Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (26 page)

And as the Rieses monopolize the lunch counters, the public use of Times Square has come under the private-developer’s ax. Historic real estate is overtaken and emasculated by modern-day robber barons eager to extract as many dollars per square foot as they can lobby for themselves. “People are still hung up on the goddamn corny image of what’s there on Times Square, and yet Times Square is horrible,” said Atlanta developer John Portman in 1973. “There’s not one thing great about it.” And indeed, eleven years later, Portman’s Marriott Hotel, like the adjacent Astor Plaza, looms up over 45th Street like an extraordinary vision of concrete and corporate ugliness. Ironically, not one peep, scumatorium, or topless bar was razed for the Marriott—just the Morosco and Helen Hayes theaters.

The most inherently corrupt and immoral power group since Tammany Hall—real estate speculators—circle like buzzards above the dying Forty Deuce. These are not visionary architects, but cold snakes who exist only to amass fortunes through land. They don’t need art, or fun, or spontaneity. With each demolished theater, they destroy more of New York’s history. Cheaply constructed, inflation-era skyscrapers of glass, cement, and plasterboard replace finely tuned, homey theatrical inns, one tower obstructing the view of the next. The reigning architecture of New York has become corporate.

The $1.6 billion Redevelopment could make the whole sense and place of Times Square disappear into the all-connecting Mall of America—a chic, commercialized, phony shopping center, with an insincere wink toward its past, like the South Street Seaport. Super rents for 30,000-square-foot floors could drive out dance studios, agents, costume and tailor shops, all the little guys who spice up Broadway.

“Architects and planners, as much as they try, cannot design urban spontaneity,” states one architect, opposing the plan.

Even the
Times
wonders, “Is there a legitimate and irreplaceable street life on 42nd St. that would be wiped out?”

Real estate values make three-story theater buildings obsolete, but the legacy continues across 44th Street, where Broadway reigns. God bless Sardi’s Restaurant, unchanged in its splendor for fifty years, the symbol of old Broadway glory.

The armed forces recruiting station for all four services is an anachronism of the military’s recognition of Times Square. It sits on the island before the Times Tower, where three-story-high cash registers became war chests for bond rallies during two world wars. People once signed up to defend America here. George M. Cohan made this pavement synonymous with patriotism, having written and performed “It’s a Grand Old Flag” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy” in the nabe. Now, there are more who sign up for the Sweep-Up Project here, where recovering alcoholics take to the Broadway gutters with Hefty bags.

The 375-foot
Times
Building, No. 1 Times Square, was constructed in 1904 as the new home of the paper. Adolph Ochs embedded his presses fifty-five feet below street level, under August Belmont’s IRT subway, built to coincide with the
Times
at this intersection. This subterrain has long been a silent cavern, last used by Hotaling’s News Agency on 42nd Street to store international papers. Take it away, Brooks:

In 1964, the Allied Chemical Corporation bought the Times Building that had presided over the neighborhood for 60 years. Modeled after a Renaissance Florentine tower, the Times Building had a grace and elegance and seemed to take pleasure in being part of an affable community. The Allied Chemical Corporation stripped off the original stonework and junked the decor and covered the steel frame with blank marble slabs. It is a cold, self-possessed building that represents a cold, self-possessed industry and it is totally detached from the crowds that stream through Times Square.

Feelings

11
A.M.
Back out on 42nd Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. The New Bryant Theater is managed by Mac, a cigar-chomping huckster from the old school. “I got a great act in from Chicago,” he says, leading his guest down the aisle proudly. “Sit down, relax and enjoy.”

Some fifty heads remain insanely silent as the stag film blacks out and live sex is about to occur. The “act” begins when red spots go up over a mattress in front of the screen. A chubby slut muddles through her striptease, then calls to a shill in the audience to come up and have sex. He is unable to even feign surprise over his odd good fortune, but merely obliges, zips off his clothes onstage, and runs through some standard fore-play (to the soundtrack of “Feelings”). He inserts his semi-erection and they perform the ol’ cock-in-cunt routine, same as the first day it began here, nothing’s changed, not even the sheets. The stud has trouble keeping it hard and goes limp by the end of the twenty-minute set, as if on cue. There is no applause. The stag projector abruptly flickers back on. “You gotta give ‘em an X-movie too, they love it,” says Mac.

Then Mac strolls into the dressing rooms to check his acts. Crowded into a narrow space are three couples who travel the live-sex circuit around the country. One of the couples feels they are “sexual pioneers,” risking arrest and performing in a medium that they insist has artistic merit.

Outside the theater, a tape loop barks incessantly about hot sex inside. “My boss swears the speaker makes ‘em stop and look,” says the box office cashier, who looks suicidally depressed. “We got fined $250 once for noise pollution.

“I know the troublemakers on the street, not to let ‘em in. Usually the three-card guys. They’ll offer to pay, then stay inside for hours, looking for marks, or let in a partner through the exit.”

The Bryant’s lease will be up any time now, but the landlord won’t renew. Same goes for the three sex theaters across the street. Up on Broadway they charge $5, while the live-sexers down here are $4 or less. “Forty-second Street,” says the box office. “Gotta keep with the crowd.”

Next door, an occasional customer braves the winding mugger’s staircase that leads up to Delicate Touch, at 140 West 42nd. A sign advertises “Topless Shines.” Sure enough, a corridor of makeshift shoeshine stands, polish tins and all the trimmings. An old black fellow addresses customers from behind the counter: “It cost $5 for a girl and a room for fifteen minutes. Anything extra is negotiable.... But if you fool enough to wanna stay out here and have her shine yo’ shoes, that be fine with me.”

