Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (25 page)

“This is a family operation, we don’t use dirty words,” the boss explains. “The worst offenders wanting off-color headlines are women. Two Spanish women once had me write something in Spanish about a guy, calling him a fag. They sent it anonymously. He came here with a dick. The cop grilled me to identify these women, while the guy went wild. Now, I make everyone translate.”

“We won’t print ‘fuck’ or ‘shit,’” adds the counter guy, “but we will print stuff about farts.” The counter provides twenty outdated suggestions: __________
DINES WITH ROCK HUDSON;
__________
MOBBED BY SCREAMING GIRLS;
__________
TO STAR ON ED SULLIVAN T.V. SHOW

“Most people have an intuitive feeling not to ask for dirty words, thankfully,” says the counter guy. “I want to give ‘em what they want, make ‘em happy. My most memorable headline was for a guy whose girlfriend was afraid of water:
L. NORRIS GOES DOWN
&
SETS NEW DEPTH RECORD OF
6000
FEET ... WITHOUT SWALLOWING
. The boss wouldn’t let me hang it up, wasn’t general enough.”

“How much dis booshit cos’?” demands a young Negro, barging into the tiny shop.

“It’s four dollars.... And it’s not bullshit,” says the political science major.

The Ol’ In And Out

The Doll Theater, at Seventh and 48th, revolves around an emotionless palooka ramming his three-quarters hard-on into some broad’s snatch atop a pink-spotlighted mattress tilted toward the audience. That is the whole of its theatrical endeavor. But, says the projectionist, an old junker who thinks he runs the show, “Video is killing our whole business. I give this only two more years.”

Featured tonight at eight o’clock are Passion Young and Shark. “My favorite place was the old Follies Burlesque,” says Passion, where she debuted in Times Square. “They watched me dance and said, ‘You’re fat, but you’re damn sexy,’ and they booked me steady a year.”

Shark, a newcomer to dicking onstage, comes from Cuba, perhaps a gift from Castro’s boat-people exchange. He doesn’t speak English. Though Passion claims to have a whole burlesque wardrobe (“from my own designer”), she won’t break out the costumes here. They’re not paying enough. Couples who fuck onstage get $10 per show. A few years back it was $15.

“It’s not worth it to get better-lookin’ stars,” says the projectionist, in his decrepit booth. “You lose money paying their expenses and salaries; the theater don’t even seat a hundred. The best way to make a profit is with what we got now, ‘cause it’s a losing business anyway.

“I gotta worry ‘bout the guy outside clippin’ me,” he continues, stuck back here running the huge reel of rickety stag porn and announcing the “love team” every ninety minutes. “These guys should be grateful for a job. But the kind of man you get is one who can’t keep a job,” he says of the box office barker. “Same problem with stage couples. We’d rather have them married or living together. I don’t like that boy-meets-girl crap—two hustlers who meet on the street, usually on some stuff, they come in here to do a few shows and get some money in their pockets. Then they’re out after two days. That’s why we always have a standby.”

The Doll keeps a live-sex girl working at the New Paris, a sucker’s burlesque dive two blocks down where they offer “private shows.” They call her in when some fly-by-night live team deserts their engagement. The barker comes in and
schtups
her onstage.

“Wednesday I call ‘China Night.’ That’s when all the waiters come up from Chinatown, but don’t ask me why. I try and get good couples for that night,” he says, dismissing most performers as “crap.”

Passion does perform with enthusiasm, eliciting a groan or two among the thirty patrons as she slurps up Shark’s tool. The projectionist works the pink spotlight, perfectly framing Shark’s schlong as it slips into Passion’s squack. And that’s what the whole fuss is about.

Twenty-Four Hours On the Square (Part Three)

Greatest Of Grease

There’s no better way to fuel up for our evening tour of the Square than with a charcoal-scorched, four-dollar side of Times Square beef. Tad’s Steaks, at 50th and Seventh, provides the greatest of grease, from which you can emerge with full belly and slimy hands to descend upon the cheap thrills of the Square. There are five Tad’s Steaks in Times Square. Many a derelict would be surprised to learn that Tad’s operates coast to coast. While their arch competition, Flame Steaks, around the corner from every Tad’s, chars the meat, it is a pale performance compared to Tad’s, where you observe the world’s cheapest steak devoured by an infernal grill. Tad’s is the Lutèce of Skid Row. But part of the charm and ambience of Tad’s—for anyone who leaves a few bites—is watching a derelict descend upon your leftovers the moment you leave the table.

