Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (19 page)

A criminal element kicked off the Dirty Business in Times Square. It rode the coattails of the “sexual revolution,” cashing in on the easing of obscenity laws by the Supreme Court in 1967. Low-rank mobsters, seemingly banished by their superiors to the unprestigious smut trade, spawned a multiplying swamp of pornography, which had grown to 150 joints by the early 1970s. Some paved out a proud industry. “Big Mickey” Zaffarano, who built the Pussycat Cinema’s neon façade across Broadway and 49th, owned porn shops around the world. As Joe Bonanno’s bodyguard, he took on the toughest of hoods, and later the Shubert Organization, his rivals in the Square. In February 1980, at fifty-seven, he dropped dead of a heart attack one hour before the FBI showed up with a warrant for his arrest in an anti-porn sting. The tabloids fondly observed that not one of Big Mickey’s neon displays on Broadway darkened for a moment in his honor.

Massage parlors—a euphemistic tag for street-level brothels—opened in a boom and branched out under guises of model studios, rap studios, even topless shines. They were a sidewalk manifestation of the sexual revolution, a popular talk-show joke. The first were run like counterculture communes, with psychedelic decor and hippie masseuses, in Los Angeles and Manhattan’s East Side. The typical parlor in 1969 had a white-walled, therapeutic look, with towels and a choice of body oils or talcum for your “massage,” which rarely strayed past a hand-or blowjob. But in Times Square, the fad downgraded into sleazier joints aimed at snaring an even faster buck. Hit-and-run shantytown parlors lined Eighth Avenue, opening and closing at the rate of two per week—some thirty parlors had names like Sugar Shack, Honey Haven, Sensitivity Meeting Room, Beginner’s Photo, Danish Parlor, Love Machine. Customers were chased if they requested an actual massage. The short stretch between Ninth and Dyer Avenue, replaced by Theater Row in 1976, contained wondrous cesspools: French Palace, Body Rub Institute, The Studio $10 (“Complete satisfaction featuring the most beautiful conversationalists”), 42nd Street Playhouse Burlesk (“Home of the finest exotics in the business”), and the Mermaid bar.

Martin Hodas, Poppa of the Peeps, turned three stagnant bookstores into parlors, making his entry into massage in 1971. Hodas drilled holes in the walls of The Harem to keep tabs on money exchanges between girls and customers. Five grand per week was a typical gross at these dives. The cops estimated 90 percent of the storefronts and parlors were now mob-financed, as opposed to 1967, when Hodas financed everything. But the mobsters never bothered to deal directly with street prostitution, considering the pimps too stupid. When several black pimps opened parlors in 1971 without paying the mob, their locations were firebombed out of existence.

The “Minnesota Strip”—Eighth Avenue between 34th and 55th streets—picked up its nickname in 1972. Many hookers gave Minneapolis as their home city whenever asked, to the point of its becoming a cynical retort, though some undoubtedly told the truth. Every night through the mid-Seventies, more than a thousand hookers took up their designated posts on Eighth Avenue (this number would dwindle to a half dozen by 1982). The typical pross was required to make a $200 quota every night for her pimp, in $20 throws. There was no coming home until this minimum was reached, and if she spent overnight in the police bullpen, out she rolled without sleep till that $200 was pocketed.

Writer Gail Sheehy, who interviewed dozens of hookers in 1972, found the cycle often starting in midwestern states, and leading to the Square. Many were sweet-looking, smart young white mamas, with kids, some from respectable homes. The white girls, according to Sheehy and cops who ran the pross vans, were raised in predominately black neighborhoods, or from poor black-and-white suburbs outside capital cities—such as “Coon Rapids” near Minneapolis. Their introduction to sex was through black boys, and any teenage pregnancies that resulted in interracial offspring cast them out of their schools and towns as pariahs.

Finding work impossible to get, while carting her baby through hotel rooms, a girl might turn her first trick close to hometown. But a pross arrest there meant a year in prison and a $1,000 fine. Then, an old girlfriend in the same bind would return from New York, in fashionable threads, platform shoes, no kid. She glorifies the oh-so-wonderful family life she’s attained in New York, run by her “man.” Respectable high-rise apartment living, rent and clothes, affection doled out to each girl (on her night of the week, with all competing to be his “wife”—whoever happened to bring in the most money at the moment). Mr. Times Square Pimp, naturally, had sent this prospector home to
recruit
. Providing a baby-sitter and surrogate father image for her little pride and joy, the pimp as superstar, whom she stocks her fantasy future in,
frees
her to work, explains how she’ll be “working for us,” part of a
com-mun-it-tee.
He boffs her without a trace of emotion, cokes her up, breaks her in among his distinguished colleagues at the Westerly, and no matter how stuck-up and star-struck she is over her
man
, he drops her on a dime for the next young moneymaker. Thus, a role model that the street pross reverses ten times a night with her Johns.

