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 Harvard. By 1931 it had become a burlesque house, and then in 1942 a movie theater taking on the name The Empire. This last transformation kicked off a craze: At one point, the West Forty-Second Street block between Seventh and Eighth Avenues was home to ten first-run cinemas.
When New York state’s development authority and a string of city administrations sought to remake Times Square into a corporate- and family-friendly environment, they originally planned to eliminate all of its movie houses. The movies, they feared, would continue to attract the wrong people—the working kind—who might alienate tourists. But they made an exception for AMC, the first big chain theater in New York City and, at the time, the largest distributor of Disney films. The AMC Empire 25 was designed to serve as one of two anchors for a complex backed by Forest City Ratner Companies. The other was the Madame Tussauds wax museum, a staple of tourist districts worldwide and the factor that convinced the Disney corporation to sponsor much of Times Square’s redevelopment.
Rather than start entirely from scratch, however, the state and developers opted for an elaborate plan to graft the old directly onto the new. In 1990 they demolished the nearby Anco Cinema (which had shifted to a largely pornographic format), lifted the 3,700-ton Empire onto tracks, dragged it 168 feet west, and “anchored” it to the base of a commercial high-rise. The outer shell as well as Lamb’s lobby was preserved, though the stage and the lofts above ultimately did not make the move.
AMC Empire 25. Benoit Tardif
The Empire redux opened in 2000. I moved to New York the following year and have been a loyal patron ever since. Part of its allure has been its convenience: Times Square has been accessible no matter where in The Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, or Manhattan I have lived. But it was never just transit that drew me in; it was the giddy mash-up of architectural styles.
The Beaux Arts façade of the erstwhile Eltinge—demure ornament arranged around a massive arched window—hints at the impressive domed hall that lies beyond. Pseudo-Egyptian and Grecian ceiling motifs playfully hint at grandeur, while two roped-off balconies simply raise eyebrows. (Is the lower, more ornate one original, preserved for its own sake? What’s the purpose of the higher, banal-looking gallery?) There are frescoes of women—in fact, they depict Eltinge in getup—dancing to the tune of a lute-playing beast, looking down upon a box office full of touchscreen ticket kiosks.
I ride up the first of a series of escalators and find a gift shop hawking movie merchandise. The circulation path winds its way to another escalator, spanning approximately fifty feet and boxed in by red-painted walls. After getting off, I double back on a third escalator that carries me to a lobby in the sky with bathrooms and a concession stand that sells Gujarati snacks along with the usual popcorn tubs and “freestyle” sodas.
At this point, I find it difficult to get my bearings. The theater’s interiors have dramatically expanded. Ugly red mullions run up the sheer curtain walls. I gather that I’ve crossed over into another building, but which one?
Because my film is being screened on one of the upper floors—most of them are—the ticket taker directs me toward yet another set of escalators, which brings riders parallel with the rooflines opposite West Forty-Second Street. The scene outside glimmers with the output of millions of LED lights, which, on a rainy or foggy night, become glowing abstract glyphs rather than what they are—marquees and advertisements for the stores below, their oversized proportions actually mandated by Times Square’s zoning code. The Regal Cinemas directly across the street has followed the local customs: Its flamboyant Egyptomaniac façade has been smothered with signage advertising multisensorial “4DX” theaters, enticing AMC customers to check out the competition. The defunct Hotel Carter, notoriously New York’s dirtiest accommodation, comes into view. Behind it I spot the top of the old headquarters of The New York Times—it put the Times in Times Square—now scaffolded, but until recently branded at its highest point with an anachronistic purple “YAHOO!” Exposed pipes and steel beams encrusted in gray foam are close enough to touch. Looking up, I see the curvilinear risings of even higher floors linked by ever more rows of escalators.
The Empire’s twenty-five screens are a microcosm of the stratified city they sit at the heart of: at the top, ultraplush and overloud IMAX; at the bottom, rundown, sticky rooms where the lights stay bright through the previews.
Designed by four architecture firms (Benjamin Thompson, Beyer Blinder Belle, Gould Evans Goodman, and the Rockwell Group), the cineplex is utterly confounding, even after so many visits. Navigating its interiors recalls a BBC2 film about geographer Ed Soja I’ve seen in a grainy scan on YouTube. Sitting in Los Angeles’s Bonaventure Hotel (1976), Soja explains in his bizarre Bronx-British brogue “the spatiality of postmodernism”: “It’s a landscape that’s highly fragmented, it’s a space that decenters you, makes you feel lost. The outside is inside and the inside is outside—the very metaphor, by the way, of the postmodern city itself.”
