The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (25 page)

ACT I

IN THE MID-1970S, Show World, the biggest and easily the most professional of the Times Square sex shops, opened on the northwest corner of 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue, in a spot previously occupied by a Chemical Bank. A vivid contemporary description of its operation comes from Josh Alan Friedman, the Damon Runyon of Times Square’s pornographic subculture:

The scene is a crowded weekday lunch hour at a modern Times Square sex emporium in the late 1970s. . . . There are twenty occupied booths, each with a glowing red bulb that indicates a quarter has been inserted, giving the viewer his thirty seconds. Cocks of every age, race and size are being drawn out in the booths. Some will spurt onto the walls, some into Kleenex, some will even discharge into fifty-cent French tickler condoms from the store’s vending machine. These will be discarded on the floor. . . . Roving quarter-cashiers double as barkers, trying to perpetuate some cosmic momentum of flowing cash. “C’mon fellas, keep those quarters comin’, take a booth or clear the aisle, get your change here for live sexy girls, four for a quarter.” Every ten minutes, one of the four sexy girls is replaced. A hidden female emcee announces each new entry, guaranteeing they’ll love her. “Foxy Bertha joining the sexy girls now, big daddy, all for a quarter, love to love you, come in your pants, yeah, right now!”

That was Show World in its heyday—the very model of the Times Square “scumatorium,” to use one of Friedman’s most evocative terms. The owner, Richard Basciano, an ex-boxer, was “The King of Porn,” as
New York Newsday
dubbed him, the owner of sex shops up and down 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue—eleven in all, it was said, employing more than four hundred people (thirty in “management,” wrote Friedman, plus “endless girls, quarter cashiers, mop-ups”). As an immensely profitable cash business, pornography was enormously attractive to organized crime, and Basciano’s chief partner was Robert DiBernardo, a member of the Gambino crime family. In 1986, DiBernardo was murdered on orders from John Gotti, the Gambino capo, and Basciano took over his share of the properties. Basciano himself was never connected either with the murder or with any other criminal activities associated with the mob (though he was convicted of mail fraud unrelated to his sex business). He was, by most accounts, a gentlemanly figure who ran his porn empire according to up-to-date principles, investing in the latest technology for his video peeps and his coin-operated machines. As the owner of the nine-story building on 42nd Street, another building on 43rd, and others elsewhere in Times Square, he was, whatever his associations, many orders of wealth, and perhaps also of respectability, above his fellow pornographers. He was also a mysterious figure. Basciano never gave interviews, not even to Josh Alan Friedman, the most sympathetic auditor a sex entrepreneur was likely to find.

The war against vice, which had been going on in Times Square virtually since there had been vice, had picked up again around the time of Friedman’s account, when the Mayor’s Office of Midtown Enforcement began closing down massage parlors, which fell under laws forbidding prostitution. And during a brief moment of abandon when the sex parlors took down the peep windows and let the customers and the girls touch one another, some of Show World’s competitors had also been closed down as brothels. But the windows went back up and the sex shops remained beyond the reach of the law for the same reason that the porno movies did: they were deemed forms of expression, protected by the First Amendment. In fact, the number of sex shops in New York rose from 131 to 177 between 1984 and 1993. Times Square alone had forty-seven “adult” stores, even though many of those on 42nd Street had been closed down by the process of condemnation. Indeed, Richard Basciano received $11.3 million as compensation for three of his stores that lay within the catchment area of the 42nd Street Development Project.

If good uses were to drive out bad ones, as the public officials in charge of Times Square hoped, then it was the pornographic movies and sex shops, above all, that had to go. But a combination of Supreme Court decisions protecting obscene material and New Yorkers’ own impulse to defend freedom of expression at virtually any cost had thwarted earlier attempts to expel the sex industry from Times Square. Nevertheless, when the Times Square Business Improvement District (BID) was established in 1992, local property owners concluded that they would have to take on the porn industry in order to stimulate change in the area. Gretchen Dykstra, the BID’s executive director, says that she approached Norman Siegel, then the head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who, she says, “hated the whole idea” of targeting the sex industry, but explained that she could succeed only by proving that the stores had a harmful effect on property values and local conditions, and then seeking to regulate them through zoning. So in 1994 the BID produced a report showing—though far from conclusively—that “adult use establishments” had baneful “secondary effects” on Times Square.

