But to Gary Barnett, diamond merchant-turned-real estate tycoon, the decidedly unglittery street is just waiting to be buffed to the high sheen of a superluxury trading center. Though his 34-story International Gem Tower has been slow in getting off the ground, Mr. Barnett is vowing that, in the coming year, its 11,000 tons of structural steel will finally go vertical.

SLIDESHOW: A trip through the Diamond District >>

Like many of the district's early founders who fled Europe in the 1940s, Mr. Barnett emerged on 47th Street in the 1990s by way of Antwerp's famed diamond trade. But as a developer, he's found himself at odds with many of the street's jewelers, setters, cutters, and polishers, who fear that the new tower, heavily subsidized by municipal tax breaks, will rupture their industry's crystalline equilibrium.

The International Gem Tower was recently declared a foreign trade zone by the federal government, and the state and the city have put forth $49.6 million in tax breaks tied to drawing new businesses—necessary, Mayor Bloomberg says, to make New York competitive with the global gem markets of Shanghai, Dubai and Las Vegas.

egeminder@observer.com

SLIDESHOW: A trip through the Diamond District >>

VIEW SLIDESHOW > BUILDING STORIES: ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL

The rail yards on Manhattan's far West Side, like the developers' dreams and mayoral agendas they inspire, slouch wearily toward the Hudson. For a necropolis of transit systems past (the Hudson River Railroad, the New York Central, the High Line), the Hudson Yards offer up eternal-and seemingly eternally deferred-promise, the heady rush of unclaimed surface area.

Mayor Bloomberg, the latest heir to the yards' unwieldy inheritance, tried to lure both the Jets and the 2012 Olympics to the expanse of metallic flatlands. His failure mattered less than the rhetorical grandiosity of the gesture, which eased the way for mock-up visions of a vertical glass-and-steel far West Side.

The area's rezoning and a concurrent push to extend the No. 7 subway line produced a spasm of glittery architectural renderings, each carted out by a big-name developer, anointed with potential financing schemes and greased with revolving door-dizzy municipal insiders.

The ultimate plan, a $1 billion deal struck by the Related Companies, entails erecting what amounts to a 26-acre deck atop the rail yards, a giant platform for staging the drama of high-rise development. The idea for building atop the yards is nothing new: Since the 1930s, there have been dreams of factories and warehouses rising above the ghostly terrain. But the closest anyone has ever come was a developer known as Richard Ravitch, the future M.T.A. head and now lieutenant governor.

In 1967, he built the Westyard Distribution Center, the concrete hulk that straddles the Penn Station rails, a study in Death-Star Brutalism.

The building was either a generation too late or several too early. Constructed for factory use, the elephantine structure was a remnant of an era already fast departing: the days when manufacturing pumped blood through New York's arteries and transmitted oxygen through its ports. By the time the police-state windows and bulbous floor plans were converted for office use in 1991, the building was still decades away from any realization of midtown's fabled future shift west.

And though one of the oft-cited maxims of the shiny future Hudson Yards was that it would draw a veritable media corridor, the media have largely absconded south. Of the West 33rd Street building's media tenants, only the Associated Press remains, with the New York Daily News, WNET and U.S. News & World Report gone or soon to be. Condé Nast, rumored to have considered the neighborhood in its bid for a new home, has transferred its attentions to the Financial District.

In perhaps the most costly comedy of errant timing, the 1.7 million-square-foot building itself was purchased by the young landlord Broadway Partners, which happened to be on something of a swaggering buying spree at the flush heights of 2007. By then, Mr. Ravitch was long out of the picture, and Broadway bought 450 West 33rd from a group led by investor Joseph Chetrit. Glimmering with boom-time sheen, the rattly Death Star traded for $664 million.

Meanwhile, star tenant Mort Zuckerman, publisher of the Daily News and U.S. News & World Report, a man with hundreds of thousands of square feet at stake (his newspaper would take an entire floor), had come onboard in the mid-1990s, a time when a developed far West Side was barely a glint in Mayor Giuliani's eye and rents reflected its industrial past.

Whatever the Daily News was worth, it would soon be gone anyway.

