Walking through Times Square, I feel as if I've been dropped into a pinball machine. I must continually weave around the people who've stopped to watch street performers or who stand in the middle of the sidewalk staring up to the sky, mesmerized by the fantastic signs.

"I can't believe it. I just can't believe it," says a middle-aged Asian American woman with a southern accent as she watches a video montage of ABC's "greatest hits" on a large video screen. Her friend appears too stunned to respond.

"Mommy. Mommy. Look at that Jell-O spoon," an eleven-year-old white boy shouts to his mother, pointing to a giant silver spoon mounted on a sign advertising Jell-O above the DoubleTree Guest Suites.

I step to my left to avoid running into the boy's mother. Then I step to my right to avoid a group of five Swedish tourists who have decided to stop in the middle of the sidewalk to take photographs of 1 Times Square. I've got a good rhythm working, swerving to avoid other pedestrians without having to stop. I feel like Fred Astaire. "I could probably walk up the side of 2 Times Square," I think to myself. Then, crossing Forty-seventh Street, I bump into a black man who's watching Times Square through a camcorder. He started to cross but he stopped suddenly. tilt.

"Sorry," I say. He doesn't respond. I don't think he even notices. He is lost in the buildings that zoom in and out of focus on his screen. Even though I shouldn't feel anxious about the congestion, I do. Then I think about the lunch I had with Anneka Jones a few days earlier and her comments about negotiating the daily traffc in the Square on her way to and from work.

"People come here and they lose all sense of what's going on around them," she told me. "They get so consumed with what's going on up there that people become zombies or something. I'm like, 'It's a fucking billboard—move on.' But I guess I'm so used to it that I don't understand how big of a deal that it is; this is a historic place. There are these cutting-edge technological wizardries, and the whole apple dropping on New Year's Eve thing, mark it on the map even more. And I understand that. But it's still, 'How long can you gawk?' And they seem to be able to do it endlessly."

"Maybe they're trying to teach you to take a more Zen approach," I replied.

"To stop and smell the burning neon."

"To chill out."

Bobbing and weaving to avoid bumping into people and ducking to make sure my head doesn't appear in their photographs, I realize that my advice to Jones has been lost on myself. I want to move and I can't. The gawkers restrict my freedom. I enter the Forty-seventh Street subway station. Finally, some empty space. Never did I think the subway station would provide more room to move than the street; it does on this afternoon.

In the evening I return to the Square. My frustration during the day was a temporary lapse. I'm surprised that only a little time away allows me to become wide-eyed once again. The lights are brighter at night, making the Times Square show more spectacular. Many of the people who were staring at the sky during the day have been replaced with a new crowd who rush to the theater. They've got it backward; now is the time to gawk. The colors change on the Nasdaq video screen. I grab my camera because I want to take a photograph when it turns completely white, which should produce a nice effect on the infrared film I'm using. Just as I'm about to take the photograph an Indonesian man bumps into me. "Sorry," I think I hear him say, but I'm trying to readjust the film speed on my camera and am too busy to respond to his apology.

There are 235,000 neon lights in Times Square, according to the Times Square BID. Nasdaq's eight-story cylindrical video screen, which wraps around 4 Times Square at the corner of Forty-third and Broadway, is the most spectacular sign in the Square at this point. The sign's eighteen million light-emitting diodes (LEDs) can light up the heart of Times Square, especially when the screen turns completely white or completely red. What's interesting about the signs in Times Square is that they're tools for advertising various goods and services, but they've become a form of art and entertainment, helping to create a unique experience in the district. Among other things, we flock to Times Square to see and photograph advertisements.This is a phenomenon that is not unlike television shows dedicated to the year's funniest or sexiest commercials. The major diVerence is that people can spend thousands of dollars to travel to Times Square to look at the signs, whereas a television show dedicated to commercials is often watched with little planning (if not by accident).

A central feature of the district, which helps to maintain Times Square's status as an iconic site, is the illusion of geographic origin that's associated with the signs. We've seen similar advertisements in other cities, and they are merely isolated urban trees in the urban forest, but in Times Square the signs become a form of entertainment that seems to exist no place else. There's no denying that the district features a unique blend of cultures, architectural styles, and approaches to garnering the attention of pedestrians. This illusion is maintained, in part, because the district itself provides a central location for the information and does so in a way that the emotional and physical energy felt in the Square matches the visual stimulation.

