Casting Light on New York City Nights

In Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago, 2004), Alison Isenberg suggests that symbols of "Main Street," depicted in postcards or wielded by planners, did more to shape American memory than the material realities of unsightly telephone lines, signage, and parked cars. In a similar vein, Elizabeth Blackmar and Roy Rosenzweig’s The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (New York, 1992) deftly shows how the meanings attributed to Central Park by average and elite New Yorkers alike shaped the policies and uses of the park.

Peretti’s nightclub study effectively supplements the "new social history" of the 1980s and 1990s. See David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York, 1993); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, 1986); and Lewis Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture (Westport, CT, 1981).

See Peiss, Cheap Amusements.

See Timothy J. Gilfoyle, "Policing of Sexuality," in William Taylor, ed., Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World (New York, 1991), especially the map of Times Square brothels from 1901. Also see William Kornblum, ed., The West 42nd Street Study: The Bright Light Zone (New York, 1979).

As an alternative, Lynne Sagalyn’s Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon (Cambridge, 2001) features buildings and plans as the engines of history and then uses groups of people or powerful individuals to animate the story. In a contested, multilayered space such as Times Square, both strategies are probably necessary to fully explain what happened after World War II.

My forthcoming book, Blue-Collar Broadway, will address these issues.