The Related Companies' 99-year lease for the Hudson Yards is hinged to a set of wary market conditions. The deal doesn't spring into motion until, for instance, midtown office vacancies fall below 11 percent and Manhattan apartment prices hit an average of $1,200 a square foot.

The project that is Manhattan is made and unmade by unseen forces-the ebbs and tides of markets, the axes of political and financial alliances. Timing is everything. But the West Side rails are also unlike any development in Manhattan's recent history. Hudson Yards' wide-open vastness has engendered decades' worth of vertiginous visions-a tomorrowland from a graveyard, a whir of glass offices and condos from a freight station-while simultaneously collapsing those visions into the lightless gravity of development stalemate.

The rail yards represent the bounds of Manhattan, the limits to which the city draws ever nearer, but they also represent the waterfront, or, at least, a memory of the waterfront as something more than a shiny backdrop for tourists and luxury condominiums.

Before we misplaced it behind highways and buildings, the water shipped out cargo of another New York, a New York of tangible exports and nostalgia-tinged optimism-which is maybe why we so like the idea of it but never seem quite certain about the way back.

egeminder@observer.com

4 New York Plaza

The time when the news industry could afford to be in midtown (sans an owner who's also a landlord or in a partnership with a major owner) may be fast departing, and Mort Zuckerman's move downtown is a herald of that. Moving from 33rd Street to a building 75 percent occupied by JPMorgan Chase in the Financial District, the Daily News and the U.S. News & World Report Media Group may be starting a trend.

Cushman & Wakefield's John Cefaly and Michael Burgio brokered the 100,000-square-foot deal on behalf of the news group. Norfolk-based real estate investment firm Harbor Group International, which purchased the building six months ago, was represented by CB Richard Ellis' Howard Fiddle and Bradley P. Gerla.

Jordan E. Slone, chairman and CEO of Harbor Group International, said in a statement that the deal "bodes exceptionally well for the future of downtown."

We suppose.

125 Park Avenue

The Atlantic Philanthropies, a foundation of the famously fame-averse billionaire Chuck Feeney, is quietly subletting its vacated Park Avenue space to another nonprofit. New York Blood Center, the largest nonprofit independent blood center in the country, will move into the entire 21st floor. The philanthropic vehicle of Mr. Feeney, who made his billions through a chain of duty-free airport shops, recently relocated to Varick Street but was intent on subletting to another nonprofit.

"Given the number of parties involved and the dynamics of the transaction, it required a multilayered solution," said Suzanne Sunshine, who co-brokered the deal with Glen Markman of Cushman & Wakefield. Cassidy Turley's David Lebinstien represented New York Blood Center.

Ms. Sunshine, who works exclusively with nonprofits, said, "There is tremendous nuance in transactions particular to nonprofits. My role is to advise and find solutions that are not otherwise easy or obvious."

The deal was further complicated by a shift in building ownership: Shorenstein Properties sold to SL Green. "I was able to gather the key members, and assure them that this sublease was in the best interest of everyone involved," Ms. Sunshine said. "Ultimately, everyone agreed that this transaction was the right deal at the right time."

It's in part because of all this or maybe despite it that when Haroon Moghul, a tall doctoral student with an easy laugh, launches into the Friday afternoon sermon, the words, "We seek refuge and sanctuary," take on sudden weight.

The Financial District building that recently sprung to the center of national debate, several raucous city meetings and one twice-rejected, ominously intoned National Republican Trust-sponsored ad—"They want to build a monstrous 13-story mosque at Ground Zero"—has, for close to a year now, been the space where hundreds of Muslims gather quietly to read from the Koran and to pray.

Well-pressed men slip out of shoes, pocket their iPhones. The owner of a nearby Halal cart fans himself with a hat. A woman closes her eyes and fingers a strand of prayer beads. For all the national clamor, prayers go on the way they always do. Every so often, the chanting gives way to the staccato undertow of Lower Manhattan—the sharp slant of a siren, a loading dock's grating tug—but mostly it's quiet.

Among the worshippers is Sharif El-Gamal, a member of the congregation that has been praying in Lower Manhattan for five decades. He is also head of Soho Properties, the firm that purchased the Park Place building last year with the intent to build an Islamic community center. Recently rechristened Park51, the endeavor would include prayer space, a 500-seat performing arts center, a library, a culinary school, child-care facilities and a swimming pool.

