Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


When I was an undergraduate, having rashly and unwisely switched my major from chemistry to anthropology, I met with my academic advisor. He asked me: What do I hope to learn as an anthropologist? To this, I gave the answer: I want to walk through Time Square and understand why it is the way it is. Yes, grandiose and pretentious, but it did capture something—the urge to figure out why the world is filled with so much soulless, commercial crap.

I am now suffering the financial consequences of studying anthropology, and not much closer to enlightenment. Thanks to this book, however, I do feel closer to understanding that mecca of American consumerism: Times Square.

This is a highly unusual book. Delany, who usually writes science fiction, set out to write a work of urban studies. And yet it is just as much a memoir as an academic analysis, and it comes to its point in a very roundabout way. Even so, it is easily among the best books about New York City I have ever read.

The book is divided into two essays, originally published independently. The first, “Times Square Blue,” recounts Delany’s experience of the old, seedy Times Square—the Times Square of peep shows, prostitutes, drugs, and sex shops. Specifically, it focuses on the porn theaters, places which became gay cruising grounds, despite showing almost exclusively straight porn. Delany spent decades visiting these theaters and paints a memorable portrait of this now unimaginable Times Square.

Yet this part of the book is not prurient. Delany doesn’t write to titillate the reader, or even to mourn a part of the city that has disappeared. He writes, instead, to illustrate an idea about what makes cities work. It is really an expansion of what Jane Jacobs said in her classic book on the subject: that cities need to foster contact between different sorts of people. Delany merely adds a sexual dimension to this analysis, and he shows how his own search for men threw him into contact with all sorts of people whom he would never have met through work or other socializing.

Part Two, “… Three, Two, One Contact: Times Square Red” expands this observation into a theory. Delany contrasts “contact”—the kind of random meeting of a stranger, such as in line at a grocery store—with “networking,” which is a more formalized way of meeting people, such as at a book convention. An important difference between the two is that, in the former, it is common to meet people of different backgrounds and socio-economic classes, while the latter usually restricted to members of the same class.

Delany asserts that much of the modern world is intentionally created to promote networking and to discourage contact. And the redevelopment of Times Square is a case in point. Whereas it was possible to go to the old Times Square and meet all sorts of people, in the Times Square as it exists today there are simply tourists and people trying to make money off of tourists. And very few people who visit Times Square now, I reckon, meet anyone at all.

There are further aspects of Delany’s analysis—much of it in a Marxist vein—but to me the pleasure of this book was simply in the love of city life that he exudes. On every page, the reader can feel that he simply enjoys meeting people of different sorts, and finds that it enriches his life. It is a wonderful antidote to the sometimes suffocating loneliness that big cities can engender—the feeling of being surrounded by people, and yet completely ignored. While reading this book on the metro, I suddenly became aware of everyone else on the train as individuals and not faceless mannequins. It made the ride far more pleasant.



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