Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (18 page)

“Wasn’t that pretty,” says another cop, stopping his squad when the officers get out. “Would you do that again so I can take a picture?”

“When I was in the Thirty-second on 135th,” recalls Parillo of his early years, “we stopped a car filled with blacks that had a ‘Wallace for President’ sticker. Dead giveaway it was stolen. I asked ‘em, ‘Who did you vote for?’” Parillo moved out of the 32nd when the 14th precinct became Midtown South, a “super precinct” in 1972, needing volunteers. “I remember about ten years ago, three security guards were shot to death at Nathan’s Hot Dog during a robbery. Next day, I saw this ad in the
Times
: ‘Three security guards wanted, inquire at Nathan’s.’”

Parillo left the 32nd for Times Square to escape the drug wars that were killing three cops per year at his Harlem precinct. He’s somewhat fed up with the area, can’t wait to collect his pension and retire to another job. “The orientals come outta them restaurants every night drinkin’ that saki before they drive. Their driver’s licenses must come in a bottle of saki. We fought ‘em in three wars, now they’re takin’ over the city.”

Last week Parillo collared four out of eleven black boys who crow-barred into the metal gate of a 42nd Street camera/electronics store at 4
A.M.
, a current fad. It was a hard chase for the graying officer. “Four virgins, never been locked up, it’s before the court now.” Next door to the camera shop is 259 West 42nd, specializing in men’s mag overstock returns. “That guy’s the worst,” he says of this joint, which was the first to install peeps in 1966. A sparkling display counter of knives, handcuffs, fake badges, and the like make this the only weapons-pornography hybrid in the Square. “You can see ‘em buying that shit from the car,” says Parillo, slowing the squad out front. “I busted a guy who bought a gun holster inside. Now, whaddaya assume he’s gonna put in it? Judge threw it out, said ‘You’re
assuming
too much.’”

The squad passes the Holland Hotel, one of the midtown hotels now accepting welfare cases at $70 per night. Little kids spill onto the street at all hours. “Those mothers blame Reagan for making them poor,” says Skeeter. “They oughta try closing their legs for a while, and learn to read books.” Other welfare families trail out of the larger Hotel Carter on 43rd, across from the
Times
, where arson fires occur weekly.

“If they don’t like it, they light it,” says Parillo. An elderly white couple carrying four suitcases have left Port Authority through a wrong exit onto 40th Street. The man drops his baggage and asks the patrol where to hail a taxi. If either cop is concerned about the couple’s welfare, he doesn’t particularly show it, passing up a Boy Scout opportunity. The old man and his wife are about to walk through a scaffold filled with black junkies vegetating in various stages of consciousness. The cop car just happens to be stalled in traffic, right along the scaffold; none of the junkies budge. The cops get paid whether they stay in the car clocking time, or get out and mix. But without the police presence, the old folks would have been goners, or at least their luggage.

A bearded, blond-haired man with bloodshot eyes hails the patrol car. Parillo rolls down the newly repaired window.

“I’m from Texas, ah was robbed three days ago and I’m at the end of my rope. Ah haven’t eaten in three days, I’ve never been in a city before, ah just don’t know how to get back home.”

“Did you try Travelers Aid on 43rd?” asks Parillo, staring past the man.

“Ah
tried
Travelers Aid!”

Parillo shrugs. The reek of liquor spills into the patrol car—the man is soused. Why would a robbed man reek of liquor?

The cops receive a radio call to disperse a “disorderly crowd” across from Port Authority. A sorry bunch of street flotsam have bedded down for the night in the driveway of some trucking firm. Skeeter and Parillo step out of the car before a ragged group of discharged mental patients, harmless as jellyfish, with a few homeless teens among them. Whenever these types of critters are arrested, the cops wrap them entirely in a blanket so they don’t stink up the car. One of the kids says he’s waiting for reentrance into Father Ritter’s Covenant House in two weeks. You break the rules there, you’re out for a month. He’s got two weeks left to scrounge like a rat. The dustbowl group obeys without hesitation, undoing the boxes and newspapers they’ve assembled for a night’s sleep, carrying them across the street and stacking them in neat refuse piles.

“And you’ll have to take your friend,” instructs Skeeter, referring to one who is unconscious in a pool of vomit. Four of them lift their comrade out of his vomit, a strand of it stretching from his mouth to the street, like pizza cheese. Parillo lets loose with an Ed Norton hoot, turning back to the patrol car to contain himself. The owner of the trucking firm and his wife thank the officers as the mental patients go limping down 40th Street toward the river, like a wounded Civil War battalion.

