Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (7 page)

TELL ALL
THE
GANG
ON
42
^ND
STREET!

The Princess of 42nd Street

Fay Gold, an actress who lives on the outskirts of Times Square, has been a Public Library member all her life. When she was a kid, they opened the glass cases in the children’s section for her to gaze at original editions. Today, she rides the bus across 42nd Street, since it is unwalkable for a woman in her late seventies. The last time she tried, her purse was snatched, and though some Good Samaritans caught the bandit, a cop snapped at her to shut up when filing a report. She’s been mugged six times in the Square, feeling a surreal sensation, as if a film crew were shooting it. But each time she rides the M-106 bus across 42nd to the library, she reconstructs the same panorama from her childhood. “It’s still my street, in my mind.”

In 1915, at the age of eight, Fay ran her father’s newsstand at Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street. It was out on the sidewalk, in front of Jimmy Kelly’s Saloon. When school let out at three o’clock, she donned a little change-apron and relieved her father, a stern Russian immigrant, who went back to their tenement on 41st Street to have dinner and sleep. The man in the smokeshop with the wooden Indian outside kept an eye on Fanny, as Fay was then called, but nobody ever stole money from the cashbox. The customers were kindly people from the flourishing theater community who knew Fanny and her father. This was Times Square’s aristocratic era, before Prohibition, before honky-tonk emerged out of the Depression, a twenty-five-year epoch, before the grand theaters of 42nd Street converted to B-movie grinders.

Fanny’s newsstand customers spilled out of the New Amsterdam, where the Ziegfeld
Follies
of 1915 featured $100,000 worth of costume changes, paraded by a harem of robust glamour girls, giving off an elegant illusion of sin. The Art Nouveau interior of the theater contained boudoirs for ladies, a lavish smoking room for men, carved furniture, a messenger service. Ziegfeld opened the Aerial Gardens on the roof that year, debuting his
Midnight Frolic
show, which ran until 1922. The Candler Theater, a.k.a. Harris, had just opened, managed by George M. Cohan, at 236 West, in the same building as the Coca-Cola Company. The Eltinge, the Liberty, the Lyric, and the Republic were all thriving young theaters on the block, whose audiences Fanny marveled at. Gentry emerged from carriages, autos, and trolley cars in ducktail tuxedos, the ladies dripping jewels. Neon tubing wasn’t introduced to Times Square until the 1920s, but a million incandescent light bulbs spelled out the names of stars, formed paintings, ran up and down the façades of theaters, and defined the edges of storefronts in straight rows of dots. Some of the bulbs blinked intermittently on marquees in the sky—the sudden darkness attracted attention more than a solid light glow.

Some of Fanny’s trade came from Rector’s, the palatial two-story restaurant on Broadway and 43rd, a block below Hammerstein’s Olympia. On Rector’s opening day in 1899, thousands came for a spin through the first revolving door on Broadway, though none stayed for dinner, throwing the owner into panic. But the joint quickly became a highbrow institution. Suspended over the entrance was the Rector griffin, a creature with devil’s tail, lion’s body, and eagle’s head and wings. The griffin monogram appeared on Rector’s linen and silverware. Fanny was too poor to enter this restaurant, where expensive ham-and-eggs dishes were snobbishly monikered
jambon
and
oeufs,
created by chefs with mustaches ear to ear. Diamond Jim Brady could swallow down so many oysters, lobsters, and steaks at a sitting that the owner saluted him as “the best twenty-five customers we had.”

Gazing from Broadway and 42nd toward Macy’s at 34th, one saw The Great White Way, the main drag of vaudeville and musical comedy theaters, the medium of the day. This rainbow included the Empire Theater, the Broadway Theater, the Hotel Albany, and the Hotel Continental, with Western Union on the ground floor; Browne’s Chop House, the United Cigar Store, Moe Levy and Co., a blazing Budweiser sign, and the Kid McCoy Saloon, named after a fighter who invented the “corkscrew” punch. “Pity the sky with nothing but stars,” observed a visiting Frenchman.

Fanny once recognized Enrico Caruso, who stayed at the Knickerbocker Hotel on 42nd and Broadway, serenading crowds from his balcony suite. On a cold night, before a performance at the Metropolitan Opera, he gathered an armful of magazines at Fanny’s stand and instructed someone in his retinue to pay for them. Then Caruso personally tipped Fanny five dollars.