By this time, Rudolph Giuliani had become mayor of New York. Giuliani was not even remotely troubled by the thought of limiting access to sex shops; what’s more, he had promised Michael Eisner, the chairman of Disney, that he would eliminate pornography and suppress crime in the area around 42nd Street. At the same time, the mayor understood that he could not simply ban sex shops altogether. Both he and the BID favored “dispersal zoning,” which limits certain uses to a city’s periphery. Giuliani wanted to remove all sex establishments to manufacturing areas in the city’s outer boroughs, but members of the City Council representing those districts bridled at the prospect of their becoming a pornographic dumping ground. In March 1995, the mayor and the City Council agreed to a compromise that would permit the stores to remain in designated commercial areas, including Seventh Avenue and Broadway from 48th to 55th Streets, and Eighth from 38th to 41st. All stores with “a substantial portion of their stock in trade or materials characterized by an emphasis on specific anatomical areas or sexual activities” would be subject to stringent regulations: they would be prohibited from operating within five hundred feet of residences, schools, churches, or one another. Gretchen Dykstra triumphantly declared that the number of sex shops in Times Square would drop from forty-seven to five or six.

The new ordinance was part of Giuliani’s larger effort to redraw the boundaries between collective goods and individual rights; and it ran into some of the same resistance that his campaigns against predatory and antisocial street behavior had. Gay and lesbian activists complained that the law would eliminate harmless sex-toy boutiques in Greenwich Village. Norman Siegel described it as “a sign of the times and of a repressive new climate toward sexual expression that is totally contrary to New York’s rich cultural history.” Through its chief lawyer, Herald Price Fahringer, the sex industry disputed the secondary effects study. Nevertheless, in late October the law was passed by the city’s community boards, then once again by the City Council, and it went into effect the following year.

The authors of the legislation had clarified the term “substantial portion” by declaring that any store more than 40 percent of whose stock consisted of adult articles would fall within the new rules. One of the city’s more high-profile pornographers observed at the time that he could evade the rule with ease. “A lot of fetish movies don’t have sex in them,” he noted. “And if I have to put violent and horror movies in, I’ll do that too.” It was a prescient comment. Though many sex shops closed up rather than attempt compliance, others filled their shelves with kung fu movies. And when an inspector from the city’s Department of Buildings tried to shutter a store, the owner would turn to Fahringer, the silver-haired and silver-voiced chief attorney for the adult entertainment industry. Fahringer was, he says, “27 for 27” on such cases; he claims that the net effect of the “60–40 rule” on Times Square was zero. Eighth Avenue remained a hive of sex shops, as well as a happy hunting ground for drug dealers and pimps. Nevertheless, pornography was eliminated from 42nd Street; in the central areas of Times Square, nothing remained of the old carnality save for a high-class strip joint on 47th Street called Lace. The new law cleaned up Times Square without making it squeaky-clean. “What’s Times Square without sex?” as Gretchen Dykstra asks. “It’s the concentration that hurt Times Square, not the sex. A few porn shops never hurt anybody.”

ACT II

RICHARD BASCIANO COULD easily have filled 60 percent of his selling area with Bruce Lee movies, but he was a man with a broader vision. Basciano spent, according to Fahringer, over $100,000 reconfiguring the upstairs rooms where he had shown live sex acts into theatrical stages; and then he began to look around for a producer to provide legitimate theater. Basciano found that well-established theater companies did not want to relocate above New York’s most notorious sex parlor; unhoused avant-garde troupes were not so choosy. A group called Collapsible Giraffe began putting on plays in 1998. In the summer of 1999, Aaron Beall, a promoter of what is loosely known as Off-Off Broadway, stumbled into Show World with his girlfriend while three or possibly four sheets to the wind. Already in an impressionable state, Beall was overwhelmed by Show World’s surreal décor—leering clown, carousel figures, coffin—“the circus of death,” as Beall calls it. He had, he decided, found his new home. By October, Beall’s Todo Con Nada theater had replaced Collapsible Giraffe.

I first met Aaron Beall in December 2001. He was sitting in Show World’s black box theater, wearing a scarf and a red nightcap. He was a young man with a middle-aged man’s shapeless tummy, octagonal granny glasses, and a beatific smile—something in between a dime-store Santa and a Jewish leprechaun. Aaron was one of those people who require no encouragement whatsoever to tell his story. “I opened up my first theater in 1989, at 167 Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side,” he said, sitting in the darkness of GoGo 1, Show World’s principal theater. “We kept opening up more and more theaters on Ludlow Street—the House of Candles, the Piano Store, the Pink Pony, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.” The theaters were typically named after whatever it was the storefront had done in its previous life. “My basic method of producing plays was, I would sit by the phone and people would call up and say, ‘Can I do a show?’ And I would say yes. We were the epicenter for nineties theater on the Lower East Side. In twelve years we did twenty-five hundred shows.”

I assumed that I had misunderstood and asked, “You mean twenty-five hundred performances?”

