The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (16 page)

Police enforcement might have eliminated, or at least suppressed, this new level of erotica, but starting in 1966, the Supreme Court issued a series of decisions extending First Amendment protections to explicit sexual materials. Real estate in Times Square had always adapted to the most high-profit uses; now, with remarkable speed, pornography became the boom industry of 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue. Martin Hodas was soon a major producer and distributor of hard-core material, allegedly in collaboration with the Mafia (claims he regularly denied). And he and others began buying up the leases on storefronts up and down 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue. The camera shops, gadget stores, delis, cafeterias, and pinball arcades that had lined the street, and that had accounted for what remained of its raffish feel, gave way to pornographic bookstores and peeps. Soon there were stores specializing in gay porn, kiddie porn, and S & M. Stores with forbiddingly blacked-out windows and kinky posters out front lined the street. Hubert’s Museum, the last relic of the old honky-tonk 42nd Street, closed in 1975. Three years later, Peepland, a porn emporium, opened on the site, a change just as portentous in its way as the replacement of Murray’s Roman Gardens by Hubert’s had been half a century earlier.

The Supreme Court rulings also cleared the way for “massage parlors,” which were storefront shops with booths where men could buy sex—in effect, street-level brothels. By 1967, Eighth Avenue was lined with massage parlors: the Sugar Shack, the Honey Haven, the Danish Parlor, the Love Machine. According to Josh Alan Friedman, the author of
Tales of Times Square,
a zestful romp through the neighborhood’s lower depths, the first live sex act, where customers paid to watch a man and a woman have sex on a stage tilted toward the audience, was conducted at the Mine-Cine, on 42nd Street, in 1970. Friedman dates the first “Live Nude Girls” act, where customers could look through a slot as the girls touched themselves, to 1972. Within a few years, he writes, the partitions separating customer from performer came down, so customers could pay extra for quickie sex, or just a feel. The films became more explicit, and kinkier. At Peepland, a customer could rent, according to show cards cited by the unflinching Friedman, films in which “Two wild girls shove live eels up snatch and asshole,” “Farmboy fucks cow,” “Man fucks a hen,” and “Girl takes on dog, horse and pig simultaneously.” These are among the less baroque subjects Friedman lists.

By the mid-seventies, many of the 42nd Street movie theaters had switched to pornography, a change that further degraded the life of the street. Prostitutes often worked the aisles of the theaters, bringing johns to bathrooms in the basement, while thieves preyed on the derelicts who often camped out in the theaters all day, slashing open their pockets while they slept. Adam D’Amico, a New York police detective who worked in Times Square, recalls a time when a wall was torn out of a theater being refurbished, and forty to fifty wallets, some with identification dating back to the 1950s, came tumbling out; thieves had apparently tossed them there after removing the contents. D’Amico says that he spent several months staking out one fetid movie-house bathroom where gangs of kids would wait for a patron to go to the urinal and then grab his wallet, yank his pants down to his ankles, and run. Usually, he says, they targeted Asian men, who tended to carry a good deal of cash, speak little English, and feel too humiliated to report the crime.

In 1960, the decay of 42nd Street had seemed anomalous; but by the end of the decade, the downtown of virtually every old northeastern and midwestern city had begun to totter, or collapse. Suburbanization had robbed the department stores and the restaurants and the movie theaters of their customers; and as companies followed people, the cities’ employment base had begun to dwindle as well. And just as middle-class whites were decamping, large numbers of blacks, most of them poorly educated and unskilled, were migrating up from the South—2.75 million between 1940 and 1960 alone. They were arriving just as the low-level manufacturing jobs they might have taken were leaving. It was a recipe for catastrophe. Crime rates, which had been remarkably low during the urban efflorescence in the middle decades of the twentieth century, began to surge. New York City had 390 murders in 1961; by 1964, the number had reached 637. In 1972, almost 1,700 New Yorkers were killed—a more than fourfold increase from barely a decade before. The number of reported robberies almost tripled from 1966 to the early seventies. Not only the volume but the nature of crime changed; knives and blackjacks gave way to the Saturday Night Special. Heroin hit the streets around 1964. The combination of guns, drugs, and enormous amounts of cash produced a lethal dynamic.