The plan-still embryonic, Mr. El-Gamal hastens to interject-has a kind of wild ambition to it, the imaginative urge, like all real architecture, to make the world over again. "We're looking to build something that's never been done before in the city," the Brooklyn-born developer says, sitting cross-legged in the makeshift prayer space. "We have a very ambitious project, and we want to have a very ambitious design. When people come to New York, we want them to come to Park51 just to look at the architecture."

Cleared by the local community board, supported by a roster of city officials from City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to Mayor Bloomberg, the project now just requires a vote by the Landmarks Preservation Commission to proceed. On an unset date later this summer, the commission will determine whether the current building, damaged by landing gear on Sept. 11, merits landmark designation, a decision that could potentially block future construction. Though the building was considered for—and not granted—landmark status more than 20 years ago, the fevered pitch of a public hearing on the matter last week leaves little certain about its future.

What will happen if the commission votes to landmark the building?

"We're praying and hoping for the best," says Mr. El-Gamal. "We believe."

THE PROCESS BY which New York landmarks its buildings takes place mostly in drab backrooms, with municipal-minded retirees in bow ties the primary witnesses. Even considering the operatic Jane Jacobs-Robert Moses epic the city reenacts every decade or so, little could have prepared the commission's members for the hearing on July 13, which included one police-escorted departure, innumerable rounds of heckling and legions of the most ardent preservationists the city has ever seen. Technicalities of architectural merit were met with thunderous whoops of endorsement.

"They're unique," a woman declared of the building's cast-iron Italian Renaissance palazzo features. "They're a special group of buildings that are never going to be built again."

"Yeah!" a man with a neck tattoo shouted in solidarity.

Campaigning politicians also made guest appearances, cast as the unlikely foes of development. A question posed by Republican gubernatorial hopeful Rick Lazio—why was a building of a similar style landmarked over this one?—drew cheers. (Later, speaking to reporters, the candidate ventured into less technical terrain, suggesting that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf—one of the project's leaders and an active member of the interfaith community—has radical ties.)

Despite the chorus on the other side, the building in question has its share of naysayers as well—chief among them Mr. El-Gamal, who hired the architectural consulting firm AKRF to evaluate its merit. "We don't feel that it has the significance of an individual landmark," he says. "This is not the Woolworth building. This is not the Chrysler Building. ... There are 30 different buildings in this submarket that deserve landmark status before this one."

The building was completed in 1858, when the sky-swallowing chasm of today's Financial District was a trading hub with a more tangible output, mostly dry goods and textiles. Erected for a prominent New York shipping magnate, like most buildings of its day, 45 Park Place was a throwback to an earlier era of European grandeur, the Italian palazzo intended to conjure up visions of economic might.

The structure was home to a Burlington Coat Factory when, 143 years later, the landing gear of a plane rocketed through its roof. It then sat empty for years, a mute skeleton of a building—the windows boarded up, metal gates yanked across its facade, the top floors in shambles. Today, letters spelling out "Burlington Coat Factory" are faint outlines in chipped paint.

Opponents of the community center are calling for the building to be turned into a war memorial, and there is precedent for granting landmark status to historically significant buildings. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory is a landmark, as is the townhouse inadvertently blown up by the Weather Underground. Park51's leaders, meanwhile, have also stated that a Sept. 11 memorial is part of their vision for the site. (Daisy Khan, Imam Feisal's wife, is, incidentally, an advisory member of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.)

It's never been an easy question, of course: whether the city pays tribute to the past by enshrining its memory, or whether, in some cases, the past ripples out in all directions, stretching forward as well as back, into the city that is not yet here. And that city, the city rolling toward us, must find a way to be both for the living and for the dead.

THE FRIDAY AFTERNOON congregants vanish as quickly as they came, back to office buildings, back to midday's undulating heat. Two blocks away, the long necks of cranes rise and fall above ground zero, straining with unknowable cargo. A member of the congregation is quick to point out that his brother is among the workers there, rebuilding.

Mr. El-Gamal, meanwhile, darts back and forth between people, keeping pace with multiple conversations at once. On architects, he says, "Everybody's interested in this project. Everybody's offering us their services, and they want to be a part of this process. It's really been overwhelming."