Aaron corrected me. “No, individual productions. We had shows at seven, ten, and midnight—three shows a night, and sometimes we did four showlets at midnight. We put on a total of ten thousand performances, with fifteen thousand performers. It was like an explosion of activity.” Aaron and his mates also started up the International Fringe Festival, which mushroomed into the largest theater festival in the United States.

And then Aaron learned a lesson about the relationship between culture and real estate. “We were,” he said, “brought in by a couple of landlords to gentrify the neighborhood.” By the nineties, thanks to people like Aaron, the Lower East Side, which had already evolved from a shtetl to a Hispanic and Asian slum, metamorphosed into Bohemia; and Todo Con Nada—“Everything with Nothing,” a jokey reference to Aaron’s willingness to soldier on with very little outside support—was evicted from one theater after another as the buildings were converted to co-operative apartments. Aaron had also lost control of the Fringe Festival to more mainstream and well-heeled players. “I was experiencing the lessons of capitalism,” he said with a shrug. Aaron accepted the verdict; he did not buy the idea that the avant-garde had to fail the test of the marketplace in order to prove its legitimacy as art. Quite the contrary: Aaron saw himself as the impresario of a burgeoning counterculture he called Alternative Broadway. What’s more, Aaron wasn’t quite the mooncalf he appeared to be. He had, it’s true, spent his formative years living with his mother and little sister in an abandoned chapel in a hippie commune in Mexico, but his mother had also thrown him into a Mexican parochial school where, Aaron said, “I learned everything about machismo.” One thing Aaron had plainly learned was how to dust himself off after getting beaten up. And so, when he lost the Fringe Festival, he founded a rival, albeit much more modest, event: Pure Pop, “the fringe of the fringe.”

Then Aaron and his girlfriend stumbled into Show World, and Nada Show World was born. Aaron loved the place—not the way Richie Basciano did, but not exactly ironically, either. Aaron, thirty-seven, was of the generation that grew up watching
The Gong Show
and
The Rocky Horror
Picture Show,
and whose artists, like Jeff Koons, practiced a deadpan appropriation of schlocky household objects. “My generation thinks of cheesy as fabulous,” as Aaron put it. Aaron came along too late to see the scumatorium in full flower, and perhaps he might have felt differently if he had; but as it was, he identified with Richie Basciano, whom he saw as an entrepreneur who had brought a marginal activity into the mainstream, and succeeded by mainstream standards. Aaron talked about Basciano as he walked me through the Big Top Cabaret and the former Peep Room—“the sanctum sanctorum,” Aaron said, semi-mock-reverently— and then upstairs to the dance studios, which Basciano rented out. “He was the Ziegfeld of his day,” Aaron said. “He created an industry; he was the person who really put it together, maximized the floorspace. Ultimately, Richie Basciano is a master builder.” Aaron, too, saw himself as a master builder, a Hammerstein of Alternative Broadway. Hadn’t he built the Ludlow street scene, and the Fringe Festival, and Pure Pop? He had dreamed of hooking up with a modern equivalent of the nineteenth-century impresario—Ted Turner or Time Warner. Instead, he got Richie Basciano.

Aaron had been much influenced by the theater of spoof, camp, and pastiche associated with the late Charles Ludlam, founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. He described Ludlam’s
Vampire Lesbians of
Sodom
as the “defining play of the 1980s,” which might come as news to devotees of Tom Stoppard, David Mamet, or Terence McNally. Like Ludlam, Aaron was deeply versed in classic drama, and loved the idea of running old plays through a kitschy modern sensibility. He had invented something he called Super-Theatrics, based on the insight that “you could deejay or sample any style of theater onto any text.” One of his first productions at Show World was
Pervy Verse,
which he described as “a retelling of
The Bacchae
in fetish gear.” He put on a production of
Waiting for Godot,
as well as all twelve of Anton Chekhov’s early comedies, which Chekhov had called vaudevilles. He staged a “Ridicu-fest” to honor Ludlam’s work. Nada Show World’s first hit was
God of Vengeance,
a 1910 Yiddish play by Sholem Asch that takes place in a brothel. The play had attracted a supremely odd combination of blue-haired ladies and Hasidic Jews; the latter invariably arrived without their identifying hat or overcoat, for
God
of Vengeance
was a notorious play that had been banned for blasphemy. Besides that, it was being staged above New York’s most famous sex shop. This was the kind of incongruity Aaron lived for: he and Times Square were a match made in heaven.

