It Ain't No Fairy Tale
July 15, 2014 7:11 AM   Subscribe

42nd St., NYC ca. 1988-1991 (Vaguely NSFW)
posted by griphus (69 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
Huh, I always consider One Worldwide Plaza to be a "new" building but it was finished in 1989.

You might think the colors are the result of the technology used to take the photos but I can assure you there are summer days when the entire city gets a sticky yellow tint.
posted by The Whelk at 7:18 AM on July 15, 2014 [2 favorites]


Heh. I worked at a few of those theaters and strip joints. My home away from home. So many memories, so many stories.

I still like it better than modern Times Square.
posted by Splunge at 7:22 AM on July 15, 2014 [3 favorites]


My husband talks about how he used to get off the subway at 42nd St. and run to whatever theater he was seeing a show at that night. My parents, when they took the bus to Port Authority, would often cab the three blocks to a theater.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:25 AM on July 15, 2014


It's cocktail time at Howard Johnson's. May we suggest...a decanter of
  • Manhattan
  • Martini
  • or Daiquiri [sic]
posted by Ogre Lawless at 7:26 AM on July 15, 2014 [3 favorites]


Point Break AND Problem Child 2? It's so weird how your brain associates two things you were plenty alive to remember happening in totally different times.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 7:31 AM on July 15, 2014


Meh. There's nothing quite so self indulgent as this kind of nostalgie de la boue. I can understand feeling affection for a vanished marker of one's personal past, but I really can't buy the claim that New York was somehow culturally richer for having a street of shitty porn houses.
posted by yoink at 7:32 AM on July 15, 2014 [12 favorites]


Why do they call it all photos of 42nd street? Most but not all were, but for example the HoJo is on 46th and the World theatre was on 49th.
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 7:33 AM on July 15, 2014


There's something wrong with human nature: Gil Scott-Heron, brought to you by Budwesier; the musicruise will not be televised. Freedom of choice? Jesus said you have to be born again.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 7:33 AM on July 15, 2014 [1 favorite]


Literally everything within a good five to ten block radius around Times Square was next door to a porn theater.
posted by griphus at 7:35 AM on July 15, 2014 [11 favorites]


That's not the logo used by the broadway show Cats. I'm pretty sure that's a strip club.
posted by The Whelk at 7:35 AM on July 15, 2014 [1 favorite]


I can understand feeling affection for a vanished marker of one's personal past, but I really can't buy the claim that New York was somehow culturally richer for having a street of shitty porn houses.

There's a strip of crappy smut businesses near Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. I think it's 3rd or 4th avenue. I've walked through there a few times and it's just depressing. In fact, you can find places like that in lots of American cities, and I don't think anyone looks very fondly on them. Though they might fondle themselves while looking.
posted by ChuckRamone at 7:36 AM on July 15, 2014


I can understand feeling affection for a vanished marker of one's personal past, but I really can't buy the claim that New York was somehow culturally richer for having a street of shitty porn houses.

Depends on your definition of "culture". Thankfully for those of us who find this era aesthetically pleasing, there's still Downtown Los Angeles. For now.
posted by billyfleetwood at 7:44 AM on July 15, 2014 [2 favorites]


yoink: "Meh. There's nothing quite so self indulgent as this kind of nostalgie de la boue. I can understand feeling affection for a vanished marker of one's personal past, but I really can't buy the claim that New York was somehow culturally richer for having a street of shitty porn houses."

Yeah, those things seem a lot more romantic in hazy retrospect than they were in reality.
posted by octothorpe at 7:47 AM on July 15, 2014


Well huge porno theatres and huge m&m emporium are basically a one to one substitution in the end anyway.
posted by The Whelk at 7:47 AM on July 15, 2014 [2 favorites]


The worst breakfast I was ever served were burned, shell-filled scrambled eggs, barely-cooked bacon, and thin, bitter coffee at the Howard Johnson's seen in many of those shots, c. 1986 or so. I don't know what the hell we were thinking going there. My gf was interviewing for crappy academic jobs and we were staying at conference rates at the then-new Marriott. So young and foolish.
posted by aught at 7:47 AM on July 15, 2014


I worked in that neighborhood at exactly that time. I apologize in advance for my nostalgie de la boue, but boy is it flaring up at the moment. Good times.
posted by chavenet at 7:51 AM on July 15, 2014 [3 favorites]


Well huge porno theatres and huge m&m emporium are basically a one to one substitution in the end anyway.