More specifically? "A lot of big names." He stops to think a minute. "It's all big names."

Like any developer, Mr. El-Gamal is contending with air rights and space allocations, the arcane formulas by which Manhattan divides itself, a finite tract of space written and written over again. Real estate, like history, is an eternally contested site. The only sure thing is reinvention, the abiding law of creative destruction.

A building, in itself, is a kind of experiment in utopia, a captive orb. It unmakes the world and makes it over again. But a building in a city is something else: A long-shot speculative gamble, fugitive as time and precarious as community, it strikes at the place where unity and complexity move toward each other.

egeminder@observer.com

One Grand Central Place

Midtown tourism, it turns out, is about more than ogling tour groups and keychain kiosks-it's also the district of government agencies intent on promoting the latest postcard-ready tourist campaign. The Spanish government's tourism office, for instance, just inked a deal at One Grand Central Place, the glossy tower that's also a ZIP code unto itself.

The agency charged with promoting Spain as a tourism hot spot is moving from 666 Fifth Avenue. Owner W&H Properties' senior vice president Fred C. Posniak credited the building's recent renovation and reposition process with the 8,500-square-foot lease. "We're also seeing tenants choosing to relocate to One Grand Central Place from the Plaza district-in addition to the Tourist Office of Spain, the international hair care and cosmetics distributor Ales Group USA Inc.recently signed a lease," he said.

Owen Hane and John Fitzsimons of Cushman & Wakefield represented the tenant in the transaction. William Cohen, Ryan Kass and Alison Coffey of Newmark Knight Frank, the building's managing and leasing agent,represented the landlord.

1040 Sixth Avenue

The techies of Sharp Decisions are taking 7,600 square feet in Skyline Developers' 24 stories of high-tech sheen. Near Bryant Park, the tower at 1040 Sixth Avenue was recently fitted with worker-bee luxuries including a Wall Street Journal video wall.

Eric S. Cagner and Kyle J. Ciminelli of Newmark Knight Frank represented Sharp Decisions in the deal. Billy Cohen and Matthew Leon, also of Newmark Knight Frank, repped the building owner. The asking rent for the space was $45 a square foot.

260 Madison Avenue

The good times for McLaughlin & Stern, one of the oldest law firms in the city, continue, as it usurps another two floors at 260 Madison Avenue. The law firm, with expertise in areas (investment advisory and hedge fund matters, private equity, trusts and estates) that read like a sum total of its office branches (New York, Millbrook, West Palm Beach), signed a lease for 36,000 square feet, ratcheting up its total to eight floors-100,000 square feet-at the top of the tower.

"The growth of our practice in many areas has moved us to expand our footprint in New York, and we have now made provisions for further growth into the next decade," said managing partner Geoffry R. Handler. "Our expansion in New York comes on the heels of a similar expansion in our West Palm Beach office."

David Sweet represented the law firm in-house. Building owner the Sapir Organization was represented by its own Lorenzo DeLillo along with Howard Grufferman of Grubb & Ellis, who served as a real estate adviser.

900 Third Avenue

Investment firm Columbus Nova, the U.S. division of the Renova Group, signed a 17,284-square-foot deal at 900 Third Avenue. A demand for space, plus what Studley broker Brad Wolk termed "competitive economics," brought the firm to the Paramount Group-owned building.

"Our client wanted to remain in midtown but occupied its 14,000-square-foot space at 601 Lexington Avenue under a sub-sublease without the option to extend or expand," Mr. Wolk said.

Landlord Paramount is throwing in a tenant improvement package, which will allow the firm to build out the space in time for its move-in next year. "Columbus Nova was so impressed with Paramount's tenant-focused approach that the company will also lease significant additional space at another Paramount building later this year," Albert Behler, president and CEO of Paramount Group, said in a statement.

Studley's David Dusek represented Columbus Nova with Mr. Wolk. Paramount was represented in-house by Jim Vandervliet and David Kleiner, as well as by Doug Neye of Jones Lang LaSalle.

650 Fifth Avenue

The gold-box standard of all things chocolate is restaking its flagship store. Godiva Chocolatier leased 1,200 square feet of high-profile temptation at 650 Fifth Avenue.

