Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (17 page)

“Adjacent to America’s amusement center on 42nd Street stands a Roman Catholic church older than Times Square itself. More than a century ago, it was a parish of farmlands, uncultivated property, dirt roads and horse cars. Its spires towered above everything around it, but now they are dwarfed by the surrounding skyscrapers. In contrast to the pleasure and amusements and hurlyburly of the rest of Times Square, it is an oasis of peace and quiet and prayer.”

In the late 1950s, Father McCaffrey wished aloud for the return of
Abie’s Irish Rose
(the show lasted 2,327 performances at the Republic Theater; the location then swiftly converted to Minskys’, with huge billboards of sneering strippers outside). Say what you will about La Guardia, he told interviewer W.G. Rogers, but at least he got rid of burlesque. He surveyed the marquees over 42nd Street, with titles like
Super Sonic Hell Creature, Fiend Without a Face, Valley of Nudes
, and the latest Elvis and Boris Karloff flicks, and lamented: “I don’t know how it could get much worse.”

Twenty-five years later, Father Robert Rappleyea, sitting in his rectory at Holy Cross, reflects on his predecessor. “Father McCaffrey used to refer to this as ‘The parish of parking lots.’ When he began, this whole area was filled with tenements, teeming with people.” Much of his parish was lost to the Lincoln Tunnel and Port Authority Bus Terminal, which troubled the priest, particularly when they kept adding parking lots. “He tried to fight these things and he was all alone. If the trend continued, he couldn’t imagine what would take place on 42nd Street.” A major transformation did begin in 1968, when Eighth Avenue harbored more than a thousand hookers. “I had breakfast with him about a month before he died in 1970,” remembers Father Rappleyea. “He was depressed and discouraged about the whole thing and felt helpless. He didn’t know what would become of the parish—in his time, there were over nine hundred children behind the church on 43rd Street. When I first came, we had around four hundred and fifty kids; it’s now down to two hundred and fifty.”

Raised in small-town Poughkeepsie, Father Rappleyea had been stationed at an East Side church and was totally unaware of what Times Square held in store. “I have no idea what was in Cardinal Cooke’s mind, he just asked if I would go to Holy Cross as pastor.” In January 1973 the priest wore civilian clothes to survey his new neighborhood: “Your immediate reaction is one of depression. The whole area was negative, there was a lot of cynicism, crime, rampant prostitution, massage parlors were all over. The parking lots were being used by street prostitutes. There was no Manhattan Plaza, just a huge parking lot, McGraw-Hill was empty, there were fleabag hotels and unsavory bars. I used to visit the bus terminal, the fire houses, get a feel of the whole parish. Many times you had to fight your way through the prostitutes.... Even today, when you dress in your clerical outfit, you can’t walk a block without being accosted by derelicts and unsavory people who ask for money.”

Father Rappleyea has never once entered a sex joint, explaining that “the marquees are bad enough.” He sits in the rectory, a cane in each hand. He is currently battling a disease that affects his ability to walk—“With the help of God, I wanna get back on a pair of skis.” The illness does not affect his work, as he remains instantly available to his parish, generous with his time, without the pomp and circumstance of Father Ritter, head of the nearby Covenant House.

Father Rappleyea says he felt an obligation to the local working-class families, thus becoming an activist in many Times Square civic organizations. He spent six years at St. Agnes in a luxury area: “It was lackluster, no community action, no family life. I have never in my life gone to so many meetings or belonged to so many different groups since coming to Holy Cross. Without families or children, you don’t have a real solid community. I have a devotion to the children, who I felt were being harmed most. That was one of the hardest things that we had to get across to the city fathers and the police department—in this area lived families. We began pressing for the observance of the law, because most of the stuff out there was illegal.” The priest formed a three-way alliance between his parish of poor, noninfluential residents, the Broadway theater, and local business, who all met for the first time in his rectory. In 1975 the parish took stock of their homes after years of helplessness. “By pure vigilance, we became successful in keeping massage parlors off Ninth Avenue. Any time we saw an empty store, we always made sure what was coming in. Once a massage parlor opened its doors, they could fight in court and stay open a year, which is all they wanted.”