Makes me wonder if the sticky floors in Flavortown were already there before they even opened.
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 7:51 AM on July 15, 2014 [1 favorite]


I can't believe Cats was showing directly next door to a porn theatre. Wow.

I know — just think of the people who might have come all the way uptown to see some porn and walked into Cats by mistake.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:05 AM on July 15, 2014 [7 favorites]


Maybe this is comforting: the woman in the "Jesus Saves" photos is still there to this day, telling me and other passersby that we're going to hell.
posted by fungible at 8:09 AM on July 15, 2014


I really can't buy the claim that New York was somehow culturally richer for having a street of shitty porn houses

Well, one thing I miss from the 'old' Times Square, was wandering into a shitty dive bar on 8th Ave at 2 in the morning, and having the clientele be a mix of finance guys, drug dealers, sex workers, and construction guys - and everyone essentially getting along and sharing the space.

New York was a lot more culturally stratified when I left for SF 3 years ago.
posted by bashos_frog at 8:12 AM on July 15, 2014


I am in love with that "It's Cocktail Time at Howard Johnson's" sign! I hope somebody was able to preserve it and give it a good home.

And how historically awesome is that shot of the old Apollo and Lyric theaters! I didn't realize the big Maxell sign behind them had been there for so long; I had thought it was a more recent addition.

The shots where the marquees for mainstream movie houses are next door to adult theaters really bring home the lyrics to "42nd Street," don't they?
In the heart of little old New York,
You'll find a thoroughfare.
It's the part of little old New York
That runs into Times Square.
A crazy quilt that "Wall Street Jack" built,
If you've got a little time to spare,
I want to take you there.

Come and meet those dancing feet,
On the avenue I'm taking you to,
Forty-Second Street.

Hear the beat of dancing feet,
It's the song I love the melody of,
Forty-Second Street.

Little "nifties" from the Fifties,
Innocent and sweet;
Sexy ladies from the Eighties,
Who are indiscreet.

They're side by side, they're glorified
Where the underworld can meet the elite,
Forty-Second Street.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:16 AM on July 15, 2014 [2 favorites]


There's a strip of crappy smut businesses near Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. I think it's 3rd or 4th avenue. I've walked through there a few times and it's just depressing. In fact, you can find places like that in lots of American cities, and I don't think anyone looks very fondly on them. Though they might fondle themselves while looking.

I'm not trying to paint an entire state here, because it's most likely just the one area where my friends lived, but when I visited my friends in West Virginia, driving down any given street it was like, "Church... sex shop... church... strip club... church... sex shop... church... strip club..."
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:21 AM on July 15, 2014 [1 favorite]


Yeah, drive through any rural road in PA or WV and you'll see adult shops or strip clubs at regular intervals, often advertised with giant billboards proclaiming "ADULT WORLD" or such. There was even a drive-thru peep show on Rt. 22 somewhere near Johnstown, PA but it's closed now.
posted by octothorpe at 8:40 AM on July 15, 2014


or Daiquiri [sic]

"[sic]"?
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 8:42 AM on July 15, 2014 [1 favorite]


A Jersey kid, I started going to high school in New York City in the fall of 1988. I was 14, chubby, and did not really know a lot about the Big Apple, other than avenues and streets ran at right angles. On the first day of school, I commuted in with a junior from the next town over. He showed me the ropes and assumed I had figured it out. On the second day, I tried to make it home on my own. My commute took me through Grand Central on the way to the Port Authority.