"Godiva sought a new flagship location on Fifth Avenue," said James P. Quinn, one of the Jones Lang LaSalle brokers for the building. "The chocolatier was attracted by this high-profile site at 650 Fifth Avenue. The area's high foot traffic from pedestrians and tourists made it an ideal choice."

Karen Bellantoni with Robert K. Futterman & Associates represented the tenant in the 15-year deal. Landlord 650 Fifth Avenue Co. was represented by Mr. Quinn, Gary Youm, Randy Abend, Aaron Ellison and Nina Marroccoli of Jones Lang LaSalle.

When the Whitney, chronically in want of space and funds, finally makes its leap downtown, like any longtime Upper East Sider in less lofty altitudes, the museum will have some things to get used to, not least the insouciant High Line sunbathers and gritty-chic meatpacking clubsters for neighbors. But Whitney Number One-finally unyoked from oft-thwarted dreams of an uptown expansion and now in the process of selling its surrounding brownstones-may also be coming into some new neighbors.

Residents of East 75th Street have long paid fortunes for views that include the inverted gray ziggurat, and the Whitney's soon-to-be-former property will undoubtedly shake up the block's high-stakes real estate roulette, where the likes of Barbara Walters and Mike Nichols have cast their hand.

VIEW SLIDESHOW> THE STREET WHERE YOU LIVE: BUH-BYE, WHITNEY!

The trade zones extended to buildings, too-great vertical bazaars abuzz with buyers and rapid-fire transactions, their showrooms laid out with taxonomic specificity. There were towers devoted just to textiles, towers exclusively for accessories, towers for gifts and, of course, for toys. Across the street from Madison Square Park, 200 Fifth Avenue, long known as the Toy Building, was an inverted plunge into Wonderland. Its contraptions, curious and curiouser, lit up, blinked and whirred to life-a kinetic carnival of engineered glee.

Except it wasn't kids firing off the latest in model airplanes and tinkering with the new line of Colorforms. It was grown-ups in suits. The Toy Building may have been a lab of giddy delights, but it was animated more by the patenting and manufacturing of those delights, transfixed by the mercurial forces of commerce running through them.

But even before it gave itself over to the children's entertainment industry (worth, these days, about $22 billion annually), the address had something of an irresistible draw for industry. The 15-story structure, before it earned its more playful moniker, was known as the Fifth Avenue Building, a name perhaps meant to evoke some of the gilded opulence of the Fifth Avenue Hotel it supplanted.

The Fifth Avenue Hotel was known less for its accommodations (luxurious though they were, with princes and dukes among the regular patrons) than for the backroom deals cut in its stiffly upholstered corridors. Its sitting rooms were magnets for industrial tycoons (Jay Gould and Commodore Vanderbilt among them), and New York's Republican leadership orchestrated state and city business from a nook known as the "amen corner."

Edith Wharton, who was born in a townhouse across the street, made reference to the hotel in her novella New Year's Day, in which the old-money narrator reports, "[The hotel] was frequented by 'politicians' and 'Westerners,' two classes of citizens whom my mother's intonation always seemed to deprive of their vote by ranking them with illiterates and criminals."

In its earliest incarnation as an office complex, opened in 1909, the would-be Toy Building was home to one lone toy vendor. It wasn't until World War I effectively halted the flow of European imports to the U.S. that the building's toy industry began to boom. Buoyed by the country's newly transformed manufacturing landscape, the ranks of American toymakers swelled. They churned out yo-yos and hula hoops, engineered newfangled worlds of marvel and delight. They all but invented childhood itself. (Freud may have had something to say about this, too.)

At the very least, they invented a distinctly American kind of childhood, a developmental juncture no longer reserved for the privileged few. Store-bought playthings, in all their factory-new sheen, were hurtling toward the dawning of mass production. By the end of the World War II, the better part of the building was stocked with toy companies, many with nearby factories in Brooklyn and Long Island.

Soon the postwar baby boom, the rise of middle-class affluence and the imperious ubiquity of television conspired to form an entire subculture of youth-more or less interchangeable with a new culture of mass consumption. Demand for the Toy Building quickly engulfed the edifice next door, transfiguring the two-building complex-connected by a ninth-floor walkway-into what was officially called the International Toy Center.