“Rockin’ Robin” comes over WCBS, the home of the hits. Parillo remembers it from high school.

“Yeah, but it wasn’t no Michael Jackson version,” says Skeeter.

“The rain’ll quiet ‘em down,” he says of his street constituency as a drizzle begins to fall on the windshield. The squeegee bandits at 42nd and Ninth take a moment’s break from their particular contribution toward a cleaner New York when the patrol passes. Teenage blacks carrying squeegees make their kung-fu movie cash here by running a soap rag over windshields at the red light, then demanding a tip to wipe it. An old winos’ ploy from the Bowery, which amounts to a twenty-five-cent mugging by intimidation. “That’s what people’s windshield wipers are for,” says Skeeter. “Except for this dirtbag white bitch who comes up to the squad car, a real head case, tries to wipe the windshield with her snot handkerchief for a tip.” There’s not much the cops are allowed to do but chase off the squeegee bandits, some of whom raise their threat to a dollar.

“They wanna stand there at the light and defy all we stand for,” Skeeter says through clenched jaw, looking out his patrol car window at an army of black Riker’s Island transients on 42nd, whose beat-drug mantra of “Reefer, acid, black beauties” hisses along at people’s heels. Older skells at abandoned doorways yap about the proverbial room upstairs with willing girls. There’s always some bumpkin with a fat wallet sticking out of his ass who serves himself up like a suckling pig. Younger packs sometimes roam the side streets with pipes and blades. Sure, the cops could launch a paramilitary campaign against this inhuman contamination, and fill up Madison Square Garden with arrests. It poses an interesting argument for one little night of fascism.

“Cops are pawns,” says Skeeter, “they change the rules on us constantly. When I was a kid, if you cursed a cop, you’d get clubbed, and you couldn’t tell your old man or you’d get belted again. Today, we can’t use the billy club except in defense under attack. The skells can even curse us and we have to take it, look the other way. Everything is against the cop, the system protects these guys on the street. We could make an arrest every five minutes, there’s enough shit going on out there this moment—but you learn it doesn’t do any good, the system lets ‘em right out, so why bother?”

“First thing they should do is get rid of that Civilian Review Board,” Parillo believes. “These skells might look stupid, but if a cop bops one, they know to go right to Civilian Review, with lawyers ready to represent them and make a few grand off the city.”

A short man in a blue uniform waves to the passing police car. “Eddie, he’s a head case,” says Parillo, waving back. “He’s a security guy at one of the welfare hotels. Always calls us whenever there’s trouble, then hides in a corner.” An emergency call comes over the radio, something about a hotel stabbing. The siren goes on and the driver guns the engine. A backup car meets them at the Hotel Paramount and four officers walk briskly into another of Times Square’s once-glamorous hotels, now worn to shit. A black hotel security man, whose white shirt and tie are covered with shiny badges and tie clips, leads them into the elevator, pressing the fifteenth floor. He’s familiar with the cops, he’s taken them up in this elevator many times before, and they joke about each other’s pot bellies, how good their wives cook spaghetti. The security man thinks there’s an ongoing dispute between two violent women who live on the same floor. He stays in the elevator as the four cops take strategic positions in the musky hallway, with faded walls and carpet of Broadway’s past.

“Open up, police!” bangs Parillo on the door, holding a clipboard in his other hand. And then a second bang. The door creaks open, and peering around the edge comes the ghastly, overly madeup face of an ancient hag, with a blushing smile. This is the second time this week she’s called in a false report. She looks mighty pleased that all these virile policemen have come to her door.

“Call back on my night off, will ya, lady,” whines Skeeter, while another cop says she should be arrested this time.

Outside the Paramount, the sergeant’s car has pulled up for a report. Skeeter jots the incident down on his clipboard, already thick with bureaucratic forms and paperwork. The sarge, a gray-haired gentleman in a hyper mood, removes a large searchlight from his car, clicks it on, and glides a circle of light across building tops of 46th Street, greatly amused. The four-to-midnight shift is nearly through, and these salt-of-the-earth working men will return to their precinct, get out of uniform, and go for cocktails.

It’s the anniversary of a fallen officer, and flower wreaths are being placed in front of his plaque at the Midtown South entrance on 35th Street. Parillo points out an older plaque of a policeman “stabbed in the back by a pimp” twenty years ago. He knew this cop from his own neighborhood when he was a kid. The pimp has just been released, after doing twenty years in prison.