With that description in mind, I’m struck that the Forty-Second Street poly-building is a far stranger beast than the Bonaventure. When catching a Sunday matinée, I’ll find that the multiplex has morphed into a megachurch. The Journey Church NYC holds three services on the fifth floor, bringing the longstanding tradition of Times Square street preachers indoors. Congregants chatter over coffee and doughnuts, while kids gather in a designated play zone; Christian rock plays on the sound system. On one such visit, I was surprised to see a church greeter holding a sign that seemed to welcome me in from the sidewalk with the word “SHALOM!”
The movies themselves are capaciously curated, with Hollywood blockbusters programmed alongside conservative-coded religious features (the ubiquitous Angel Studios productions), mainstream indies (the latest from A24 or Neon), truly independent films (like the 2022 Slamdance winner Hannah Ha Ha), and international releases (oftentimes in five or more languages). Many of the features in the last two categories will appear in few, if any, other cinemas in town, attesting to Times Square’s reputation as a home for foreign genre films. It’s not for nothing that the young future members of Wu Tang Clan regularly sojourned from Staten Island to the Theater District in search of kung fu artistry.
The Empire’s twenty-five screens are a microcosm of the stratified city they sit at the heart of: at the top, ultraplush and overloud IMAX; at the bottom, rundown, sticky rooms where the lights stay bright through the previews. Those smaller, less coiffed theaters tend to house the films I gravitate toward. Along the side walls are bargain-basement James Turrells: red and blue lights pointed at the ceiling, bifurcated by mirrors that reflect the beams back diagonally in shades of yellow and green.
Often over the course of a film, a man will wander in and take a seat in one of the otherwise empty front rows. Sometimes he will plug his phone into a wall socket. Sometimes he will sleep past the credits. Or he will enter after the movie has started and leave before it ends. Perhaps he is watching some of every movie he can catch. He might even spend his entire day there.
When I see those men, I think of Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), which decries the neighborhood’s rehabilitation at the hands of Giuliani and Mickey Mouse. The redevelopment project axed many of the porn theaters eulogized by Delany, whose titillating text is often read against cultural critic Marshall Berman’s On the Town (2006). His Times Square, like the Marxist conception of capital itself, exists in a state of perpetual motion and transformation; the constant is the extravagance of mass escape. The period from the 1970s to the ’80s, when Times Square solidified its dim standing as a haven for sex, drugs, and violence, were, for Berman, the area’s nadir because that capacity for enjoyment had significantly narrowed. By contrast, Delany delighted in the fact that Times Square existed as a locus of love and comradery for a specific set of men and argued that no place can be safe and appealing to everybody all at once. I belatedly read both books in preparation for moving to Hell’s Kitchen five years ago and found myself, like the little girl in the meme, proclaiming naively, “Why not both?”
Urban renewal, often likened to the implacable bulldozer, is revealed to be a sputtering lawnmower that cuts down the tallest blades but fails to level the entire field.
After the movie, I head for a different set of cascading escalators, perpendicular to Forty-Second Street and lit by the demonic red of an oversized Target LED display. I pass through the bright gauntlet of Dave & Busters and Applebee’s on the second floor—a shock to the senses after taking in some of the quieter films on the AMC roster. (Imagine sitting transfixed through three quiet hours of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 2021 Drive My Car and then wandering bleary-eyed into an arcade.) On the ground floor of the complex, I stumble onto another storefront situated a few yards from the exit that until recently housed the Liberty Diner. The outside is inside, the inside is outside, and I am somehow both.
When I finally push through the heavy glass doors and reach the pavement, I am nowhere near where I entered a couple hours prior. Walking west, I pass Dippin’ Dots, Doc Popcorn, King Bubble Tea, NY Gits, and It’Sugar before again encountering the Empire’s terra-cotta archway. This spatial dislocation is multiplied by the general disorientation of Times Square, where advertisements conceal the structures behind them. Property boundaries, so militantly drawn everywhere else in the city, are gleefully effaced. Although Madame Tussauds and the AMC Empire 25 tether the Forest City Ratner development from the east and west, respectively, no pedestrian would necessarily know they were parts of the same complex. (Nor would they spot the fragments of two other turn-of-the-century movie houses, the Harris and Liberty Theatres, embedded in this mini streetscape.) I walked into a premodernist Broadway theater, and I walked out of a postmodernist commercial tower. In between are elements of all that Times Square has ever been: the shared and the solitary, the pious and the profane, the public and the private, the Delanyesque and the Bermanite.
On the streets, three-card monte dealers jockey for space with the world’s biggest corporations, without either brand of hustler entirely displacing the other. Parents and families take a wholesome bath of light in the same spot where teen crews and lifelong loners find lascivious reprieve from their families. Makeshift megachurches offer spiritual communitarianism beside films displaying demonic possession. Urban renewal, often likened to the implacable bulldozer, is revealed to be a sputtering lawnmower that cuts down the tallest blades but fails to level the entire field. The antithesis of Times Square Red and Times Square Blue is yet to be abolished, but perhaps Times Square Purple stands before us in plain sight.