Varsity Dancing, Satin Ballroom, and Tango Palace, all at the top of the Square, are sordid anachronisms, persisting a few decades after they died a natural death. They are rotting, musty ballrooms. At Tango Palace, Brazilian transsexuals eke out a living as $20 dance partners, dry-humping the occasional geek who braves the ominous staircase. The trannies are lined up in shadow behind the wood railing. Same as Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck, who were once dime-a-dance girls here at 1587 Broadway, founded 1910. Sinatra once played here. Tango Palace had a six-piece band and seventy hostesses, struggling actresses in sequined gowns who stared off into the distance when some GI accidentally pawed her fanny. Occasionally, some old mook comes in today and actually wants to tango. So they still keep a few tango records in the juke.

After nightfall, the billboard of Popeye’s Chicken on 48th and Seventh amazingly transforms to a Negro Popeye, through lighting effects. Fifty Japanese businessmen from the Sheraton Centre line up outside the World 49th Street Theater for
All American Girls.
Many open their tall wallets, chock full of freshly minted, unfolded fifties, long before their turns buying a six-dollar ticket. They are the favored customers of the sex industry, from peeps to bordellos, the biggest tippers, the least troublesome.

The former location of the World, across the street, was converted to a family theater. Under the stewardship of Sweetheart Theatres, a porno chain (“Bring Your Sweetheart”), the World had debuted
Deep Throat
1972. Exactly a decade later, Sweetheart sold the theater to new owners who promptly switched the bill to Walt Disney’s animated
Robin Hood.

Less trivial in movie history was the 1914 opening of the Strand, a million-dollar cathedral at Broadway and 47th. With three thousand seats and a thirty-piece orchestra, it was the first theater in New York designed exclusively for silent movies. Not a trace of the heavenly Strand exists at the RKO Warner Twin now on the block. Even more dastardly was the fate of the Criterion. Its locale was originally part of Oscar Hammerstein’s Olympia, built in 1895, the pioneer theater on land that was soon to become Times Square. The Olympia consumed the entire 44th Street to 45th Street block on the east side of Broadway; it contained three massive and ornate theaters, which quickly led to bankruptcy. Vitagraph purchased one of the three in 1914—the Criterion—and it remained a Broadway movie mainstay for generations. Today’s “Criterion Center,” however, has been butchered into six claustrophobic multiplex screens. Several RKO Twins on Broadway take this a step further—some of their reconverted “theaters” economize space by stacking the rows on a steep incline, directly before the screen. Patrons of this scam must hold their armrests—one slip on a Milk Dud could send them tumbling down to their death.

Leighton’s, at 1571 Broadway, sells bland, middle-of-the-road men’s apparel. You’d never figure that in the 1950s it contained high-priced Broadway flash for blues singers, gamblers, and pimps. The quality spot for a Billy Eckstein roll-collar shirt, or alligator shoes. A jaywalk across from Leighton’s is the “tkts” booth in Duffy Square, selling half-price leftovers for that night’s shows. This triangle originally contained the statue of “Virtue.” This was a forty-foot miniature of Liberty, erected by The Association of New York in 1909 “to challenge indiscriminate abuse and criticism of New York City.” Her shield read
Our City,
and had dark blotches symbolizing the mudslinging it warded off, with her plaque inscribed
Defeat Slander.

The old neon façades of Broadway’s numerous Playland arcades remain untouched, but video has obsoleted pinball. Here are schlock art galleries; flash T-shirt-poster shops; dozens of bargain-bidding Sephardic camera-electronics gyp stores—the same ghetto blaster here might be half-price next door. Fat guys with cigars are slowly being replaced by Third Worlders.

In advertising, Japanese electronics dominate today’s galactic center of Times Square. The voltage is peaking now at ten o’clock. American beverages and designer jeans are outjazzed by superior billboards for Panasonic, Fuji, JVC, Toshiba, Nikon. But none have the cherished vulgarity of the three-dimensional, pre-pop art engineering wonders of Times Square legend. Only in recent times was the Camel Smoker scrapped. He blew several perfect smoke rings each minute (through Con Ed steam pipes) for decades—“And never coughed once,” said his builder. Maxwell House coffee dripped an eternity past its last drop; Little Lulu hopped eight stories high to pull out a Kleenex; the 10,000-gallon Pepsi-Cola waterfall, above Bond clothing and the Criterion, was an entire block long. Immigrants of the World War I era stared for hours at such spectaculars, entranced by American know-how. (All were creations of either Artkraft-Straus, or Leigh.)

