Nearly every day I stroll through Times Square, perhaps Manhattan’s most polarizing corridor, where fantasy, desolation, and corporate IP meet in a haze of pixels. A visceral hatred of the area unites those on the political left and right, with the former condemning the commodity fetishism conjured by the inescapable advertisements (this is where the epithet Disneyfied first gained ground) and the latter bewailing a culture of public licentiousness (Giuliani be damned, there are still at least three strip clubs and several sex shops). I understand their disdain, but I don’t feel it. I count myself among the quarter million people who regularly opt into Times Square, some of them tourists, some of them workers, a great many New Yorkers simply seeking a good time.
The site of the AMC Empire 25 has long fulfilled this purpose. The theater began as the Eltinge, which opened in 1912 and was designed by the architect Thomas W. Lamb. It was named for Julian Eltinge, one of the most famous drag performers of the era, who fancifully claimed to have studied architecture at Ha…