The rebirth of 42d Street, slumbering entertainment crossroads of the world, begins officially on Tuesday, with a ground-breaking for the renovation of the Victory Theater. Disney's restoration of the New Amsterdam Theater is to follow, right across the street. But while we wait for these plans to become reality, the most effective if least acknowledged booster of a Times Square renaissance is to be found at another recently renovated playhouse a dozen blocks up Broadway: David Letterman.
For all that has been said about the Letterman phenomenon in the eight months of his ascent -- all the praise, in my view, deserved -- his huge impact on New York has been understated. It shouldn't be. Night after night, his "Late Show" is remaking the image of the Big Apple's notoriously rotten core -- and thus that of the city around it -- on a scale that money cannot buy and that developers, urban planners, tourism commissions and politicians cannot match.
Mr. Letterman's broadcasting base is fittingly the Ed Sullivan Theater, haunted by ghosts of the Beatles, Elvis and Topo Gigio, and itself a landmark of the glamorously bawdy Times Square that got away. And there's an earlier, equally fitting generation of ghosts on the site as well: the Sullivan Theater was originally the Hammerstein Theater -- named in honor of Oscar Hammerstein the theater-builder (and grandfather of the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein 2d), who at the turn of the century invented the whole idea of an entertainment district in what would later become Times Square.
"Late Show" is helping to revive that district with a form of entertainment neither Hammerstein nor even Sullivan would recognize. In fact, Mr. Letterman's show has only a superficial resemblance to its contemporary late-night rivals. Though the host interviews celebrity guests from behind a desk as befits the nocturnal format, the celebrities are rarely allowed to plug their products and questions are rarely intended to elicit information. "Late Show" is not a talk show but a meticulously planned comedy hour, in which everyone who appears is a supporting player to the star, acting an assigned role in his skewed vision of the world.
That's where Times Square comes in. Through a running gag he calls an "external camera," Mr. Letterman has made ordinary people in the Sullivan Theater's surrounding blocks continuing characters who get at least as much time on air as visitors from show biz. The star, or the faceless camera serving as his video proxy, compulsively visits the nearby deli, copy joint and even sex club, to engage the locals in conversation and comic stunts.
While these segments, too, are shrewdly planned -- any resemblances to "Candid Camera" are deceiving -- the Broadway locations are bona fide and the action carries the illusion of spontaneity. Whether through luck or coaching, the neighborhood regulars, many of them immigrants, come across as such good-humored and hard-working souls that Mr. Letterman's neighborhood seems a benign and intimate community that anyone would want to visit. It's not that "Late Show" whitewashes New York City -- wisecracks about crime, prostitution, filth and "rats as big as ponies" are staples -- but the urban ills only seem to add raffish local color to the picturesque presentation of the Broadway environment.
So much so that when Mr. Letterman took his show to Los Angeles last week, I found myself, as I suspect many viewers did, missing the presence of New York and its denizens each night. Even the L.A. audience went wild with delight when Mr. Letterman slaked this homesickness with an ingenious video stunt in which he and his sidekick, the band leader Paul Shaffer, seemed to jet back to Times Square in mid-show to retrieve Mujibur Rahman and Sirajul Islam, the salesmen from the T-shirt-and-souvenir emporium next-door to the Sullivan Theater. Mujibur and Sirajul, as they are fondly known, are now more popular with Mr. Letterman's audience than most Hollywood giants he could book.
Mujibur and Sirajul really do exist; I often spot them in their now bustling store when I walk up Broadway. The dreamy Times Square they inhabit on "Late Show" is less in evidence, but Mr. Letterman is doing as much as anyone in town to keep alive the wish that it could yet come true.
