Once upon a time there was a dark and dirty place called Times Square. Hookers and hawkers and hotel sneaks. Pimps and pushers and preachers. Neon and nastiness and all sorts of neurotics, writes Colum McCann.
It was a cyclorama of big-city low-life. All the sleaze of America went there to shoot up, lie down, check out. Still, it was a place to behold, in its own peculiar way - in the same manner that crack-ups fascinate us, or gossip titillates us, or the failures of others somehow scaffold our own lives. We all need a little madness to keep ourselves in order - and the old Times Square in New York was a reminder of just how wonderfully bad the human species can be.
Last week, in the midst of the blackout, a strange thing happened: hundreds of tourists ended up sleeping out on the pavements of Broadway. Even stranger, they weren't scared. On the streets that used to be among the most dangerous of any in the world, there were tourists asking for more pillows and a little quiet from the corner of 42nd and Seventh Avenue. Not even Marquez could have invented it.
In the darkness one might have expected the dear ol' dirty Times Square to return, but it didn't. When the power returned the newly revamped area was on parade. No more girls on liquid legs stumbling out of alleyways. No more hustlers in feathered hats hawking bags of smack. No more rude noises from the other side of the fleabag hotel door.
Times Square is now squeaky clean. Residents of the skyscrapers include the New York Times, the Bertlesman media empire, AOL Time Warner, all the major television channels, franchise restaurants and even horrible theme pubs. A neon ticker-tape shows the stock exchange prices. A giant Ferris wheel stands in the world's biggest toystore. In Bryant Park, which used to be home to the junkies and the slung-down drunks, they recently brought in a team of trained hawks to chase away the pigeons: one of the major complaints from businessmen and tourists is that they were, quite literally, getting shat on.
Of course nostalgia runs cheap. The old Times Square was at best a place of questionable virginity, at worst an incomparable sleaze pit. But it had style and rhythm and life. You could hear it breathing. You could get hooked on the plot of the streets.
The newer look - even for sleeping tourists - is an in-your-face commercial for everything that is shining but shallow, very much a metaphor for life in America under the Bush administration.
Of course in looking at the change of landscapes we watch ourselves grow older. The Disneyfication of Times Square is not something my six-year-old daughter will ever object to. Nor, in truth, do I object to the literal fact of it - things change, hail and farewell. It's what it symbolises that is frightening.
In the recent American political climate everything is gussied up to compute. All the bells and whistles of a politically-mute media are in charge, as they are on 42nd Street. Any sort of protest is dulled. In February when marches were organised against the war in Iraq the cops shepherded Broadway and Seventh Avenue to make sure that the throngs - and there were many, believe me - were kept dispersed.
The cartoon mediocrity of the White House administration is beamed every day from the buildings of Times Square on to the throngs of tourists below: these screens are literally hundreds of feet tall. Any voice raised up against the system - that of Noam Chomsky, for instance - is said to smack of liberal naiveté. In the corporate bordello of places like Times Square the right-wing becomes increasingly bellicose while the left-wing uses up most of its energy apologising for itself.
Putting manners on a city is nothing new. The idea of Moore Street becoming yet another shopping centre is horrendous to many Dubliners, but that's hardly going to sway those who will make millions from it. And - just as in Dublin - it's quite easy for American politicians to say that they like the revamped New York. It's clean! It's disease-free! There are no homeless people! No nasty smells! Hip-hip hurray!
One of the deeper ramifications of this sort of inane cheerleading is that our cures sting less than our wounds. It becomes easy for politicians to claim that deprivation does not exist, that everything is hunky-dory and brimming with optimism.
It could all be funny if it weren't so serious - it creates territory for politicians like George Bush. And the Bushs of the world, as we all unfortunately know, believe in a shining corporate complex that extends from Crawford, Texas, to Beijing and back again.
Consider this, however: there is an area called Hunts Point in the Bronx. It's an old warehouse district where families live in what amounts to third-world poverty. Due to garbage incinerators and factory negligence, it has the highest incidence of child asthma anywhere in the country. It is one of the saddest areas anywhere in the US and it's also where much of the new prostitution and drugs trade finds its epicentre. There is no sense of community here. It is a barren, drive-by meat market. Under the shadow of the highway one can see strung-out prostitutes literally tottering along in only their high-heeled shoes - no other clothes at all. The trade here is as rough and as violent, if not more so, than anything Times Square ever knew. There's no shoeshine man here - nor any sense that the dealers, the hookers or the customers are alive at all.
The fact that Hunts Point is out of the glare of the television cameras, and beyond the logic of most other mainstream media, allows the politicians and police to pretend it doesn't exist. But it does exist. And it will keep on existing.
Would I like Times Square to return to what it used to be? No thanks, of course not. I'm quite happy that I can walk through the area on a Friday afternoon and not worry about what questions my children will pose to me about the dirty films and the empty shoes in an alleyway. What I am worried about - and not just in New York - is they might grow up in a world where there are supposedly no questions to be asked at all.
Colum McCann is an Irish writer living in New York. His most recent novel is Dancer.