Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (43 page)

The neighborhood has seen over $4 billion in private redevelopment. Rescuing the New Amsterdam Theater, where
The Lion
King
played, was an epic achievement.
Mary Poppins
plays there now. Not even a real Phantom could have survived in its basement catacombs sprouting huge mushrooms in a stagnant pond with fifty feral cats. Disney anted up $8 million, prompting the State of New York to put up another $34 million for rehabilitation. The New Amsterdam regained its virginity, looking finer than it did on opening night in 1903. (The befuddled Disney guide who led my tour announced that “the theater began showing kung-fu movies in 1936.”)

The final exhibit in Madame Tussaud’s new wax museum on 42nd is a solemn World Trade Center tribute—firemen hoisting the American flag. The old Times Square would have featured jumpers splattering onto the sidewalk. Madame Tussaud’s is pitifully out of touch with the old Times Square’s Zeitgeist. Madame makes an attempt at good taste with excruciatingly inappropriate wax celebrities, like TV weatherman Al Roker, Ru Paul and Donald Trump. Now that’s bad taste.

In contrast to the $22 wax ticket, 42nd Street enjoyed a brief appearance by the Chashama arts complex, a non-profit performance art organization. This stretch of reincarnated $4 sideshows put the block to good use. Real estate baron Douglas Durst lent the four storefronts to his producer daughter Anita. It was an altruistic experiment for the public good, a rare gesture amongst developers. Anchored by the Bindlestiff Cirkus and Palace of Variety, vaudeville-burlesque returned briefly to Times Square.

A national renaissance in burlesque was predicted by Morton Minsky in
Tales
(Chapter 2) and it’s happening now. This neo-burlesque, sans gynecology,
is
for your aunt from Dubuque. Especially if she’s a lesbian. But Times Square always belonged to the Common Man. Lord only knows who that is today. Outside of Sardi’s, there are no more cozy private phone booths—occupied by what A.J. Liebling coined “telephone booth Indians”—the once-ubiquitous Bud Abbott types who operated around Broadway.

After Mayor Giuliani left office, a lunatic’s soapbox reopened on one of Broadway’s traffic islands. The deranged “lost tribe” of black Hebrews, for instance, in robes and combat boots, once again harangued the white man that the day was coming when he will be chained in slavery. These
shvartzim
were ordered to take a hike during the Giuliani years, but reemerged with Bloomberg.

Since the Cold War began, Times Square has figured in the collective imagination as the nuclear bullseye for Armageddon. (By my figuring, only Show World, cockroaches and Keith Richards will survive.) Only a mayoral fanatic of such conflicted moral fiber as Giuliani could make the city this safe. The fact that decent Americans like your aunt from Dubuque can once again stroll safely down 42nd Street is a miracle. Women, children and callow fellows are no longer assaulted by disembowelment show cards, fuck holes and Riker’s Island inmates on 42nd Street. Sex is no longer cheap and dirty. New York is no longer a town without foreplay. High life and low life do not coexist in corporate America.

“Retailtainment”—
see the show, buy the crap
—is the new pornography of Times Square. Times Square refuses to become fossilized, but it no longer boasts the virility of Satan. There’s no good reason a designated red-light district couldn’t have remained behind subdued storefronts on at least one block, say 42nd between 6th and 7th.

But Giuliani’s zoning restrictions were enacted in 1995. Hundreds of Russian, Polish and Slavic Live Nude Girls born behind the Iron Curtain were suddenly liberated from behind the peep show curtain. The notorious “60/40” law went into effect, all but crushing the porn right out of Times Square. “Adult-use” establishments had to stock at least sixty percent non-sexual filler. And the more patriotic the better: I
NY tees, statues of Liberty, Empire State Buildings, cutout Popeye and Erik Estrada videos in Spanish, and other clearance-item tourist crap.

Times Square also saw the demise of two-fisted 8th Avenue Irish bars. Downey’s and Jimmy Ray’s—gone. No more steaming corned beef & cabbage plates for the working man at Blarney Stone or Shandon Star. Smith’s on 45th Street became a white-collar shrine just by nature of its being the last blue-collar holdout of its kind. The last Howard Johnson’s on 46th & Broadway (“the new Algonquin roundtable,” according to magician Penn Gillette, who presided over fried-clam dinner parties there) was shut in 2006. Brave octogenarians, Jack and Morris Rubenstein, held out as long as they could, proclaiming that Times Square still needed its last Howard Johnson’s (there once were five).

Joe Franklin’s 8th Avenue restaurant proved that TV’s very first talk-show host was still alive. Broadway hadn’t had a greeter of that caliber since Jack Dempsey’s closed at the Brill Building. Apparently, Joe rushed about wearing a raincoat, as if perennially late for appointments. “Gotta go, gotta go,” he greeted patrons.

For those few of us who cared about the fate of 42nd Street’s golden age theaters, there were positive results. The exterior of the New Victory Theater now resembles its 1899 façade as Hammerstein’s Victoria. The New Vic is now a 499-seat (one seat less than B’way minimum) cutting-edge children’s vaudeville theater. The Vic and the New Amsterdam are the two greatest saves on the block. The Ford Center for the Performing Arts combined locations of the Lyric (opened in 1903) and the Apollo (1920) into one giant new theater. The Ford, like its namesake in Detroit, can only accommodate mass-market blockbusters. The 43rd Street side restored the lovely façade of the Lyric. The Apollo’s boxes, ceiling dome and proscenium were restored to the Ford. The Ford Center is run with cold auto-industry efficiency.

More amazing was the transfer of the Empire Theater, which opened in 1912 as the Eltinge, later to become Times Square’s beloved Laffmovie house in 1942. The 3,700-ton Empire was literally rolled on rails 170 feet west to become reincarnated as the lobby and mezzanine for the AMC 25 cinema. Its terra-cotta exterior, plaster ceilings and proscenium survive. The same ceilings under which Clark Gable, Laurence Olivier, Abbott & Costello and Jackie Gleason debuted on 42nd Street.

But each era in Times Square reflects its own time. Rest assured, 42nd Street will return to a futuristic squalor for our descendants to enjoy. Some apocalyptic, Disneyfied world of sleaze and pornography and blight and ruin lurks in the future. It’s genetically encoded into the urban ecosystem called Times Square.

Josh Alan Friedman

Dallas, Texas

2007