Out on the strip, in front of the Bryant, a squealing dog man walks by, barking and whimpering without a trace of healthy brain tissue in his head. Two scantily clad white teenyboppers have the audacity to walk down this route, a subliminal search for niggerman trouble. “They your daughters,” jokes one disgusto to another. Then an aspiring Superfly jumps out blocking their path and poses Mr. Universe style, but the chicks walk around it. Another couple from the Bryant stage, slammin’ it to each other only minutes before, exit the theater after their eleven o’clock show, walking arm in arm down 42nd like Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch, out on a summer stroll—which they are.

Across the street is the Times Square Boxing Club, where Boom Boom Mancini works out every morn. An old barker hands out cards that say “you Are the King.” Holiday Hostesses looms above, at 113 West Forty Deuce. The elevator bank is Art Deco, reminiscent of a finer day, long before dishonest whores took over. Only one tiny room exists for suckers who believe they are indeed “the King.” Angry ghetto chicks, after extracting a $10 entrance fee, will roll out a filthy rug for the King, tell him to “make himself comfortable,” then
dare
him to try something, muthafucka. Sex rarely occurs.

A young white guy runs the elevator. His entire job is to press the second-floor button whenever gentleman callers arrive. Every five minutes he sprays the elevator cab with Evergreen air freshener. “I’m a forest ranger out on the range,” he sighs, inhaling deep. “If I smoke enough pot and spray out a can, I’m a forest ranger.”

Nedick’s, on Seventh and 42nd—the southwest corner of the Crossroads of the World—has maintained its mediocrity on this spot since the early Twenties. The old Grant’s Bar, a few doors over, didn’t survive the ages with Nedick’s. Described by the city as “a center for intense criminal activity,” Grant’s became a Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1974. The skells then took over Topp’s Bar, a block east on 42nd, which in turn choked in its own filth by 1982. Forty-second Street’s renowned street scum currently toast glasses at the Golden Dollar Topless Bar, within spitting distance of Nedick’s.

Which brings us to the peak of a hot Saturday night for ten thousand honest slum kids. Where else can an eighteen-year-old A&P stockboy from The Bronx escape with his girl on a Saturday night date for twenty bucks? They hop a D train down to 42nd, all snazzy and dressed to kill. This is a heavy date, and the boy wants to impress. Charcoal greasy sirloins
upstairs
at Tad’s, at $4.39 a side, including rubbery garlic bread, watery onions, and baked spud with melted lard! They set a candle on the table and block out the world. They stroll arm in arm down 42nd, their pick of fourteen movies before them, at $3.50 per ticket; the rest of the city charges $5. It might be
cinema du
kung-fu
(Kill or Be Killed),
slice-em-up (J
Spit on Your Grave),
black exploitation reruns
(The Mack),
violent sexploitation
(Barbed Wire Dolls)
or first-run Hollywood
(Breakin’ II: Electric Boogaloo)
.

Movied-out afterward, at eleven-thirty they might pick from a dozen Playlands, where a photo-booth souvenir costs a buck for four poses. Finally, they take a neon suntan under the Godzilla-size Japanese display ads, and with his Johnson rising, he embraces her closely for a $3 color Polaroid, on the advice of a cultured street photographer. Ah, ghetto romance.

“Everybody knows it’s gonna go, it’s just when,” says an old, irritable stagehand, sipping a midnight coffee at Grand Luncheonette, 229 West 42nd. “Those theaters coulda stood another hundred years, if it wasn’t for the real estate. I’ve worked in each one.”

The old stagehand claims an elevator contraption built by Houdini for his Disappearing Elephant lies dormant and forgotten under the Victory Theater stage. “That whole side’ll come down first,” he says, pointing at the south side of 42nd Street, “everything but the Candler Building.” Though the plan calls for saving at least seven theaters, he doesn’t believe it for a second. Even the New Amsterdam, once the neighborhood’s Sistine Chapel, will go. “They found out the steel’s bad, it has to come down. They just won’t say.

“On this side,” the old hand continues, pointing north, “we’ll be lucky to save just the Lyric, the Selwyn, and the Apollo. Apollo’s just like it was sixty-five years ago, I remember.”

The old stagehand saw them paint over Abbott and Costello’s graffiti when they restored the Apollo a few years ago. Although showing movies now, “It’s ready to convert to legit on twenty-four hours notice.”

In the years following a gruesome Chicago fire in 1902, all theaters were prohibited from having any construction above—thus, the theatrical homes along 42nd Street, with no skyscrapers squatting over them. Three-story buildings rotting on the hottest commercial real estate in the world. Those theaters have gotten away with murder, sitting there with all those “air rights” over them for eighty years. And allowed to become a slum carnival, no less. They’ve had their laugh.

So long, sucker.

TIMES SQUARE PAST

The following pictures are an aside to this book
—
not a photo record of the chapters. Several shots, taken
in 1986, may vary, slightly from description in
Tales
,
which deals primarily with the, years 1978–1984.

Pity the sky with nothing but stars. Montage of electric signs on Broadway in 1932 (when theater had already passed its pinnacle).

Broadway traffic in 1938, facing the Times Tower. Archaeologists with pickaxes may one day say, “There appears to have been some kind of public center here.”