of what makes the essay so powerful (another part being the fact that Delany is, for my money, just about the best essayist writing today), but his extension of the personal into the theoretical realm with the second essay, "Three, Two, One, Contact: Times Square Red," shows that the porn theaters are just one example of the cross-class venues he values. This is where he really delves into the Jane Jacobs-style contact mentioned above and, skipping ahead because I'm running out of steam, where he stresses the importance of creating and recreating these venues as the structuring forces of government, law, capital, whatever, try and succeed in pulling them apart, appropriating them, and/or defanging them.
Which I suppose leads me back to a central question I have as a wannabe planner, a profession that in its definition and history has been allied with those structuring forces and yet seems to always be trying to figure out how to situate itself between structure and the flexible nature of human life and culture. And that question is, well, since both are necessary, I think, how and where should planners position themselves in that interstitial space between structure and flexibility? How can we design structure to support culture in its fluidity? Dionysian v. Apollonian, etc.; Nietzsche as planner, etc. Same question I for better or worse always seem to be asking, but Delany's book is what first pushed me towards that question. Yes, highly recommended.
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