All year it stayed dark, then in February, for the annual Toy Fair, the building shuddered into light. Its endless array of contraptions sprung into motion as suits from all over the world descended on Toyland. Packs of them stalked the halls in fighter-jet formation and sipped martinis under the watchful eyes of plush bears and life-size cartoon figures.

BY THE 1980s, the city's distinct trade zones, its weird little alleys of obsessive devotion, were being scattered by the homogenizing forces of late capitalism. But specialty buildings were, for the most part, still thriving, often commanding higher-than-average rents. The Toy Building, stocked with 600 tenants, had a waiting list. There was a movement within the building to establish a Toy Hall of Fame.

But two decades later, the specialty building was a dying breed. Trade shows absconded to the Javits Center or left the city altogether, shipping out to Las Vegas and Atlanta. The Toy Building, meanwhile, was down to 300 tenants. The fact that the property managers wanted to rename the building the International Children's Entertainment Center was indicative, if a little slow to catch on, of the seismic shifts in kidland: Toys were being ousted by electronic games and interactive media. What's more, buyers followed the flight of manufacturing overseas, and as retail chains consolidated, it became increasingly difficult for small companies to compete.

The Chetrit Group, a developer, bought the struggling complex in 2005, and it was soon announced that the coming Toy Fair would be the building's last. The building changed hands again in 2007, when it was bought by L&L Holding Company. In a recently announced deal, the famed jeweler Tiffany & Co.-also partial to glittering objects and brightly colored boxes-will take a sizable chunk (260,000 square feet) of the building for its corporate headquarters, joining the Grey Group ad firm and a coming Mario Batali-backed restaurant and brewery called Eataly.

It may be that New York is fated to remember its branded buildings over its skyward districts of trade. We know where MetLife and Verizon fit into the skyline because they continually remind us. Even corporations that have come and gone-PanAm and Lehman Brothers, for instance-remain in some recess of cartographic memory.

The other coordinates, the cross streets of our obsessions and curiosities, are erased by a ubiquitous city. It's a city of smooth lines, Walgreens, elevator jazz and no need to ask where to chase down some obscure whim-it's a city of everything, all the time, found.

egeminder@observer.com

The disreputable ghosts of Boweries past-the gangsters, vagabonds and punk rockers who saw the street shape—shift over the past century and a half—likely have more in common with each other than with the citizens of the Bowery lately. The last few years' barrage of the new (new luxury condos, new cuisine, the boxy metal lines of the New Museum) is revealed in the worlds traversed from block to block: One cross street up and you've gone from overcrowded industrial kitchen suppliers to minimalist boutiques displaying Rodarte and Brian Reyes.

But whether it's a designer boutique's glass-enshrined relics of CBGB or a trendy new club's flophouse aesthetic, the old Bowery hasn't been forgotten altogether—it's reassembled into industrial-chic window-dressing for the new.

VIEW SLIDESHOW > TOUR THE BOWERY

You paid your dime in a cramped little booth (toward the end, it cost a whole 40 cents), then descended into a den of mirrors, elongating and distorting, your flesh doing contortionist tricks. You went down "like Orpheus or Alice or Virgil," wrote Diane Arbus. Submerged, you found yourself suddenly too big, then too small, "all around you like flowers a thousand souvenirs of human aberrations, as if the world had quite literally stashed away down there everything it didn't need."

The show-continuous, as you were reminded at every opportunity-ran every half-hour, its glassy-eyed curiosities materializing onstage one by one: Albert-Alberta, the half-man, half-woman; a kid called the Human Canary; Congo the Jungle Creep (from Haiti, in fact); the World's Tallest Cowboy; the Backwards Man. For five minutes each, they sent back aloof stares, answered questions or disregarded them. At the end, the fez-wearing maestro ushered the crowd into the next room (for an extra coin or two), where the real circus happened: Professor Heckler's world-famous flea troupe.

The flea circus was founded in 1923 by William Heckler, author of likely the defining treatise on the art of flea training, Pulicology. The troupe generally numbered around 16 (six principals, 10 understudies), and each miniscule performer, according to the professor, had its own distinct personality. (Heckler's favorite was an Irish flea called Paddy.) They juggled, raced chariots and played a xylophone fashioned out of fingernail shavings. In the final and most anticipated act, the professor's "stars" staged a ballroom dance adorned in tiny gowns and tuxedos. In Heckler's obituary, it was recalled that he "always fed his pets himself."