Father Rappleyea looks out of his rectory to see a vast redevelopment that he helped lobby for—not a single sex establishment remains west of Eighth Avenue, massage parlors are nonexistent, and fewer than a dozen whores cruise the mythical “Minnesota Strip.” The huge Royal Manhattan Hotel, suffocated out of business by hookers, has reopened as the Milford Plaza. “The police did excellent work in the early days,” remembers Father Rappleyea, “they were the only ones to turn to. But it was like the little boy with his finger in the dike. Then Mayor Beame started the Office of Midtown Enforcement (OME), and it was made stronger and more vital by Mayor Koch. They are excellent in terms of knowing the law, of shutting down these places, handling street prostitution. “The only negative factor we are working on now is that the real estate vultures have swooped down on the area because of its improvement, trying to drive out the poor, hard-working people. They give out eviction notices, harass them, no heat or hot water. We have one instance where they put transvestites and drug addicts in the building to force them out. We have established our own parish housing committee.”

But Father Rappleyea’s sworn enemy, the big one that refuses to give, is Show World, a hop away from Holy Cross. “It’s degrading and dehumanizing,” he told the
Daily News
in 1982, adding that mothers of students are subjected to taunts from Show World’s human spillage. “We’re going to fight him [Richard Basciano] any way we can,” he warned, including a “parents’ war against the smut belt.” “We’ll picket. We’ll march. We’ll do anything we can to get him out of here.... It’s a disgrace. Our forefathers never intended that the First Amendment protect perversion.”

“I’m not an angel,” countered the graying, curly-haired, fifty-seven-year-old Basciano, who had earlier made the papers when it turned out the government granted a $65,000 loan for improvements in his porn empire. “I’m not sprouting wings, but I’ll argue that this business is not a detriment to the community.”

Show World owns all the property from 42nd to 43rd on Eighth, except the bank, and most of their Times Square land parcels are not slated for redevelopment. Clenching his canes, in frail health, the priest seems less feisty than he was two years ago, when he vowed to win the war, even if Show World won the battles:

“We’re trying to get it in on the redevelopment, though I don’t know if we’ll be successful. It’s been alleged and fairly well substantiated that organized crime is behind it. But they have tough lawyers and they are astute enough to stay just on the borderline.... The attitude of the judges is that it’s still harmless and victimless. But people who live here can testify that wherever there are sex-related activities, there has been a comparable increase in crimes of assault, muggings, breakins, we’ve had so many. It’s open twenty-four hours, seven days a week. When Mayor Beame completely closed Show World for two weeks under a city ordinance, that corner took on an entirely different scene. It became a hundred percent better.... Midtown Enforcement is still actively trying to do away with it, they’ve been very successful in getting ordinances passed to close the places down. So we are watching Show World very carefully. In all likelihood, this fall, we’ll have a demonstration out in Long Island where these people have big estates. Finally, these people tend to trip up themselves. . . .”

The pastor does acknowledge that Show World is more troublesome because of what takes place around it than what goes on inside. “There have been rumors, which I’m trying to nail down, that there is some kind of organized gang trying to pick up young boys,” he points out, as though all roads lead to kiddie porn. He is opposed, “as a Catholic priest,” to designating a red-light district anywhere in New York, even as a compromise.

“Holy Cross stands out like a sign of contradiction to everything around it. Half a block away we have some of the greatest evils in our society. We still have all of the social problems besetting our country—the homeless, the discharged mental patient, the drug addict.” The priest absorbs threats with a smile, in this neighborhood consumed by transients. Total nutcases, arrested after “causing a disturbance in church,” sometimes return: “Out of the blue, one day, a fella shakes hands with me and smiles and says, You’re my good friend, but I’m gonna kill ya.’ I said, You’re gonna kill me? For what?’ He says, ‘Because you killed my cats.’”

Holy Cross feeds 450 homeless every Saturday and takes in bag ladies during the winter. “After eleven o’clock at night on 42nd Street, ninety-five percent of the people are there for no good. You have the strata of prostitute and transvestite involved in drugs. Most of your transvestites are involved in assault and robbery. I’d say eighty percent of whoever their customers are get mugged. They rarely get a complaint against them, because the person who was mugged is so embarrassed. The police tell me if they had the opportunity to search, ninety percent would be armed. After eleven, I wouldn’t venture out without a police escort.”

