Hey Samantha!

 

I thought that you had very interesting insight on Times Square. I particularly found your anecdotes contrasting your feelings about modern day Times Square to your Mother’s lingering fear of the area.

While I thought your musings on the social changes in Times Square were very interesting, I did disagree somewhat with your analysis of Delany’s essay. I believe that when you talk about talking to strangers on the street, you are referencing the part of Delany’s article when he talks about sexual and nonsexual exchanges between people on the street before the rezoning of Times Square. Understandably, as women in New York, any sort of verbal or physical contact with strangers clearly jumps out as dangerous to us. However, I think this is a case where we have to analyze the circumstances that the LGBT community was facing in 1960’s and 1970’s New York. Many young people had been kicked out of their homes without money because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Furthermore, some LGBT people were unable to obtain a job due to prejudice, or were fired from their jobs if they were somehow ‘outed’. There were very few places where people could be themselves and find more people with whom they could identify. People were searching for comradery and also for unconventional moneymaking activities, and Times Square became a place where both of those things could happen. Given the social norms of the time, and the cultural safe house that Times Square was, it is very hard to apply our modern day assertions about talking to strangers to the people who lived, worked and sought pleasure in pre- zoning Times Square. As Delany expressed in his essay, social interactions in Times Square were really not between strangers, as most people lived or lingered around the neighborhood consistently, meaning that even if you had not spoken to someone before, you likely had seen their face.

 

In short, your blog got me thinking about the actual meaning behind Delany’s essay. I have come to the conclusion that it is not fair to classify this essay as solely being about the ‘safety’ of past and present Times Square. Instead, I think Delaney was attempting to paint a picture of a cultural center, with all of its positives and negatives, being dismantled by the capitalist desire for a money making tourist hot spot. Something that I agree with in your analysis is that Times Square really is not safer now than it was then. It has just managed to mask its crime with a populated, ‘safe’ looking façade. If Times Square was corporeal, it would be Mickey Mouse smoking a cigarette. But that is what makes the rezoning of Times Square so much more futile. They destroyed an oasis for oppressed communities. Furthermore, they did it through the slow eviction of poor and underserved minority groups, letting them slip deeper into poverty and consequently become more susceptible to the lure of crack cocaine. After all of that heartache, all of those human lives damaged in the name of ‘safety’, nothing even improved. All that was accomplished was a shiny new tourist trap and the destruction of any eyes-on-the-street policing that would have occurred when there was an actual community there.

Thanks for the thought provoking read!

~Willow