Times Square, which for generations had been understood to exemplify the freedom and the energy and the heedless pleasure-seeking of New York, now came to be seen as the emblem of a city deranged by those very attributes. The change can be measured in the difference between
City of Night
and
Taxi Driver,
released in 1976. Rechy’s narrator says in
City of Night
that he “surrendered to the world of Times Square” like an addict mainlining junk; Travis Bickle, the enraged and delusional loner at the heart of
Taxi Driver,
does the same thing, but with far more deadly results. Travis’s Times Square is the heart of darkness—his own darkness and the world’s. He returns again and again to the surreal streets, dense with hookers and hustlers and crazed street people. Iris, the fourteen-year-old hooker, tries to climb into his cab, but is yanked out by her pimp—and then meekly complies. The casual cruelty drives Travis mad. “All the animals come out at night,” he growls in an ominous voice-over as he prowls 42nd Street. “Someday a rain will come and wash all this scum off the street.” Travis wants to be that rain; he dreams of a vigilante act of purification. Ultimately he takes all the insane violence of the city into himself and slaughters Iris’s pimp and two confederates—for which a grateful city congratulates him.

By the time of
Taxi Driver,
the two precincts that covered Times Square, which not long before had recorded a relatively modest number of crimes, placed first and second in New York in total felony complaints; the next closest precinct, in Harlem, had about a third as many complaints. While they remained popular thoroughfares during the daytime, at night 42nd Street and the Eighth Avenue corridor had descended to an almost feral state. Here is Josh Alan Friedman on the area around the Port Authority Bus Terminal:

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. . . . Near-dead human vegetation takes root in their own excretion in condemned doorways— most of them have slit pockets from scavengers searching for their wine-bottle change. . . . Fifteen ghetto guerrillas wearing Pro-Keds (what transit cops call “felony sneakers”) swoop down on a victim, then scatter back into subway oblivion.

For the legitimate shopkeepers, restaurateurs, theater managers, pedestrians, and even police officers who worked in, frequented, or patrolled the area, Times Square had become a hellhole. Dale Hansen had left the small town of Wausau, Wisconsin, to become the minister of St. Luke’s Lutheran church, on 46th Street just west of Eighth Avenue, in 1975. It is safe to say that nothing in Wausau could have prepared the Reverend Hansen for what he found in Times Square. In the course of his first year, five congregants were killed, one of them by being pushed onto the subway tracks. In the ensuing years, a prostitute was killed on the front steps of the church, a seventy-four-year-old congregant was mugged while delivering flowers to a shut-in down the street, and Hansen himself was knifed twice. Dozens of prostitutes solicited on the corner; dealers sold crack openly. The building next door was taken over by Cuban transvestites who had been released in the Mariel boatlift of 1980. “Stuff would come flying out the windows,” Hansen recalls; “suitcases and garbage. They would break people’s legs with a baseball bat.”

The city had actually stepped up enforcement efforts in the mid-seventies. The mayor’s Midtown Enforcement Project targeted massage parlors and other sex establishments, and succeeded in closing many of them down and even keeping some of them closed. In 1978, the police established a new substation on 42nd Street and increased the size of its force until nearly eighty uniformed officers, and twenty-five plainclothes officers, patrolled the area on a regular basis. But to the officers themselves, it still felt like King Canute ordering the sea to turn back. The prostitutes and the drug dealers were back on the street almost as soon as they were rounded up. The daytime crowd of con artists and three-card monte players gave way every night to pickpockets and “push-in” robbers, who would throw a victim into a dark doorway and make off with his or her valuables. And the police were hobbled by a widely shared reluctance to view “victimless crime,” including pornography, vagrancy, prostitution, and even street-level drug dealing, as matters for serious enforcement. Much of what went on in Times Square was treated as the more or less inevitable and more or less tolerable consequence of urban life.