At Grand Central I got a bit turned around and wound up on the street level. Young and inexperienced and terrified of winding up in Connecticut, I couldn't process that "the 7 train" and "the number 7 subway" referred to the same thing. I would ask for directions to the latter and get directions to the former. But what if they're confusing the subway with the train? Of course, I didn't notice that Metro-North routes aren't organized by number, either....

Screw it, it's only a few blocks, I'll walk.

That walk is largely what these photos are about. I learned oh-so-much about the world in that walk, both that day and later on. The things I learned that day are represented in this photo essay. The things I learned, (really, figured out) later on, well... I ran into my neighbor while I was walking the route. I knew he worked in the city, and was pretty sure he worked in finance. Maybe he was just taking a stroll down 42nd Street as well. Maybe it had nothing to do with his divorce a few months later. Who knows.
posted by aureliobuendia at 8:42 AM on July 15, 2014 [2 favorites]


Yoink got it right. We look back and imagine a nice thing and forget how bad it was. We do this, among our veterans, even for wars! I had been there at that time and I go there often now and Now is much nicer. Good though if you liked
the chicken hawks. They too seem now vanished.
posted by Postroad at 8:44 AM on July 15, 2014


I really can't buy the claim that New York was somehow culturally richer for having a street of shitty porn houses.

Maybe this is true—tho the argument has been made—but if we're judging a place by the degree to which it is culturally enriching, then there's very little difference between shitty porn houses and shitty Flavortowns, really. Same great boue, half the nostalgie.

Anyway, this is the one I'd choose in a size suitable for framing.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:45 AM on July 15, 2014 [1 favorite]


"Le" Sex Shoppe - makes it more classy and exotic, don'tcha know...
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:45 AM on July 15, 2014


Here's my memory of that neighborhood, circa 1976.

As a young music student from New Jersey who was obsessed with owning the piano score to every piece of music I loved, I heard about G. Schirmer's music store, which was just west of that neighborhood. My very first solo trip to New York was on a very hot Friday afternoon in July, via bus from Union NJ to the Port Authority, to buy a copy of the score to Bernstein's Mass.

Having neither a sense of direction, nor any experience on my own in New York, and since Google was not a thing yet, I got turned around leaving the Port Authority bus terminal, heading east instead of west, and so was approached by a very tall, very beautiful woman of African American heritage who was far, far overdressed for the time of day and the summer heat.

She approached me and said, "Mumble mumble mumble?"

"I'm sorry, what?" I replied.

She repeated, a little louder, "Mumble, mumble mumble MUMBLE?"

"I'm sorry, what?"

A little louder, "MUMBLE MUMBLE MUMBLE MUMBLE?!?!"

"I'm sorry, I can't understand you."

"LOOK, DO YOU WANT A {euphemism for oral sex}?!?!?!" she shouted.

"Erm......no.........but can you tell me where G. Schirmer's music store is," I asked, whipping out the piece of paper I had written the address on.

Still more interesting than anything the current version of Times Square has to offer.
posted by jayb3369 at 9:00 AM on July 15, 2014 [1 favorite]


Well, one thing I miss from the 'old' Times Square, was wandering into a shitty dive bar on 8th Ave at 2 in the morning, and having the clientele be a mix of finance guys, drug dealers, sex workers, and construction guys - and everyone essentially getting along and sharing the space.

I think what sometimes gets lost when the "pre-Giuliani" days are talked about is just how much good music and great shows happened in NYC during that period.
posted by playertobenamedlater at 9:02 AM on July 15, 2014 [1 favorite]


The sad thing is that our only two choices seem to be shitty porn shops or the same terrible national chain places that are in every city.
posted by octothorpe at 9:05 AM on July 15, 2014 [2 favorites]


These pictures remind me of a high school day trip up to NYC. The nuns (this was Catholic school) just dropped us off and let a bunch of 14 and 15 year olds roam free around the city. In retrospect that seems insane. Yet awesome. We didn't get in too much trouble. We gawped at the strip club signs. One kid got hustled $20 playing 3 card monte. I smoked my first cigarette.
posted by medeine at 9:07 AM on July 15, 2014 [1 favorite]


is just how much good music and great shows happened in NYC during that period.

