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The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square. By James Traub. New York: Random House, 2004. xvii + 313 pp. Bibliography, index. Cloth, $25.95. ISBN: 0-375-50788-4.
Over the last two decades, the writer James Traub has looked on Times Square and felt disturbed by street people, heartened by campaigns against crime and disorder, and ambivalent about the growth of a global entertainment district in the heart of Manhattan. That ambivalence, and the century of history leading up to it, are defining elements in Traub's The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square.
In a book that is part history, part journalism, and part meditation on city life, Traub explores the changes in Times Square and what they mean for New York and popular culture. He is frankly uneasy feeling about the new Times Square: he enjoys visiting it with his eleven-year-old son, but the district's globalized amusements crowd out its venerably raffish character. If this produces an awkward ending, it also gives the book an honesty that makes it valuable for anyone who cares about cities-especially efforts to revive their downtowns.
The Devil's Playground casts the present in the light of a century of history. "Times Square's meaning," Traub writes, "evolved along with popular culture itself (p. xvi). Respectfully grounded in the essays of William R. Taylor's Inventing Times Square: Culture and Commerce at the Crossroads of the· World (1991) and Lynn B. Sagalyn's Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon (2001), Traub examines important questions with hard answers.
Traub begins with a chronicle of Times Square, from its founding in the early twentieth century as a center for vaudeville through the heyday of the Broadway musical to the decline of the 19703. The "cross-roads of the world" may have taken its name from a self-consciously fastidious...