A guy wearing a sticker that said “I need a better job” recently handed out flyers for one of the topless clip joints on the side street of 45th, between Sixth and Seventh. Lucky Lady advertised “$13 Complete,” while a baggy-pants bouncer frisked customers at the entrance. The girls in the waiting lounge were the best on the block, but the session wasn’t “Complete” until the customer’s choice was greased with another $25. Lucky Lady was busted every year. It always reopened under a new incarnation, such as Her Place, Harlow’s, the Silver Slipper, the Blue Garter. Across the street were scuzzier parlors, like Heaven’s Paradise and International Rooms, charging a flat total of $10. Illegal aliens from South America turned nonstop tricks on stained mattresses in cardboard-walled cubicles. Grunts, groans, and cursing filled the air as the poor man found his paradise. Smiling black messenger boys, in between deliveries, counted out loose change to make the $10 entrance; they exited five minutes later, euphoric over a taste of syphilitic pussy. Next door, at the Luxor Baths, in a condemned hotel, hookers themselves ran the manual elevators up to the ninth floor.

But the Grapevine took the cake, as the block’s crowning wonder. Here was the smoky hangout of Times Square’s several hundred pre-op transsexuals. He-she-its. Some were astounding sex changes, the more gifted of whom appeared on the Grapevine’s cabaret stage. Bringing down the house one night was a remarkable early 1960s look-alike who pouted through the song “I Wanna Be Jackie Onassis.” Cheesecake patriotism.

Like a huge can of Raid, Midtown Enforcement wiped out the entire side street of 45th.

Riese’s Leases

Lindy’s restaurants are a perfect example of the phony commercialism filling the vacuum caused by porn closures. The original Lindy’s from 1921 to 1969 had been the most revered hangout on Broadway—where even a starving comedian could order the seventy-five-cent Fruit Compote, pass the front-center tables manned by the heavy funny men, and be “seen.” Sadly, rights to the name were acquired by the Riese Brothers, ten years after its demise. They opened a spate of mundane, overpriced tourist traps bearing no resemblance to the original Lindy’s, which each purports to be. Sorry tourists at the 44th and Broadway branch stare at posters of comic legends who once hurled one-liners and insults at each other at the old restaurant. Their quotes appear on wallpaper—public relations remarks made forty years ago about an entirely different restaurant. At a time before a sandwich, salad, and drink totaled $27, a cheeseburger $8.

Each of eighteen sandwiches employs the good name of a Buster Keaton, Milton Berle, even Richard Pryor, along with “Laurel & Hardy Combos,” “Will Rogers Steakburgers,” “Jack Benny Eggs,” or “Groucho & Harpo Juices & Fruits.” Storefront billboards recall the rapport between famous comics and legendary Lindy’s waiters, noted for their wit. (Bing Crosby: “Do you serve crabs here?” Lindy’s waiter: “We serve anyone. Sit down.”)

“I have no jokes,” states the poor waitress at today’s pathetic “Lindy’s.” “But you should go next door for dessert, the prices here are ridiculous.”

In the esoteric world of Times Square junk food, a division might be made between good and bad. Nathan’s, Barking Fish, Tad’s, Popeye’s—these contain some element of style or soul. But like a locust invasion of Times Square comes an unscrupulous influx of hit-or-miss chains, overseen by one family. The Riese Organization, which operates as landlord and franchisee over many hundreds of locations, are the ghouls of Times Square junk food. Their cannibalistic real estate conquests are aimed at building a four-thousand-restaurant conglomerate. At Penn Station, for instance, they own a dozen restaurants, yet all are surreptitiously served from one central kitchen. On the block of 44th and Broadway, they run Häa-gen-Dazs, Roy Rogers, Godfather’s, and Lindy’s, side by side, with similar clusters ad nauseam through the city.

The Rieses disguise their holdings under a hundred shell companies. Their Times Square storefronts are standardized franchises, with bored ghetto workers who hate their jobs answering to suit-and-tie managers. In 1983, the Rieses began another onslaught with twenty-five Godfather’s Pizzas (“A Pizza You Can’t Refuse”) in midtown, fifty in the suburbs. Thirty new Roy Rogerses were slated for Manhattan, while they took over seventeen Chock Full O’ Nuts for $62 million. The fallen Schrafft’s and Lindy’s, Ma Bell’s, Boss, Childs, Brew Burger, the Bagel Factory, Pete Smith’s Hall of Fame—people don’t eat at these joints for pleasure. Rather, to the hungry lunch crowds, the Rieses are fast-food Big Brother, peering out from every corner in another disguise. Junk food at its worst.