Pretty sure there are still good music and great shows in NYC. And fewer homicides.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:07 AM on July 15, 2014 [3 favorites]


The worst thing shown in these photos is still Star Trek V.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 9:17 AM on July 15, 2014 [4 favorites]




Was there ever a time that Times Square was a nice respectable place? What was before the junkies and pornos?
posted by Nelson at 9:26 AM on July 15, 2014


I can never get enough photos, videos and stories of 42nd Street before the suburban hypocrisy took over. I remember family trips from a young age, craning my neck out of the station wagon to see posters for porn, neon and zombie movie titles on the marquees. Allowed to wander around from 12, I recall being propositioned by a hooker of the same age (I was silent) and trying to look in on all the flesh, blood, kung fu, video games and transgression. A more humane approach would have been closer to what has happened to more transgressive parts of London. Remove hard core hassle and criminality, like clip joints and stick up kids and leave a space for experimentation and transgression. At least some space. Times Square Red/Times Square Blue was good on all this. Frankenhooker has some great locations too and close to my young memory in look and feel. I doubt allowing 'space for transgression' or the idea that not all spaces need be 'family friendly' is much of a vote winner, though. When I heard one of the last porn businesses there had been replaced by Hooters, it was news more obscene than I can express. Dishonest. Vichy France like. I know plenty of people who were adults in 70s/80s NYC and don't regret a safer, cleaner city today. But I think that careful surgery could have removed gangrene and stink without killing the patient. When I stayed near Times Square last year I was mortified and got out of that scene faster than a curtain twitching out of towner avoiding hardcore. It was like it wanted to erase my soul.
posted by The Salaryman at 9:31 AM on July 15, 2014 [3 favorites]


It was the place to buy early automobiles for a while and was considered to be unfasjionably far uptown and in the "might as well be farmland let's herd goats on broadway" boonies when it was Longacre Square.
posted by The Whelk at 9:33 AM on July 15, 2014 [1 favorite]


Was there ever a time that Times Square was a nice respectable place?

Cannot attest to that personally -- my first visit there was in the nineties, when this 42nd street was just giving way to the commodified family-friendly version you now see -- but the number of theatres with clean-cut jaunty 1940s names like the Liberty and the Victory suggests an era of women in gloves and hats going to see Mrs. Miniver and The Fabulous Dorseys.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:35 AM on July 15, 2014


Was there ever a time that Times Square was a nice respectable place?

Not really. I mean even back when it was hot shit at the turn of the century, it was still seedy as hell.
posted by griphus at 9:42 AM on July 15, 2014


In high school, this would have be around '74 or '75, we had to see a Broadway play for credit. We went to My Fat Friend with Lynn Redgrave (and a young John Lithgow!). It was at the Brooks Atkinson, so obviously not on 42nd, but close enough. While waiting to go inside, two young ladies wearing yellow hotpants and matching tights came up to me and started chatting.

I think I still have the marks from where my mom grabbed me to pull me away.
posted by tommasz at 9:43 AM on July 15, 2014


Was there ever a time that Times Square was a nice respectable place? What was before the junkies and pornos?

Fred Astaire is bummed at the seediness of Times Square in 1953 in The Band Wagon while looking for the old Eltinge Theater.

(From what I've heard, there were several of those kinds of arcades.)
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:47 AM on July 15, 2014 [2 favorites]


Pretty sure there are still good music and great shows in NYC. And fewer homicides.

Sure, my point was the impact isn't there anymore but that could have more to do with industry conditions instead of Guy Fieri taking over midtown.
posted by playertobenamedlater at 9:49 AM on July 15, 2014


The sad thing is that our only two choices seem to be shitty porn shops or the same terrible national chain places that are in every city.

THIS. This was my precise complaint when I was watching the area get done over in the late 90's. The people who express what looks like nostalgia for the old Times Square aren't being nostalgic about hookers and porn (okay, maybe some of y'all are), we're being nostalgic about "NOT-Disney".