Police officers, says the Reverend Hansen, “would stand on the corner and watch drug deals going on like cigar-store Indians.” After a community meeting at which local residents had vented their outrage at the chaos on the streets, Hansen recalls that the precinct commander took him aside and said, “Father, you’ve just got to learn to live with it.” This was the kind of despairing surrender that drives Travis Bickle over the cliff of sanity; Hansen decided on a less violent, but almost equally shocking, course of action. At the time, a kind of citizens’ patrol known as the Guardian Angels had been formed. The Angels were teenage boys and girls, mostly from the ghetto, who wore red berets and affected a somewhat paramilitary air; they were widely condemned as vigilantes-in-training. But Hansen and the merchants of the area were desperate. They established a post near St. Luke’s and gave the kids free meals and walkie-talkies; Hansen blessed their berets in church. And the Angels essentially walked up and down the street; they were a presence, and very little more.

“At the height of the battle,” Hansen recalls, “we probably had twenty or thirty of them on the street at any one time.” The Angels, it is generally agreed, eliminated some of the more outrageous behavior on the street—though they could hardly suppress crime itself—and brought a novel sense of calm. Hansen was perfectly happy to live with the charge of encouraging vigilantism. But, of course, the very fact that the beleaguered citizens of West 46th Street had had to turn to a private security force—and a force consisting largely of impoverished teens—was an appalling indictment of the collapse of order in New York City.

In the summer of 1981,
The New York Times
ran one of its periodic articles on 42nd Street, which constituted the paper’s backyard; the difference between that moment and 1960, when Milton Bracken had explored the block, was far greater than that between Bracken’s 42nd Street and the one the Beats had discovered in 1940. The 42nd Street of 1981 wasn’t troubling; it was depraved. The reporter, Josh Barbanel, went to talk with the street people who had, he wrote, “witnessed the final moments of a naked 26-year-old man from Connecticut as he was chased to his death on a subway track in Times Square by a bottle-throwing crowd” nine days earlier. There was, it turned out, a simple explanation for the man’s death, and Barbanel heard it from a thirteen-year-old girl hanging out on the street in the middle of the night. “They wanted to see some action,” she said. “He was just bugged out, and everybody started going wild on him. They had nothing better to do.” A drug dealer, standing a few feet from a police officer, describes the stream of summonses he had received as the cost of doing business. A “squat young man with a crewcut” comes by to announce, “I rob people. I like to rob people.” A copiously bleeding man bangs on a theater door, demanding the arrest of a security guard who he says beat him with a nightstick. And the night rolls on, in its lassitude and its lunacy.

OVER THE PREVIOUS three quarters of a century, Times Square had inspired a literature of revelry and celebration, of withering contempt, of arch delectation, of prophetic disgust. And now something quite new appeared: a literature of diagnosis. Times Square had become not only a place, or a state of mind, to be limned, but a disease to be cured—if possible. By the late 1970s, moves were afoot to renovate Times Square, and especially 42nd Street. And in 1978, a group of scholars at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York published a study commissioned by the Ford Foundation and titled
The West 42nd Street Study: The
Bright Light Zone.
The study constituted a definitive social anthropology of 42nd Street and the surrounding area—its “social ecology,” its markets, its sex and drug business, its hustles and so forth. The
Bright Light
study would soon be followed by yet others.

The Bright Light Zone
documented the enormous volume of crimes committed in the area, but its essential subject was not crime but pathology— a pathology that seems to have defeated all attempts at control. Here is a typical excerpt from one researcher’s field notes:

As I returned south on 8th Avenue I saw an older black man urinating on the sidewalk. This same man has been around this corner of 42nd and 8th for years. He is sick and should be hospitalized. His street name is Cadillac. Year after year I’ve seen him there, drunk, loud, menacing the passers-by. A well-dressed white man appealed to two policemen about the man’s conduct. The police said in effect that there was very little they could do—about a sick, drunken man publicly urinating on the west side of 8th Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets!

The authors note that Cadillac “circulates in a world of bottle gangs”— groups of alcoholics—“and street violence which destroys the civic culture of West 42nd Street as well as the men themselves.”