Over the next few months, I periodically dropped in on Aaron and his expanding empire. Getting there was always half the fun. Show World had a kind of nonadult foyer or antechamber with animal sculptures propped on pedestals; a sign near the front door said, “No Live Girls.” (Aaron had also staged a “No Live Girls” festival.) It was extremely discreet by Eighth Avenue standards. Straight ahead, beyond a pair of saloon doors, were the peeps; downstairs was the big sex supermarket, with videos and every kind of dildo known to man, and more booths. You could walk upstairs from the foyer, or you could go around the corner to a separate entrance, where the risers on the staircase read “Talk to the Stars,” “Nude (25 cents) Shows,” “Fantasy Booth,” “Live Nude Girls,” etc. Upstairs were GoGos 1 and 2, the Big Top, and various lounges—all painted black, with red trim and diamond-shaped mirrors. It felt like an all-new, jazzed-up Ludlow Street setting: the House of Sex.

Aaron felt that Richie Basciano intuitively understood him because they were both dreamers. Aaron had been nurturing the same dream since the early nineties: to unify the scattered energies of Alternative Broadway and to fully realize the cultural and economic power of the fringe—under his own tutelage, of course. He had been tinkering for years with a document that laid out his vision. Now he had relocated that vision from the Lower East Side to 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue. In June 2001, he had prepared a new draft of his grand plan and sent it to Basciano. Aaron’s ulterior motive was to save his skin: rumors were flying around that Basciano was preparing to sell his real estate for some astronomical sum—$300 million, says Aaron, whose sense of money is extremely approximate—and Aaron was trying to make a case that his patron could make more money by staying. Aaron was, in effect, laying out another version of the argument that Rebecca Robertson and others had been making for almost a decade: that culture was what would drive economic development on 42nd Street and in Times Square. But Aaron was making a case for a different branch of the culture—more demanding, more ambitious, more homemade, more “real.” He was proposing, he wrote, “a true alternative to the ‘new’ Times Square that recaptures the spirit of the ‘old’ Times Square.” Aaron would offer authentic entertainment, rather than the synthetic product being peddled on the new 42nd Street.

Todo Con Nada @ Show World @ the Times Square Theater and Entertainment Center Plan 2002 is one of the truly odd documents of the Times Square redevelopment process. The plan is suffused with a sense of breathless anticipation, of a “historic collaboration” between business and the arts and a giant windfall for both. Show World would become a “scene,” a “neighborhood,” the new center of Bohemia; it would be the home of an all-new arts complex that would attract a minimum of 250,000 visitors a year, and a maximum of two million, which Aaron figured as one-quarter of the total annual attendance of Off-Broadway, though he appears to have confused this figure with the total attendance of Broadway. The implicit theory was “Build it, and they will come.” Aaron proposed ten new ventures, meant to work synergistically with one another and with the more traditional attraction downstairs. The big moneymaker was
No Live Girls,
a nonpornographic video peep show using forty-one booths that had just been packed up at Basciano’s defunct Peepland, on 42nd Street. Aaron’s ingenious inspiration was to offer 128 channels of video material and to charge a quarter for ninety seconds, just like they did downstairs. And
No Live Girls
wouldn’t need a mop.

Aaron also proposed a late-night club, a gift shop—“think museum gift shop”—an art gallery, and the Show World Bar and Restaurant, where a spruced-up version of Show World’s “original décor” would provide “that 1970s
feel.
” In a hardheaded touch, Aaron suggested that Todo Con Nada’s plays and festivals be scheduled only when the four theaters could not be rented. At the same time, Aaron’s surreal sense of numbers led him to calculate that, at optimum capacity, the new Show World Center would have a potential annual revenue of $47,123,100. It was a beautiful vision, a vision that promised to transform Times Square, Show World, and Aaron Beall, in that order. Todo Con Nada would receive 10 percent of gross rentals, 12 percent of gross receipts from the bar/restaurants, and 25 percent of the proceeds from the sale of art.

By the spring of 2002, Aaron saw the new Show World Center beginning to emerge. The art gallery was up and running, he was outfitting the Big Top Cabaret with video monitors, and Basciano had built new offices up on the third floor. One afternoon, Aaron took me up to his office, a big, empty room with a table and a few books. A workman stopped by to ask, “What time would you like me to start up every morning?” Aaron shook his head in amazement; it was some kind of miracle. Aaron accepted miracles with the same good humor, almost the same fatalism, he brought to fiascos; it was precisely the fact that anything could happen that Aaron relished about his peculiar corner of show business. It was hard to imagine that Richie Basciano could take Aaron’s blueprint seriously, but Aaron believed in himself too much to wonder that someone else would, too. “When I look back someday and see what I’ve accomplished over fifty years,” he said—on this particular day his thinning, straggly hair was covered by an incongruously rakish black beret— “I could have had no better apprenticeship than with Richie.”