Father Rappleyea always emphasizes the decent, church-going citizens of his neighborhood: “I think this is the most unique parish in the world. We have people from Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina, Puerto Rico, the Islands. Yugoslavians, Irish, German, Italian. It’s much more provincial than people realize. An awful lot of people refuse to move. The Poseidon Bakery, they’ve been here for generations, Alps Drug Store. This is why we have the Ninth Avenue Festival every year, it’s considered one of the greatest ethnic mixes in the whole city. Down the block is Manhattan Plaza, where seventy percent are in the performing arts, many of whom are our parishioners, and we want to see them succeed. Hopefully, we have brought them God.... I feel it’s a great honor and privilege to serve this area as pastor. There’s only one Broadway. When I was in Poughkeepsie High School, the big thing was to visit Times Square by bus—the Paramount to see Frank Sinatra, Joe E. Lewis. We had no fears. I hope and pray that 42nd Street becomes a place the city is proud of again.”

Cops and Skells

“All the losers who can’t make it in their neighborhoods come to be losers here,” states Officer Skeeter, cruising his patrol down 42nd on an August Thursday night, windows rolled up, air-conditioning cool, and the Beach Boys surfin’ over the FM dial. The police radio crackles at a lower volume, but no matter what’s on WCBS, Officers Skeeter and Parillo can hear when their car is summoned, even in the midst of philosophizing.

“Asshole Alley,” Skeeter calls the lineup of shoeshines along the Eighth Avenue parking lot between 41st and 42nd. A half-dozen bulky stands, portable with wheels underneath, are open twenty-four hours to Port Authority bus travelers who brave a nerve-racking shine here. Athens liquor store on 40th Street helps bottle-feed a whole scuzz industry of loud-faced winos. “If they closed that liquor shop, most of it would disappear,” posits Skeeter. “But when it’s closed, the shoeshine stands sell it. We removed ninety bottles of wine from under that stand there Sunday morning.”

“You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to figure that out,” adds Parillo, “just follow where the winos are goin’.” Their beloved Terminal Bar, the lowlife’s shrine on this energized skid row, was closed a year back, while the adjacent Terminal Hotel, home of the ugliest five-dollar whores in the U.S.A., was converted to a legal haven for bag ladies. Yet another firm on 39th designates more Thunderbird and Night Train shelf space than anywhere on the Bowery itself.

“You better find a cab fast, honey,” warns Skeeter under his breath. Three young stewardesses stupidly try to hail a cab from the shoeshine side of the street. “They’ll get your suitcases, they’ll get your bra and you won’t know it... if you’re even wearin’ one.”

Fresh-scrubbed, freckle-faced boys wearing grown-up policemen’s uniforms are stationed across 42nd. “Anyone can be a cop now, they’ll take anything,” laments Skeeter, who’s husky himself, with blond hair, large arms, and six years on the force. “Look at the size of some of those cops,” he says in wonder, pointing out the foot patrols. A tiny blond woman in blue soberly stands between a condemned doorway by herself, looking more like some pervert’s fantasy than a police officer.

“They put these rookies from East Cupcake, Long Island, out on 42nd Street,” says the wizened Parillo, a tall, gray-haired seventeen-year vet. “They aren’t streetwise at all, and the skells love it, they eat it up.”

“Females haven’t been tested, they’re still new,” says Skeeter. “There hasn’t been a female cop killed on the job yet, knock on wood. Once it happens, then maybe they’ll take ‘em off 42nd Street. And it’ll happen from her own gun taken away.”

“When I joined the force,” says Parillo, “they checked my whole background, they even traced my grandparents’ fingerprints for criminal records. Now they take you if you have a record. Some of the black cops don’t know who their parents are, the department won’t trace it. I had a partner once who was a black cop, when I joined, up in the Thirty-second Precinct in Harlem. Turned out he was doing hits for the mob on the side. He’s doing time in an Arizona jail.”

The Midtown South patrol car zigzags through Times Square traffic, passing red lights, making U-turns, free from the laws of traffic in order to make sure others obey. Tonight’s tour of duty is from 34th to 44th streets between Sixth and Ninth avenues, the four-to-midnight shift. Skeeter stops at a roadside-repair police van, where a mechanic quickly fixes a faulty window-handle roller, essential for times when someone approaches the window. The two officers trade seats, relieving Skeeter at the wheel.