She hated delivering papers to the madam of a whorehouse on 43rd Street, part of a route her father sent her on. The madam gawked at her, making her wait while getting change. Then she tipped Fanny a dollar. Her parents, who couldn’t even read the English publications they sold, shushed Fanny when she pleaded not to return to the whorehouse. Fanny loved delivering to the Clinton Arms, a five-story brownstone apartment/hotel at 253 West 42nd. She climbed a curved staircase with balconies to the top floor, where a blaze of light from the atrium took her breath away. Here lived painters and performers in artists’ studios with skylights.

Fanny Gold herself lived in utter poverty at 306 West 41st Street, off Eighth Avenue, just over the borderline into Hell’s Kitchen. Her family used a public outhouse and bath in front of the tenement. Much of the pavement was worn through to cobblestone but would soon be improved during a neighborhood reconstruction in 1918. Her brother was a polio cripple whose name her father put the newsstand under, when the law later established that newsstands were to be run by the disabled. Adjacent to the grimy tenement was an iron works and a blacksmith. Yet, one city block over, a two-minute walk, Fanny could escape this squalor and revel in the brave new fairytale land of vaudeville. Fanny was ushered into several new shows each week.

Herein, she recalls the most magical night of her childhood, with the breathless exuberance of an eight-year-old girl in 1915:

“Eddie was a vaudeville performer who’d just returned from the cross-country circuit, got a job at the Music Hall. He was a hoofer, singer, and dancer. He was around thirty, very nice, always concerned with me—he’d send me off to the Automat across the street for a cup of hot chocolate while he looked after the stand. He came down one day and said, ‘Now, listen, Fanny, I want you to come tonight. Be there at seven o’clock. I don’t come on till seven-thirty. I don’t want to have to look for you, so you get into that seat.’

“When Mama came to take over the stand, I ran home, washed my face, combed my hair, put on my red gown and coat, felt to see if I had my little pouch with the quarters. Then I rushed out to the Automat, pulled out my coins and put them in the slots. Clink, clink, the doors open, it’s always so much fun to pull out food with my hands. I stood there at the counter eating fast, the hot chocolate burning, then I rushed out of the Automat, into the American Music Hall, where Benny the usher was waiting red with rage. He took my hand, pulled me down the aisle and threw me across the knees of the people at the very moment that Eddie’s music came on. And out he came, dancing with his cane in his left hand, and his bowler up in the air, and when he came center stage, the lights went down, the spotlight came on, and he looked down, saw me, and smiled.

“‘Maestro, stop the music!’ he said. It was so quiet, you could hear a pin drop. Then he said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you have a treat coming tonight. I’m going to introduce you to the prettiest, sweetest little lady on 42nd Street. I give you Fanny. Stand up!
The Princess of 42nd Street!
’“

The Crystal Ball of 42nd Street

Times Square’s most miserable, ghastly forms simmer in a witches’ brew along Eighth Avenue from 39th to 43rd streets. Here are the official dregs of society, the scum of the earth, the lowlife’s lowlives whom Mother Teresa Wouldn’t bother to save. A Puerto Rican pre-op transsexual stabs a trick in the eye with a sharp fingernail to grab his cabfare before he pays the driver. Brain-damaged evangelists rave aloud to themselves; 300-pound hookers flip out their hooters to stop traffic. Old shoeshine uncles give “spit shines” with more phlegmy bile than polish—though some might look at you as though you were out of your mind if you asked for a shine. Near-dead human vegetation take root in their own excretion in condemned doorways—most of them have slit pockets from scavengers searching for their wine-bottle change. The drug-pitch skells would rather tear off with a wallet than transact an actual exchange, and they make the teenage chicken fags seem like the most discreet commodity on the street. Fifteen ghetto guerrillas wearing Pro-Keds (what transit cops call “felony sneakers”) swoop down on a victim, then scatter back into subway oblivion.

