Marshall Berman’s “On the Town” (Random House, 264 pages, $25.95), its subtitle notwithstanding, arrives a little late for Times Square’s 100th-birthday celebration. Back in 2004, there was a wave of books and articles devoted to the world’s most famous intersection, which changed its name from Longacre Square to Times Square on April 8, 1904. In particular, James Traub’s “The Devil’s Playground” did a superb job of charting the evolution of the Square – which means, above all, the evolution of its symbols. An area made famous by its signs – the “fire signs”that Theodore Dreiser wrote about in “Sister Carrie,” the neon signs that glow in the background of 100 black-and-white movies, the digital signs that seethe above the streets today – can itself be considered one giant sign, carrying obscure but vital information about culture and technology, the city and the country.

It is surprising how much of the American Century reveals itself through Times Square and the plays and movies it inspired. In the 1900s, the Floradora girls and the Ziegfeld Follies announced the rise of a vital, vulgar new popular culture; in the 1920s, the speakeasies and Broadway shows channeled the frenzy of the Jazz Age; in the Depression years,the rise of cheap amusements and burlesque shows gave the Square a rougher, more proletarian feel. During World War II, the Square became the staging area for American hope and energy, as in the musical for which Mr. Berman’s book is named, and the theater of its victory celebration, as in the famous Eisenstaedt photograph of strangers kissing on V-J Day.Then come the serious years, the 1950s, when Broadway turned from spectacle to self-examination, giving us Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, and movies like “Sweet Smell of Success” exposed the seediness of celebrity culture. The Square hit bottom in the 1970s, as 42nd Street turned into a pornographic, violent no-woman’s-land, the stalking ground for Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver.”Finally, after much hand-wringing, came the 1990s renaissance, in which the Square’s spontaneous danger was exchanged for sponsored, family-friendly entertainment.

There is almost too much story to tell, too many signs to decipher. It makes sense that Mr.Berman,in his highly personal exploration of Times Square and its meanings, abandons any pretense of comprehensiveness or even objectivity. When you stand at the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway, you are bombarded with so much visual information that all you can do is pick one or two signs to focus on, a few faces to scrutinize as they hurry past. Just so, Mr. Berman plucks out of the Square’s history a handful of memories and artifacts, moving almost randomly from postcard to advertisement, ballet to film. Sometimes, indeed, Mr. Berman muses on things – “The Jazz Singer,” the songs of Liz Phair – whose connection to Times Square is invisible to the naked eye. This can make”On the Town”a frustrating, whimsical book, and it is certainly not the place to turn for historical information. But as a clever and surprising essay in semiotics, a meditation on the way we encounter and use popular culture for our own imaginative ends, “On the Town” is exemplary.

Mr. Berman’s own encounters with Times Square, he writes, began in childhood or even earlier. The Square was where his parents met and courted and where they would escape the family home in the Bronx for evenings of sophisticated pleasure. Mr. Berman remembers once kidding his father about all the hotel matchbooks he seemed to collect, only to be met with embarrassed silence: Those Times Square hotels were the places his parents went to have sex. No wonder the Square plays such an important role in Mr. Berman’s family romance, and in his own adult understanding of pleasure. Mr. Berman was born in 1940, and the Square of the 1930s – the years of the Depression and his parents’ courtship – looms in his imagination as a kind of terrestrial paradise. Indeed, it may not be too much to say that Mr. Berman’s entire career as a Marxist cultural theorist owes something to his imagination of Times Square in the Popular Front years.

While Mr. Berman is ostensibly writing about “a hundred years of spectacle in Times Square,” the real subject of “On the Town” is the way the Square symbolizes, or can be made to symbolize, the triumph of his political and social ideals. When he writes about “The Jazz Singer” – a movie that gives Times Square approximately 10 seconds of screen time, in an establishing shot near the end – Mr. Berman sees Al Jolson in blackface as a crude symbol of American hybridity: “integration, but also intercourse, blending and fusion that change everybody. … When Jolson paints himself black, he performs multicultural America’s first sacrament.””On the Town” – the stage version of 1944, not the sanitized Hollywood film – serves Mr. Berman as an apotheosis of Popular Front culture, which allowed ordinary men and women to claim all the promise of New York: “One central theme of the Popular Front was that ordinary people, in their vernacular everyday lives, display fabulous unnoticed resources.”

At its best, Times Square represents a democracy of pleasure, erotic without being pornographic. Presiding over the book, and over Mr. Berman’s vision of the Square, is a cartoon figure he found on a postcard from 1903 and dubbed “Times Girl.” She is a beautiful chorus girl in a state of modest undress, blown up to King Kong scale and seated on the roof of the Times Tower, which she caresses absentmindedly. For Mr. Berman, “Times Girl, brimming over with fresh energy, looking into our eyes and hoping we look back,” is proof that Times Square is inseparable from a certain kind of modern femininity: independent but playful, powerful and sexy at once. He finds the porn shops of the 1970s a travesty of that ideal but seems even more outraged by the good-government crusaders, many of them women, who tried to clean up the Square by desexualizing it. Indeed, his attack on the women he calls “the Three Witches” – Cora Cahan, Rebecca Robertson, and Gretchen Dykstra, all instrumental to reinventing the Square in the 1990s – verges on sexism, so outraged is he by their Puritan disregard for the flirtatious spirit of Times Girl.

Here, as in his uncomplicated praise for the Popular Front and his awkward stabs at keeping up-to-date with pop culture (“the Simpsons” and “Sex and the City”are invoked),Mr.Berman seems to invite argument. But then, “On the Town” is not meant to be ironclad proof of a thesis. It is a clever, manic traipse through cultural history, in which the journey matters more than the destination. Mr. Berman succeeds in reminding us that, without its intoxicating promise of adult pleasures, even the most brightly lit Times Square would feel dim.

akirsch@nysun.com