To weak-kneed legions of frightened, unlaid men, she was a predator. As they stood naked she took command of their wallets, never disrobing, and issuing orders to come within five minutes into a rubber, or you’re out of luck, honey. But each Times Square summer brought out a new killer who practiced his psycho surgery upon prostitutes. And the pimps commonly beat and maimed their girls, some killing them.

Times Square landlords, some of them major real estate conglomerates, silently absorbed profits from prostitution with more stability than the mob, the pimps, and certainly the thousands of moneyless girls. Gail Sheehy decoded the buried puzzle of Times Square pross and porn landowners in 1972. The actual
landlord
for Hodas’ Harem massage parlor was Sol Goldman, of Goldman—DiLorenzo, one of the 1984
Forbes
400’s half-billionaires of real estate. Goldman’s holdings included the buildings of more than a dozen peeps, massage parlors, and pimp-hooker apartment houses. Ian Woodner, Madison Avenue builder of high social swim, feigned ignorance over owning the Raymona Hotel on Eighth, where a thousand tricks a day were turned. Dr. Alvin Bakst, renowned heart surgeon from Great Neck, secretly owned the Eros I fag theater on Eighth (Goldman owned the Eros II), along with six fleabag pross hotels and parlors. The Riese Brothers—insatiable land cannibals who would later carpet Manhattan in a locust invasion of fast-food outlets—owned the Lark Hotel lease, a massive pross operation. Edward R. Finch II was principal officer and attorney of the corporation owning 105-109 West 42nd—Peepalive, Roman Massage Parlor, Rector Books, and Bob’s Bargain Books, considered the most depraved porn stores in Times Square. Finch was the son of a New York State Appellate Court judge, and the uncle of Edward Finch Cox—then-President Nixon’s son-in-law.

On Sheehy’s list of porn landowners in 1972 were members of The Association for a Better New York, Park Avenue banks, and members of the mayor’s own Times Square Development Council. When Mayor Lindsay announced his coordinated attacks on everything dirty in Times Square, it’s no wonder nothing budged.

The Office of Midtown Enforcement is a tactical, twenty-member legal SWAT team whose investigators fan out into every layer of vice in Times Square. They were created in 1976, the pivotal year for Times Square redevelopment, to deal with the unique problems of midtown: specifically sex, although drug dens, numbers, gambling, and after-hours joints would also tumble. (Of all the establishments mentioned previously from 1972, only the Eros I remains today.) They were given more powers than all previous cleanup forces combined. Where pross hotel operators had previously been able to tie up prosecutions in court or ignore their cease-and-desist orders, the OME achieved permanent closures, and heavy fines. Midtown Enforcement’s orange sticker slapped across a door, accompanied by police padlocks, meant that location had spurted its last orgasm. They reduced the number of midtown sex joints from 121 in 1978 to 65 in 1983. They closed some forty massage parlors, then enacted a zoning amendment permanently banning new ones.

Here was a bureaucratic cooperation of city agents, an uncolorful group, but with mayoral authority. These white men dealt in graphs, charts, and statistics, using photo surveillance and “conditions investigators” to keep tabs on every morally suspect address in midtown. All data was computerized, every last health violation issued against some peep for semen on the walls. A typical OME task force visit included a buildings inspector, a fire marshal, a Health Department sanitarian, and a cop, all poised over their violations pads. Pinball arcades and peeps buckled under, as zoning regulations were enforced to the letter. The heat even hit newsstands that had leased space to glove or cosmetics peddlers.

Topless bars were the most crooked “dry hustle” dives in Times Square. More insidious than massage parlors, they advertised in the
Daily News
and
Post
sports pages, dangling the false promise of sex, liquor, and chorus lines of beautiful starlets. Even the great novelist and street wizard Nelson Algren, in his twilight, was snagged by the oldest Eighth Avenue topless scam: He was hit with a $30 tab the moment after okaying a drink for a leotarded B-girl on the adjacent barstool. Refusing to pay, Algren called their bluff amid threats. The 250-pound bouncer finally admonished, “Pops, you come around here again, I’m going to get another old man to whip your ass.”