Entrenched beneath all of this, at ground zero, on
the
corner, is old Charles Rubenstein, eighty-three, who has been in the penny arcade business for sixty years. The amusement parlor he built and owns at Eighth and 42nd is down a short hop of stairs en route to the subway:

“When I opened up here in 1939, we had all legitimate theaters, beautiful theaters, and people used to come down in tuxedos and evening gowns during intermission.
No one
was there to attack them, to molest them. We had four policemen walking the whole street, and we didn’t need that many. I remember that a girl used to go out onstage in a bikini and the patrol wagons were there and locked ‘em up. Then all of a sudden I see where they dance nude and nothin’ is happening.

“We saw the changes about 1965. Sixty-four, sixty-three, it was still all right. Then we saw that the good people are not coming down here, and I says, well, it’s goin’ bad. It was a change of neighborhoods, the lower class used to congregate here because it was free.

“If I were to come today, I would never go into business here. But I grew into this here business. I have the experience from way back handling all kinda people. So my experience keeps me going, I’m not a-scared of any individuals that tries to threaten me.”

Charlie Rubenstein also owned the Playland Amusement Parlor on 125th Street in Harlem, which he closed in 1972 after forty years, commenting, a little late, that “the neighborhood ran down.” Left with his primary arcade on 42nd Street, his stubbornness in remaining open fading amid unfathomable squalor and ruin, facing legal efforts to remove him—Charlie was suddenly rejuvenated by the coming of video games and decided to stay in biz.

“You have at least ninety-nine percent black that passes this entrance everyday. There isn’t such a thing as a white person coming through. You come down here three in the morning, it’s impossible to walk on 42nd Street with all the gangs, hoodlums, and riffraff. But there’s no trouble in here, no fights, not in forty-four years. We’ll have a hundred people playing video games. We may have
one
that’ll give us a hard time, or we’ll have
none.
That one creates a disturbance with all the rest of the good people around. We don’t have any bad people in here. All our help is instructed to immediately get them out. You’ll have plenty of lip, arguments, but get ‘em outta here. Once they’re outta here, I don’t care what they do, it’s not my business anymore. I see someone even smokin’ a reefer, I says, you get the hell outta here!

“You wanna change 42nd Street, you gotta start at 34th going up to 50th, between Seventh and Eighth, and
tear every building down!
Then,
maybe
you could change it. You think you can tear some of those buildings down and have a change? No, sir! So long as you have the low-priced theaters, movies, peep shows, cheap bars and hotels, glamorous lights floatin’ around, you’re not gonna change this neighborhood for any money. Your bus terminal brings in people from all over the world. This is the dumping grounds of 42nd Street.”

Rubenstein won an appellate court decision to remain open until 3
A.M.
, after the Metropolitan Transit Authority tried to force him to close earlier, making him a “scapegoat for street problems.” Three years ago he was ordered to install $10,000 worth of glass partition, which drunks continually break. But on Times Square’s most hair-raising corner remains Charlie Rubenstein, the only man to hold out after every other street-level proprietor from the old 42nd Street era had long since disappeared. Bring on the aggravation—Rubenstein’s gnarled fingers are forever pointing troublemakers to the exit, and he remains spry and sharp as a razor.

“You talk to those hoodlums, they will not listen. How many summonses! a day I see the police give out, but they tear ‘em up. They don’t care about jail, it’s a joke. You have to come back and use that nightstick, and I say let them use it to have discipline and respect. I remember the day they did use it, and I know what’s happening now that they don’t. The policeman does wanna work, keep law and order, but his hands are tied from higher up. Those men would be rarin’ to go, they could clean it up in twenty-four hours, where respectable American people could walk down 42nd Street and not be bothered. Like Theodore Roosevelt said as police commissioner of New York, he says, ‘Men, don’t make any arrests. There’s more law at the end of a nightstick than all your courts put together.’”

Rubenstein’s business began with crank-handle penny arcades showing Chaplin and Ben Turpin shorts, Dempsey fights, Ziegfeld girls in bathing trunks or playing basketball—“Not no peeps,” he claims, though he does admit to running one of a bikini-clad girl in 1953, which he was “quickly told to remove.” He’s seen the games he buys go from $35 to $100 in the old days, up to $4,000 for today’s largest videos. But one relic stands out amid the Ms. Pac Mans and Breakouts: “I still have the old grandmother with the crystal ball that dispenses a card, tells your fortune. That machine is with me since 1920. It’s not making any money, but I have it as an attraction of the old days of the penny arcade. I’m not giving it up.”