The desk sergeant has had a rougher night than the returning troops, his face the perfect choice for an Alka-Seltzer ad. A street-worn black fellow comes up to the desk with a maze of complaints bothering him. “You look like a perfectly decent gentleman,” says the desk sergeant, with great understanding. “Why would anyone want to threaten you?” The complainant goes on in an erratic mumble while the sarge makes a final attempt to decipher it. Then, the sarge bolts upright from his seat:
“Take a fuckin’ walk?!”
He races from behind the desk as the complainant scurries out the door. “Psycho,” grumbles the sarge, while two black civil service ladies giggle behind the desk, thankful he didn’t refer the fellow to them.

All in all, it was a quiet night in Midtown South.

The Big Cleanup

The first rumblings for a cleanup of Times Square occurred over a century ago. The lore of the region was just as dastardly then as it became during the explosion of porn and pross. Hell’s Kitchen, named as such in the 1880s by police, contained miserable tenements, “the lowest and filthiest in the City” according to an article in the
New York Times
of September 22, 1881. Several blocks west of what would be christened Times Square in 1904 was “a locality where law and order is openly defied, where might makes right and depravity revels riotously in squalor and reeking filth. The whole neighborhood is an eyesore to the respectable people who live or are compelled to do business in the vicinity, a source of terror to the honest poor, and an unmitigated nuisance to the police of the 20th Precinct.”

Hell’s Kitchen—the area west of Eighth Avenue, and ten blocks on either side of 42nd—became known to the public for the exploits of its gangs and hard drinkers. An anonymous photo from the turn of the century shows a dead horse rotting in the cobblestone gutter with oblivious slum kids at play. A mass attack by five hundred gang members called the Gophers was staged against the coppers. In 1910, the railroad corps joined police to defeat the Gophers. A reminiscent report from the
Times
in 1934 recalled how the railroad corps “slugged harder than the gang and shot quicker.” The Gophers dwindled, while Father Duffy, the legendary Times Square priest, helped quiet them and the other gangs. Hell’s Kitchen was an impoverished melting pot of all New York’s nationalities, and in 1934 it was decided that ninety-one of their slum buildings would be razed for the Lincoln Tunnel; even more were razed to make way for the bus terminal, which opened in 1950.

Forty-Second Street was designated a main crossroad in 1811, when Manhattan’s future gridiron pattern was carved out by the city commission. John Randall, Jr., who first mapped these streets and avenues, ignored the unruly X made by Broadway and Seventh Avenue when they passed 42nd Street. New York’s population was about 100,000 in 1811, and the city fathers couldn’t foresee its climbing to a half million by 1850 and nearly a million by the Civil War. Expansion uptown averaged a mile every twenty years.

The Broadway thoroughfare before 1900 was a desolate route of bumps, ruts, and potholes, where a horse-drawn bus could overturn on a winter night and fatally crush the unwary driver. Beyond 42nd Street, squatters in hovels scrounged out a living, harnessing bony dogs to drag carts from which they scavenged. The Broadway and Seventh Avenue intersection was known as “Thieves’ Lair.” A few blocks west was Eleventh Avenue—its jumble of horses, pedestrians, and railroad cars giving it the nickname “Death Avenue”—where tracks had been laid down in the 1850s. West 42nd Street itself, before 1900, was a respectable enough stretch of stores and businesses, but its outskirts became off-limits by dark.

After nearly seventy years as New York’s most magnetic attraction, by the close of the 1960s, Times Square gained its rep for stickups, saw a bold onslaught of streetwalkers, and scared away tourism. This threatened the heart of the city with a fleeing corporate tax base, and some feared for the Big Apple’s survival. Broadway, though a lesser concern of corporate interests, saw only eleven of its thirty-eight theaters occupied at one point. The city’s course of action took the form of two police “super precincts” in 1972. Midtown South, expanded from the 14th Precinct, handled 42nd Street down to 30th. The 18th became Midtown North, with a 140 percent manpower increase, policing 43rd to 59th streets. North started with a bang, closing eighteen massage parlors, papering windows of porn bookstores, impounding pimpmobiles, and making more than four hundred pross-loitering arrests—all in May, its first month. But by June, twenty-four massage parlors were back in biz. The Westerly, a high rise that headquartered a hundred black pimps, faced Midtown North right in the kisser, from its perch on 54th. Three neighborhood bars—Angel’s West, Tommy Small, and Woody’s—spilled over with black pimps who mocked, baited and taunted white cops. Every night saw 1,200 prostitutes along Eighth Avenue. The commanding officer of Midtown North, acting out of frustration over uncontrollable street conditions, set police barricades along the Eighth Avenue sidewalk between 45th and 49th streets, creating a path exclusively for pimps. “I told them to make it two pimps wide,” he was quoted as saying. A goon squad of ten huge cops kept them strutting within this perimeter.