Carl Hiaasen is one of my favorite MYSTERY authors. My having been
involved for several years in maintaining the empty shells of the
theaters in the Times Square area, and having participated in the
makeover of the New Amsterdam Theater, and Peep Land, the following
excerpt of his longer essay I find quite interesting. Though he covers a
lot of ground his essay is important as it relates to the topics of
historic preservation and multi-national corporations. I particularly
appreciate Hiaasen’s comment on cultural revulsion – a theme that had
been brought to my attention by a staff member of the Lesbian and Gay
Community Services Center, one of our customers, during the time of
Disney’s initial PR moves on Times Square.

The day and evening prior to Michael Eisner and Governor Cuomo making
their public announcement of the Disney move into the New Amsterdam
Theater I had been involved in stopping the water from the melting snow
from cascading through the building. For the weeks prior we had been
assigned the 24 hr task of shoveling snow off the theater roofs, with a
very real fear that they would collapse from the excessive load that
occurred that winter. I do not believe that the 42nd Street
revitalization project would have gone much further if the roof of the
New Amsterdam Theater had collapsed.

TEAM RODENT, How Disney Devours the World, Carl Hiaasen
“DATELINE: TIMES SQUARE, November 1997.

Deloused and revitalized Times Square, home to MTV, Conde Nast, Morgan
Stanley, the world's biggest Marriott hotel, the Ford Center for the
Performing Arts, and soon a Madame Tussaud's wax museum.
And Peep Land. From its doorway on West Forty-second Street one can see
the glittering marquee of the new Disney Store at Broadway. More
importantly, from the Disney Store one can clearly see Peep Land: a
scrofulous, neon-lit affirmation of XXX-rated raunch.

Sleaze lives.

It lives and it beckons, though less garishly than either the Disney
Store or its rococo neighbor, the New Amsterdam Theater, where golden
breeze-furled banners advertise The Lion King, a musical based on a
cartoon movie. Both the cartoon (which grossed $772 million worldwide)
and the stage show (which will most likely be the most successful
production in Broadway history) were created as exemplary family
entertainment by the Walt Disney Company, which also lavishly restored
the New Amsterdam at a cost of $38 million.

In this way Disney audaciously has set out to vanquish sleaze in its
unholiest fountainhead, Times Square; the skanky oozepot to which every
live sex show, jack-off arcade, and smut emporium in the free world owes
its existence. For decades, city and state politicians had vowed to
purge the place of its legendary seediness, in order to make the streets
safe, clean, and attractive for out-of-town visitors. New Yorkers paid
no attention to such fanciful promises, for Times Square was
knowledgeably regarded as lost and unconquerable; a mephitic pit, so
fornidably infested that nothing short of a full-scale military
occupation could tame it. As recently as 1994 Times Square swarmed
unabashedly with hookers, hustlers, and crackheads and was the address
of fortyseven porn shops.

Then Disney arrived, ultimate goodness versus ultimate evil, and the
cynics gradually went silent. Times Square has boomed.
The dissolute, sticky-shoed ambience of Forty-second Street has been
subjugated by the gleamingly wholesome presence of the Disney Store.
Truly it's a phenomenon, for the shelves offer nothing but the usual
cross-merchandised crapola: snow globes, wristwatches, charm bracelets,
figurines, and lots of overpriced clothes. Hard-core fans can buy
matching Mickey and Minnie garden statues, a $400 Disney Villains chess
set, or a twenty-fifth-anniversary Disneyedition Barbie doll, complete
with teensy mouse ears. Your basic high-end tourist trap is what it is.

Yet somehow the building radiates like a shrine -- because it's not just
any old store, it's a Disney store, filled with Disney characters,
Mickey and Minnie at play in the fields of Times Fucking Square. And
evidently the mere emplacement of the iconic Disney logo above the
sidewalks has been enough to demoralize and dislodge some of the area's
most entrenched sin merchants.

The mayor of New York says that's a good thing, and citizens agree: good
for tourism, good for children, good for the morale of the community. If
Times Square can be redeemed, some would say, then no urban Gomorrah is
beyond salvation. All you need is a Disney retail outlet! (As of this
writing, there are more than 550 in eleven countries.)
It's not surprising that one company was able to change the face of
Forty-second Street, because the same company changed the face of an
entire state, Florida, where I live. Three decades after it began
bulldozing the cow pastures and draining the marshes of rural Orlando,
Disney stands as by far the most powerful private entity in Florida; it
goes where it wants, does what it wants, gets what it wants. It's our
exalted mother teat, and you can hear the sucking from Tallahassee all
the way to Key West.”

****
“A few blocks away, Peep Land hangs on by cum-crusted fingernails.
Inside ... well, just try to get past the video racks. Sample: volumes
one through five of Ready to Drop, an anthology featuring explicit (and
occasionally team-style) sex with women in their third trimester of
pregnancy. And that's not the worst of it, not even close. The shop's
library of bodily-function videos is extensive, multilingual, and
prominently displayed at eye level. Skin a-crawl, I am quickly out the
door.

Revulsion is good. Revulsion is healthy. Each of us has limits,
unarticulated boundaries of taste and tolerance, and sometimes we forget
where they are. Peep Land is here to remind us; a fixed compass point by
which we can govern our private behavior. Because being grossed out is
essential to the human experience; without a perceived depravity, we'd
have nothing against which to gauge the advance or decline of culture
our art, our music, our cinema, our books. Without sleaze, the yardstick
shrinks at both ends. Team Rodent doesn't believe in sleaze, however,
nor in old-fashioned revulsion. Square in the middle is where it wants
us all to be, dependable consumers with predictable attitudes. The
message, never stated but avuncularly implied, is that America's values
ought to reflect those of the Walt Disney Company and not the other way
around.

So there's a creepy comfort to be found amidst the donkey films and
giant rubber dicks, a subversive triumph at unearthing such slag so near
to Disney's golden portals. (Hey, Mickey, whistle on this!) Peep Land is
important precisely because it's so irredeemable and because it cannot
be transformed into anything but what it is. Slapping Disney's name on a
joint like this would not elevate or enrich it even microscopically, or
cause it to be taken for a shrine. Standing in Disney's path, Peep Land
remains a gummy little cell of resistance.

And resistance is called for.”
 --
][<en Follett
SOS Gab & Eti -- http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/5836