And I have some stories about Old Times Square and only one of them deals with porn stores anyway, and the other two don't:

* My BFF came to visit me in New York for my 25th birthday. Before venturing out, she asked her boyfriend what he wanted her to bring back for him as a souvenir - he requested either a New York Rangers team jersey, or "the sickest video you can find from a Times Square porn shop." She decided that that was absolutely what we should get, so one afternoon during her stay we head up to Times Square and wandered down 42nd Street, looking for a likely shop. She was still living in the same part of Eastern Connecticut where we grew up, and while I"d been in New York a while, a porn shop was still kind of new on me. We finally found one and went in.

But we didn't get more than four feet through the door before my friend just got all freaked out by the fact that she was there, and froze. I stopped with her. We looked around in something of a "we're not in Kansas any more" daze, and she was too afraid to walk into the store any further - too afraid to even study the titles on the videos too closely, too afraid to even pay for the thing. She finally just reached out and blindly grabbed something off a shelf, and handed it to me, along with about $30, asking me to take care of it.

I put on my newly-acquired New Yorkers' veneer of "I'm just doing my own regular thing and taking care of my business and fuck you", strolled to the cashier at the back and slid the video to the clerk, looking bored. Yeah, I'm a woman in her 20's buying a porn tape, what the fuck is it to you. Okay, I wasn't able to look at it either, but that's mainly because I was trying to project this air of "it's my business and it's no big deal and fuck you". I paid for the video, the clerk handed it back to me in the plain bag, I said my thank you and met my friend at the door and we hauled ass out of there.

Even THEN we didn't even dare to look at the tape, though, and it wasn't until my friend was all the way back home in Connecticut and presenting the tape to her boyfriend that she saw that she had selected a fetish video about morbidly obese pregnant women who also had bugs stuffed up their cooches. She watched it with him and then called me afterward, traumatized. History does not record his own response.

* For about two years, I also worked in a building on 7th Avenue between 43rd and 44th, in a 14th-floor office that overlooked Times Square itself. Getting there on the subway was easy, walking from the subway to the office got increasingly complicated the more tourists there were. And every time there was some kind of a demonstration, concert, or other Big Event happening down on the Times Square traffic island, we would be having a meeting, and it would get interrupted; especially in summer, when we had the windows cracked open in the heat. One of my favorite moments came when we had a conference called scheduled on the same day as a Partridge Family Reunion concert (unbeknownst to us) - we were deep in the throes of the meeting, when suddenly David Cassidy's voice came drifting through the window - "I think I love you, so what am I so afraid of...."

* That office's proximity to Times Square worked to my advantage New Year's Eve of 1993, though - I told a few friends that I was just going to stay put at work after the office hours let out, and if they wanted to join me they should just be ready to show up early. A couple people came to join me at about 6, and we were just sort of hanging out waiting for midnight.

At some point one of us went to the bathrooms in the hallway, and returned with two more people in tow - they were related to someone from another office and had had the same plan we had, except their office didn't have a view of the ball drop. "Can we watch from your office?" they asked. Sure, I said, letting them in. And to thank me, they shared with me their own tip - they'd been in the bathrooms themselves and had swiped a few of the spare rolls of toilet paper, thinking "we can make streamers or something." So we all started playing with that.

At some point, we discovered that there was enough of an updraft out the window that if you fed enough of a roll out, the draft would pick it up and start unspooling the roll all on its own. We sent someone to the bathrooms to get even more toilet paper rolls after that, and all five of us then leaned out the windows, unspooling toilet paper like we were all naughty kittens or something.

The best part, though - a couple days later, I saw some footage from Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve special that year; it was about an hour before midnight, and Dick was talking about how the crowd was excited or whatever, and I noticed in the background, behind Dick's head - three of our toilet paper streamers, stretching clear across to the other side of Broadway and waving majestically in the breeze behind him.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:55 AM on July 15, 2014 [9 favorites]


The "NYC of the '70s/'80s sucked/was fabulous" debate resurfaces here periodically. However much less crime and better infrastructure there is today, NYC has lost much of its soul. It's not just that Times Square seems to have been rehabbed by a not particularly imaginative Mormon missionary, it's that no one can afford to live in the city, which means that the commercial and cultural diversity of the city, i.e., Manhattan, has been correspondingly decimated. (And, yes, I know about the flourishing ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the outer boroughs. I'm talking about the down/mid/uptown cultures that were the city's trademark and engine.)