The slickest string of topless tourist traps—Guys & Dolls, Adam & Eve, Wild West, and the Living Room—were owned by Sol Sitzer. Suckers were herded into booths and encircled by B-girls chanting “Buy-me-a-drink.” Credit cards were billed for fake champagne and $175 trips to an “Erotica Lounge” or “Garden of Eden” room “where anything could happen.” Nothing ever did—short of shelling out $500. The B-girls’ object was to get the chump so hot to trot, while buying her $10 cocktails (water) every five minutes, that he was ready to sign anything, and handed over his American Express.

A former manager of one “store,” who “looked the other way” as he sacrificed his ethics for a $550-a-week job, said Sitzer “would scream and curse at me while his stooges stood by and gloated.” Sitzer masterminded an atmosphere of suspicion; employees’ jobs rested on how well they could rat each other out. Though treachery was the B-girls’ trade, this manager tried to “separate the sharks from the guppies,” earning the rep of a “lover boy.” He was fired, as was anyone without a thieving nature.

The Manhattan DA and Midtown Enforcement gutted the Sitzer bars in 1982, and Sitzer was sentenced eighteen months to four and a half years for police bribery attempts and credit card fraud.

But Midtown Enforcement had also produced thousands of aimless pross arrests, and shuttered a dozen honestly run, corporate-account East Side spas—like Tahitia and Caesar’s Retreat—before going after the topless-bar scourge. Having now knocked the sex industry to the ropes, they branched out to battle other social ills. What with fleeing tourism and corporate abandonment, the Office of Midtown Enforcement’s goal was to return Times Square’s real estate to “good commercial uses.” This white-bread vision was realized to chilling effect in 1984, when the city approved four corporate skyscrapers for construction smack dab at the intersection of 42nd Street and Times Square.

Principal among groups formed around Times Square’s “improvement” was the 42nd Street Development Corporation, created in 1976 “to rescue West 42nd Street from four decades of misuse and neglect... to reverse 42nd Street’s fall from grace... creating in time a river-to-river Grand Boulevard that would become a magnet for private investment, visitors, jobs and tax revenues, and have a major impact on the economy of New York City and the Tri-State region.”

In the Times Square of 1976, this was a tall order. But these were dreams of a board of directors that included Father Rappleyea, pastor of Holy Cross, Gerald Schoenfeld, Shubert Organization chairman, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, herself granting $25,000 toward financing. All of them had a cultural and nostalgic sense of history. Their original fund-raising proposal listed the wonders of 42nd Street starting at the United Nations, the Chrysler Building, the library... then stopping dead at the “physical decay... feeding and providing cover for human decay—vagrants, pimps, pushers, prostitutes—and it is spreading. West 42nd Street is a cancer; it threatens the life of everything around it.” They preferred the “nice naughtiness” of Times Square’s past, evoking lost shrines, “many behind peeled paint and tinned windows, waiting to be rediscovered.” The four decades of neglect 42nd Street suffered presumably began during the Depression. All the legit Broadway theaters on 42nd went into foreclosure. Most were acquired by the Brandts, who converted them to movie houses, instituting a policy of double features for ten cents in the morning, fifteen cents at night.

The Development Corp. immediately took possession of the Crossroads Building at Broadway and 42nd. A sawdust peep scumatorium, where kiddie porn had been available, was evicted and replaced by a police substation. They commissioned a trompe l’oeil painting ten stories high over the Crossroads exterior, mirroring the old Times Tower across the street, as it appeared in 1904; it had been paneled over in 1964 by Allied Chemical. The cops and the painting, both temporary, were “symbolic,” they said, of things to come.

The not-for-profit corporation then restored the blue-green Art Deco McGraw-Hill landmark, West 42nd’s tallest building. Totally evacuated during the pross boom, the 1930s-style offices were now fully rerented. They created a new headquarters for the Mounted Unit, housing twenty-eight horses in a West 42nd Street police stable. Dozens of developments by others followed in domino fashion. The old Knickerbocker Hotel was reconditioned with quaint office space, its pictorial history laid out in the lobby, as in McGraw-Hill’s. The 1978 opening of Manhattan Plaza, 1,700-unit subsidized housing for actors, anchored the street for cabarets and restaurants nearby—the “New Hell’s Kitchen.”