The illusion also holds because the supersigns have been integral to Times Square's aesthetic since at least 1904, when the area was named after the New York Times. On April 27, 1904, the Mechanics and Traders' Bank at Forty-sixth and Broadway made the headlines in the New York Times when the bank put up the first sign with the name "Times Square." "It is of considerable size, and attracted much attention as it was being hoisted into place," reported the Times.

Like the Mechanics and Traders' Bank, many contemporary companies understand the importance of the supersigns. The signs are known around the world, transcending the boundaries of the Square. Contemporary and historical images of the giant signs have helped create and maintain the district's reputation for the spectacular: from Wrigley's giant aquatic-scene billboard, to a Camel cigarette advertisement that blew smoke rings, to contemporary Hilfiger and Calvin Klein ads featuring men with twelve-foot bulges beneath their underwear. However, the underwear ads lack the zip of the headlines that race around the façade of 1 Times Square. The newszipper, which is, temporally, the longest-running lighted sign in the Square, is arguably the most recognized sign in the world. In part, the building is so well known because of the zipper. Buildings that lack supersigns appear to be second rate. "This building being empty, without signs, was a missing link," Crowne Plaza executive Michael Silberstein noted a few years ago. "By lighting it up, it will make us part of the Great White Way."

Although current zoning codes require 18 percent of a building facing the Square to be covered with neon, the signs were historically a hotly debated aspect of Times Square's design. "When Times Square was in its heyday, before the Depression, MAS [Municipal Art Society] had never appreciated the place," observes Gregory Gilmartin. "Times Square stood for popular culture, bright lights, billboards, and the messy vitality of commercial culture—for everything the Beaux Arts aesthetes deplored. At the turn of the century, when the Municipal Art Society started campaigning against outdoor ads, it pictured Times Square as the deepest circle of billboard hell."

The Municipal Art Society attempted to ban the giant advertisements early in the twentieth century, using photos of buildings in Times Square "that were entirely blanketed in signs; even their windows were not spared," as evidence of billboard hell. They partly succeeded in their quest when a size limit was placed on all signs. In 1909 the courts overturned that regulation, and that same year Heatherbloom Petticoats built a fifty-foot electric sign. Although MAS lost the battle in Times Square, other organizations in New York City succeeded in preventing proliferation of the giant billboards in their neighborhoods. For example, in 1922 the Fifth Avenue Association fought for a ban on all "projecting and illuminated signs." They "persuaded the city's Board of Aldermen to pass a sign ordinance that not only legalized the ban but extended it to include parts of Madison Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street." The Broadway and 42nd Street associations were fearful that the ban would be extended to Times Square, but the Fifth Avenue Association expressed no desire to regulate signs in the theater district. It was concerned only with Fifth Avenue because it feared that the "'carnival spectacle' might bring an influx of the 'wrong kind of people' into [Fifth] Avenue on a daily basis, an influx that might jeopardize real estate values and undermine the control these merchants had over their property."

Both MAS and the Fifth Avenue Association were largely concerned with the lowbrow aesthetics of the supersigns; however, urban critic Lewis Mumford was quick to move beyond a strictly aesthetic criticism of Times Square. For Mumford, Times Square's bright lights highlighted the social and political problems created by the district's entertainment-oriented economy. "Broadway is, in more than one sense, the great compensatory device of the American City," he wrote nearly eighty years ago. "The dazzle of white lights, the colour of electric signs, the alabaster architecture of the moving-picture palaces, the aesthetic appeals of the shop windows—these stand for elements that are left out of the drab perspectives of the industrial city. People who do not know how to spend their time must take what satisfaction they can get in spending their money."

This belief that entertainment provides a distraction from the "real" struggles of everyday working life has reemerged at various points throughout the twentieth century, perhaps expressed most explicitly by various members of the Frankfurt School."The City of Light, it erased night's darkness—first with gas lanterns, then with electricity, then neon lights—in the space of a century," says Susan Buck-Morss in her exploration of Walter Benjamin's arcades project. "The City of Mirrors—in which the crowd itself became a spectacle—it reflected the image of people as consumers rather than producers, keeping the class relations of production virtually invisible on the looking-glass's other side." Times Square's city of mirrors reflects not only consumers but also signs and lights from other buildings. It is like a hallway of mirrors.

The images that shine on the windows of the Viacom building (Mountain Dew, LG, and Bertelsmann) are symbolic of increased consolidation and cross-promotion campaigns. Bodies of twenty-foot-long models appear side by side with the five- and six-foot-tall pedestrians. Both appear as reflected surfaces, eliciting comparisons, possibly influencing purchases. It is a visual culture that hinges on dissatisfaction and fuels a self-ethic of private transformations through consumption. People don't have to limit their fantasies to the attainment of goods they cannot afford; rather, in this hallway of mirrors people may see themselves as the goods on the billboards.