I grew up with very little money, yet my family could afford--just--a one-bedroom apt. off West End Ave. in the upper 80s. That would never be possible today. And, by the same token, the market that allowed us to live on the UWS allowed a flock of small shops and restaurants and theaters citywide to exist. That's all gone, and, with it, much of what made NYC great. To see all that's been lost does not mean to turn a blind eye to those things that were wrong. But I'd trade old New York for the current model in a heartbeat.
posted by the sobsister at 9:57 AM on July 15, 2014 [6 favorites]


Yeahh, another thing to remember is that those "shitty porn houses" were built inside of some of the finest and most opulent theaters of the Victorian era, killed off by the advent of radio and television. What most people "bemoan" is not the loss of the peep booths, but the fact that almost nothing was done to restore, repurpose, or re-use any of the existing archetecture. Instead what happened was the whole thing being gutted and replaced by the same chain of Hello Kitty and Disney stores (and something called the ESPN Zone restaurant, where I saw the most god-awful hairstyle I've ever seen in my life, on a tourist, of course) that you'll find in any suburban shithole in the 50 states. Personally, I think Manhattan needs MORE shitty strip clubs and LESS real estate that does nothing but pander to the utterly unimaginative.
posted by sexyrobot at 10:11 AM on July 15, 2014 [2 favorites]


OKAY I just tore through my bookshelves trying to find that History Of Times Square book I KNOW I have but I'll just go with what I can remmeber.

Basically, once Times Square became synonymous with Broadway (that is, Respectable American Theater, its location kinda slowly crept up Broadway, trying to outrun the lower-class and less ...reputable amusements before parking around 42nd St.) sometime in the 1880s or thereabouts it got all the associations with theater and amusements, dancing halls, Edwardian roller inks, Exhibition halls and all the unsavory associations that go with that, theater-folk (vile!) pickpockets, scam artists cons, ... added to the fact that it's right between the two major rail stations for getting in and out of the city so it was easy to provide services for visitors ...or people only there temporary like say businessmen looking for a quick extramarital tumble. It was a red light distinct that also contained some of the biggest attractions the louche and the luxurious sat side by side. Cartoons from 1900s lament that you can't see any buildings in Times Square for all the advertisements on every surface and penny museums crowding the streets. From then on it's always been kind of extravagantly vulgar place appealing to the huge crowds but at least it felt like an organic kind of vulgar*, a literal vaudeville or voice of the town.

Interestingly, waves of Times Square nostalgia are not new. The musical Guys And Dolls presents a quaint cartoon version of Times Square's past where a story about bootleggers and gamblers and showgirls living in sin is all in good fun, the aforementioned Fred Astaire song, and the constant hand-wringing in the 70s that isn't so sad that the jewel of American entertainment has become so seedy and run down, etc. It's like every generation looks back 40 odd years and gets fond of the Times Square they didn't get to visit.

*Interestingly enough the Times Square Commity DEMANDS new signs and storefornts have a certain number or % of flashing lights or oversized signs or animated feature, they consider it an important part of thier image and they even name check productions of Guys And Dolls as the kind of look they want to promote and encourage...so it's a cartoon version of a cartoon
posted by The Whelk at 10:28 AM on July 15, 2014 [3 favorites]


There was also Giuliani's demonization of sex workers, the homeless, and the mentally ill that paved the way for the blatantly unconstitutional "stop-and-frisk" policies of New York today (cf. my previous comment).
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 10:43 AM on July 15, 2014


> To see all that's been lost does not mean to turn a blind eye to those things that were wrong. But I'd trade old New York for the current model in a heartbeat.

