N.Y. Journal: Anywhere but Times Square

Yesterday was the anniversary of V-J Day and the taking of that iconic photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse in a torrent of joy and relief. I didn't realize, until this year, that the photo was shot in Times Square.

No actual New Yorker---or tourist, I think, if they were honest---likes wading into Times Square. I go there just when it's necessary. For instance, when a movie has just come out and is only in a Times Square theater and is worth standing in line for 45 minutes just to get in, or when I have a guest who needs to take that obligatory Times Square tourist photo with an electronic billboard bursting behind them and news bulletins whirling around them.

Times Square is all about hoodwinking tourists who come because they too find it obligatory. The McDonald's in Times Square has prices that outsize any McDonald's anywhere else. An appetizer at the best Times Square restaurants---Red Lobster and Ruby Tuesday---will cost you as much as an entrée anywhere else. Comedy guys hawk shows that are only $10 to get in but will cost you two $15 martinis (plus tip) to stay and hear the jokes.

There have been recent controversies surrounding the cheap plastic chairs that the city put in for tourist respite. They're gaudy and flimsy. For some reason everyone loathes them, but they're everything Times Square is, except also cheap.

Images whirl around you all the time, but when I paused there yesterday to take it all in, I realized you have all these colors flashing and news fragments spinning with no sense of content. And it's not just because I'm walking as fast as I can to get out of there. Not even the tourists, heavy with American Girl bags and posters of the Jonas Brothers, seemed to see the paean to commercialism that was whizzing all around us.

In the old photo, even with the celebration, the streets look almost deserted compared to now. There were no electronic screens vomiting the headline, "VICTORY OVER JAPAN!"

Times Square seems the wrong place for any moment of spontaneous celebration today because everything there is calculated to massage the most torpid part of the human psyche. The closest I've seen to spontaneous celebration would have been when Barack Obama was elected president and people cried and celebrated in the streets until dawn. There's a photo of a couple kissing in Times Square on that night, too.

I would have rather not been in Times Square that night but in my own neighborhood, which had mostly African-Americans who saw the election as not just an historical but also a personal epoch. The streets might be a little bleak there, but sometimes bleak streets make the best backdrop for joy.