A critique of the spectacular, which continues to this day, can serve as a call for participation, challenging passive observation. "The paradox of fascination is the encounter of the most extreme sensations and emotions with the terrible power of neutrality," claims cultural theorist Henri-Pierre Jeudy. However, for Muschamp the spectacle in Times Square "is both marvelous and horrifying. A place of indiscriminate illusion, it also sits on a bedrock of truth. Look one way, you see MTV. Shift your gaze, and behold Nasdaq. Not since Versailles, perhaps, has society's cultural essence been so accurately portrayed. And it is better to have them out in the open in the heart of the city than dispersed via cables and airways." Muschamp's belief that a bedrock of truth is exposed because the signs externalize the companies' inner workings to the public perhaps affirms that the signs are representative of the companies' overall goal: to dazzle us (for a price). However, he is reflecting a belief in surfaces. Entertainment companies put forth the images that entertain us; architecture is an extension of the companies' products (or cultural contributions). We are not privy to decisions made in the building about programming, advertising, or hiring practices. There is something beneath the surface.

This relationship between what we see on the surface and what lies beneath is foregrounded in signs that do not make sense beyond their spectacular nature, since these signs are pure distraction. The red and white sign with big letters LG on the corner of Forty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue is an excellent example. "None of the dozen people questioned in Times Square knew what the LG [neon sign] meant, but many found [it] intriguing," reports Colin Moynihan in the New York Times. Although Dongwon Lee, an account director for LG Ad, claims that the simplicity of the sign is meant to "differentiate [LG] from other companies," the sign, which is an advertisement for a Korean conglomerate, is merely another bright light that fills Times Square's sky. The disparate categories featured at the bottom of the neon sign ("chemicals," "electronics," and "communications") do not alleviate potential confusion.

Sometimes creating confusion can inspire conversations about the company, the product, or the sign itself, as was the case with black-and-white Guilty and Innocent billboards that appeared in Los Angeles around the time of the O. J. Simpson trial. There was no clear indicator that the billboards were a response to the trial, although that was a logical conclusion. After a month, local television news broadcasts reported that a radio station had created the billboards. The slogans didn't promote the station, but they did inspire conversations and pique curiosities. The LG sign has not achieved that same result.

Although LG's sign and others like it would certainly have provided good evidence for MAS's claims that the signs lack any social value, the art society's fight against the supersigns diminished over the years. Any similarities between the pessimistic attitude toward Times Square's bright lights advanced by critics such as Mumford and those held by MAS disintegrated in the 1980s. The art society had little choice but to fight for the neon if it was going to aid in the larger struggle against the skyscraperization of Times Square. This call for neon requirements within the context of saving Times Square was "fraught with paradoxes," wrote Richard Shepard in the New York Times. "For one, the regulations have been advocated by even the most esthetic-minded champions of preservation, who are not usually among the staunch defenders of the billboard arts, neon or paste-up."

Brendan Sexton, then president of MAS, lobbied for neon requirements, perhaps because he needed to appeal to a nostalgic vision of Times Square's glory days to prevent the destruction of theaters, which would have been replaced with glass and steel structures if developers had had their way. Architecture has been one of MAS's greatest concerns since the organization was founded in 1893. They have consistently "been a voice of civic conscience in the great public debates over the plan of the city, the design of its municipal buildings, parks and monuments, the preservation of its landmarks and historic districts, and the public responsibilities of private developers." So, supersigns became a tool for presenting a vision of the old Times Square, even though that Times Square was deemed troublesome to MAS when it actually existed. If there was any residue of an anti-supersign sentiment at MAS, it was completely wiped away when Sexton and Gretchen Dykstra, then president of Times Square BID, held a supersign blackout in Times Square. This blackout, which was the first since World War II, commemorated the ten-year anniversary of zoning regulations that had "saved the signs from extinction."

Although the supersigns have been a major source of struggle, the symbols beamed from the sky have consistently played a central role in helping Times Square establish a reputation as an important place. More recently, however, this reputation has moved from that of a theater district (or porno zone, depending on one's point of view) to that of a site for business and amusement, as some of the companies whose names and logos appear on the signs have opened offices or stores in the Square (MTV, Virgin Megastore, Nasdaq, and ABC, for example). Further, this shift in Times Square's reputation has led to an increase in the number of companies that attempt to align their products with the Square.