Amen. Thanks for these pictures; they brought back good memories—there was nothing like seeing an action movie in a Times Square theater. (Hey, anybody remember Tin Pan Alley, the underground dive bar?)
posted by languagehat at 11:29 AM on July 15, 2014


These photos brought back so many memories. As a teenager in mid-70's NJ, friends and I would often spend 3 days at the end of December camping and hiking from Bear Mountain to Suffern; on New Year's Eve day we would catch a train from Suffern to home, stop in long enough to get cleaned up, then catch another train to enjoy the seething clot of humanity that was Times Square on New Year's Eve. Picture spending one night in a rustic adirondack shelter on a mountain top where you are in utterly silent peaceful nature yet you can see the entire skyline from the Tappan Zee bridge down to the glow of the refineries of Perth Amboy, and then the very next night you are smack in the middle of some ground zero crush of humanity (though it seems like even THAT madhouse has been Disneyfied in recent years/decades).

And in my 20's I was a frequent and avid spectator of (and sometime willing participant in) the seamy underbelly of 42nd street and its environs. Don't get me wrong, I have an appropriate appreciation of cultural jewels like Carnegie Hall, or the Lincoln Center, or the old Jazz At Noon venue...and oh my how the memories come flooding back of countless OTHER treasures in that amazing city. But there is also, for me, a certain beauty in decay. It's why I love Detroit, and the Flats of Cleveland before that place got all gentrified, and certain unapologetically downscale neighborhoods in my own current home town.

I moved from NJ to the midwest in 1984, just before Ed "How'm I doin'?" Koch went into tailspin with his 3rd term corruption scandals. Have only been back to Times Square a couple of times since then; so differences on each visit are extremely stark and jarring rather than gradual. I think I prefer my filtered nostalgia over its current state.
posted by AvailableSpace at 12:14 PM on July 15, 2014 [1 favorite]


NO
UNESCORTED
LADIES

posted by koeselitz at 2:16 PM on July 15, 2014


(I mean, what's that about? Women aren't allowed to go to movies on their own? Were they afraid of in-theater prostitution or something? I guess that's the best bet, considering the other sign about "controlled substances" there.)
posted by koeselitz at 2:18 PM on July 15, 2014


I would guess that's for their own safety.
posted by a2a87 at 2:35 PM on July 15, 2014


It was usually a fig leaf for the police that "nope nooo sex workers in here!"
posted by The Whelk at 2:54 PM on July 15, 2014 [2 favorites]


I can understand feeling affection for a vanished marker of one's personal past, but I really can't buy the claim that New York was somehow culturally richer for having a street of shitty porn houses.

Read Samuel Delaney's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue And you might develop some appreciation for what's been lost, however tawdry.

In 1989 my 11th grade class did a school trip to NYC and we stayed not too far away from all this. As I remember it we were basically threatened with death if we were caught anywhere near.
posted by sevenyearlurk at 3:34 PM on July 15, 2014


I really can't buy the claim that New York was somehow culturally richer for having a street of shitty porn houses.

Ah ha. Did you grow up here? Is it now culturally richer for having a Guy Fieri restaurant, Cake Boss Cafe, naked Cowboys/Cowgirls, Hard Rock Jekyll & Hyde theme restaurants and knock-off Disney characters groping women and children? (well, at least that's a bit nostalgic but back in the day no costume was needed). The place now is a cesspool of pop culture obscenity, a human zoo full of fat tourists who would rather eat at Olive Garden than spend a few minutes to find something better.
posted by ReeMonster at 4:27 PM on July 15, 2014 [1 favorite]


Well, I'll just recount a favorite memory from 1962, when my friend Charlie and I went to the opera (the old one on 40th street) and got standing room tickets for Don Giovanni (about a buck) and then we walked to 42nd street and saw A Night at the Opera (Marx bros) for another 25 cents.

Before the porn, there were old movies, with less than 15 people in the audience, mostly sleeping.

Old NY isn't all gone, though. I was last propositioned in NY only about 2 years ago, by an attractive black TV, near the Javits Center.
posted by hexatron at 4:28 PM on July 15, 2014 [3 favorites]


Were they afraid of in-theater prostitution or something?