HUBERT'S ARRIVED ON 42nd Street on the heels of Prohibition, which was morphing Times Square from the gilded playground of Manhattan high society to a speakeasy pleasure house of the working class.

Murray's Roman Gardens opened in 1908, the most famous of the gout-inducing "lobster palaces" that sprang up from 42nd Street tenements. Presaging the resplendent camp of the theme restaurant, and the modern casino's tacky splendor, Murray's Romanesque décor was a nod to gluttonous sensuality. Architect Henry Erkins installed a rotating dance floor in the middle of the Pompeian-themed dining room, its faux sky bejeweled with electric stars and equipped with moving clouds. Not to be outdone, the other floors included a full-size Cleopatra's barge, nude nymphs, suspended mirrors, a Peking-themed "Dragon Room" and a 30-foot marble fountain designed by high-society starchitect Stanford White. According to a restaurant advertisement, "24 luxuriously furnished and richly appointed bachelor apartments" were handily kept on the premises.

"Dry agents" raided Murray's several times before it finally surrendered to the 18th Amendment in 1923. Hubert's freaks and fleas appropriated the building's six stories of rococo detail, though they, too, were displaced a decade later, relegated underground as midtown marginalia succumbed to mainstream tastes. Sideshows gave way to movie theaters and arcades, 42nd Street already on its way toward today's midway of mass marketing. The palatial movie theaters would become grindhouses and triple-X video emporiums and finally brand-name retail flagships, in all their engorged, boxy sheen. The arcades and pinball machines would mutate into peepshows and massage parlors, then eventually revert back to arcades, Nintendo and Viacom the newly instated impresarios.

In the 1970s, Hubert's basement became Peepland, which, somewhat like its predecessor, trafficked in transgressive spectacle and bodily deviancies. Peepland's headliners, however, drew more from nuns and eels than fleas in miniature ball gowns. In his Tales of Times Square, Josh Alan Friedman called it a "Disneyland in hell." Meanwhile, the floors above Peepland housed the notorious male brothel the Barracks, where the remaining statues of Murray's fleshly Roman revival provided the running commentary to history's cyclical ironies.

BUT NONE OF ITS manifold transformations, none of time's sly sleights of hand, could predict that in a matter of decades, the lobster palace-turned-dime museum-turned peepshow emporium would finally disappear, lost behind the acrobatics of global branding that trapeze down 42nd Street. Times Square was always known for the frenetic profusion of its lights and signs, but only in recent years have the signs pulled off the vanishing act entirely: On 42nd Street, the buildings are gone. In their place are slickly styled branding concepts, multimillion-dollar ad campaigns.

Between 1990 and 1995, the city condemned the vast sweep of 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues, turning over its defunct properties to the 42nd Street Development Corporation. In place of Peepland, Madame Tussauds, which wanted a particularly conspicuous sign, convinced the state agency to condemn not just the building but 20 feet of air above the sidewalk. Madame Tussauds, the wax museum that manages to be both hokey and a streamlined international entertainment experience (you can have the same one in London, Hong Kong, Las Vegas), installed 200 celebrity simulacra, among them a veiny Arnold Schwarzenegger and a mechanically heaving Britney Spears.

It's these oddly transfixing details that reel the audiences in off the street. They come to mug with George Clooney and stare down Simon Cowell. They count Joan Rivers' wrinkles and study the contours of Mick Jagger's jaw. Like the freaks of Hubert's, the statues stare back, unreachable and aloof. But their exacting precision, the close-up freckles and veins, isn't quite what Roland Barthes would call the "prick" of unexpected detail.

You come to Madame Tussauds not to unknow what you thought you knew about the world but to find, close up, what you've known to the point of exhaustion. You don't come to seek out the city's submerged margins, its awing, shaming contortions, to find yourself too big, too small, then just human size in the end. There's no place now to discover, as Diane Arbus did, the lone Backwards Man in a forwards city, the man "walking blind into the future with an eye on the past."

egeminder@observer.com