Yes. You used to see similar signs in bars and dance halls.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:14 PM on July 15, 2014 [1 favorite]


There's a gag in The Astaire and Rogers movie Follow the Fleet where spinster Harriet Hilliard is trying to get into the Paradise Ballroom to see her sister Ginger Rogers perform, but they won't let her in because of No Unaccompanied Ladies. She says, "Oh, I see. One can't even get into Paradise without a man."

(Then she grabs sailor Randolph Scott and pretends he's her date, hijinks ensue, and he never closes her refrigerator door.)
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:22 PM on July 15, 2014 [2 favorites]


That is the theater I saw Star Trek V at. Oh, lord! This is like a trip back to Frankenhooker.
posted by cleroy at 7:08 PM on July 15, 2014 [1 favorite]


There are still plenty of shitty porn shops on 8th Avenue, between Times Square and the now-hip Hell's Kitchen. I would argue that element has not been lost, just diminished.
posted by yellowcandy at 7:48 PM on July 15, 2014


So, having not been to Times Square since ... well, probably since around the time these photos were taken ... I'm getting the distinct impression I should not go there now, lest my fond memories be forever tarnished.
posted by madajb at 10:31 PM on July 15, 2014


I went to New York City for the first time in the summer of 1994 (I had an internship). This was the very beginning of the Giuliani era, so things were just starting to get cleaned up/gentrified but there was still plenty of the older, seedier Times Square left - not to mention more of the cool little only-in-New-York places all over.

My big regret is that I didn't take many pictures at all while I was there. I wish I would have taken more.
posted by SisterHavana at 11:09 PM on July 15, 2014


I don't see why you guys are complaining I remember just little tastes of the Old Times Square from childhood and the current one is much more obscene and depraved. It is the place we give the American tourists all the comforts of home, maximized to NYC intensity.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 12:51 AM on July 16, 2014


Wow, I had completely forgotten the adult shops on 42nd St! Thinking back, I remember seeing them during trips to the city in the early nineties and not really thinking much about them, other than a few brief giggles. Rural roads in Upstate NY have them too, so I guess I thought they were a normal, if teehee-sex, part of the landscape.
posted by wiskunde at 5:07 AM on July 16, 2014


How can you read jayb3369's anecdote and say we haven't lost something?
posted by yonega at 5:49 AM on July 16, 2014


It is the place we give the American tourists all the comforts of home, maximized to NYC intensity.

wait...do you think if maybe we take those generic sanitized comforts away from them, they'll stay home?...
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:05 AM on July 16, 2014


I don't think the adult theaters could survive in such quantities today, not with the explosion of watch at home video and the Internet. There's probably also a paper worth writing on how these theaters were magnets for prostitution, a 70s culture of swinging for some, and somewhat safer zones for gay men to meet each other. As culture shifted and so did technology, I have to believe the ability to keep afloat would diminish. Maybe some of the theaters would have evolved into more or less just strip clubs and porno shops and survive, but many abandoned buildings would have opened up without some form of redevelopment efforts, don't you think?

It's a shame that they couldn't have pushed for a massive theater district, with some of the great movie houses and whatnot converted to small live theaters, musical venues, etc. When visiting Times Square as an outsider, I liked the old landmarks, but found little of interest in the chain shops and traps. I spent the most money on street food (that which does not kill me...) and avoided spending money on pointless junk. Had I been offered a choice of live venues showing anything from Broadway to half hour skits and live music in a series of bars, I'd have spent cash. I could have hunted down such things, but having them line the Times Square area would have meant for a world-class memory created spur of the moment. Oh, well.
posted by Muddler at 6:05 AM on July 16, 2014


It's a shame that they couldn't have pushed for a massive theater district, with some of the great movie houses and whatnot converted to small live theaters, musical venues, etc.

Speaking as a theater person, whose career was most active at the time the Times Square revamp was going on -

We tried. I swear. We just didn't have as much money behind us as Disney and The Gap.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:07 AM on July 16, 2014


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