|
Anthony Bianco
author of
Ghosts
of 42nd Street:
A History of America's Most Infamous Block
_______________________________________
Beginning in 1899, a burst of construction on the mid-Manhattan block of
West 42nd Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue created the greatest
concentration of theaters America had ever seen, giving birth to today's
Broadway theater district. When the New York Times built a slender
twenty-five-story tower on an odd, triangular site formed by the convergence
of 42nd Street, Broadway, and Seventh Avenue, the city named the square facing
the tower Times Square, which quickly became New York's gathering place for
all important civic events.
In its heyday, 42nd Street was excessive, expensive, unpredictable, loud,
fun, and, at times, dangerous. Forty-second Street's Golden Age of entertainment
ended by 1930 and the street quickly devolved from the nation's first show
business capital into its first retail porn center, becoming even more infamous
for its squalor. Its denizens rechristened 42nd Street as "Forty Deuce" or
simply "the Deuce." This downward trend continued into recent decades, when
42nd Street was largely demolished and rebuilt in the largest urban renewal
project in New York history, creating the Times Square of today -- still
known far and wide as the "Crossroads of the World."#
Anthony Bianco's Ghosts of 42nd Street is the dramatic and definitive
story of this legendary strip. He joins us in a December, 2004 conversation
about this neighborhood's history, its impact on the city of New York,
and America's imagination of it as a culturally important thoroughfare.
__________________________________________________________
"[Times Square is] the only New York possessing a thrill. It is…the
carnival supernal."
- J. George Fredericks, author of Adventuring in New York,
published in 1923
*
- Listen to
Christopher Columbus
 , by the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra
_______________________________________
|
JJM You wrote, "Who does not know Fifth Avenue,
Madison Avenue, Park Avenue, Wall Street, or Broadway? But 42nd Street in
its heyday was the quintessence of the quintessential American metropolis
-- excessive, expensive, unpredictable, loud, fun, and a bit dangerous. No
place in America has ever evoked the glamour and romantic possibilities of
big-city nightlife as vividly as did 42nd Street in its Golden Age." What
was 42nd Street before Oscar Hammerstein opened the Olympia Theater in 1895?
AB It was a dusty center for the carriage
and horse trade, on the edge of inhabited Manhattan. The history of Manhattan
is that it was civilized, or occupied, by the southern tip and worked its
way up. Oscar Hammerstein took a leap beyond the current northern boundary
in his day, which was 40th Street -- into what was then called Long Acre
Square -- an area that had nothing to do with entertainment until he got
there; it was where people stabled their horses or bought carriages. It wasn't
lit, and at night it became a center of prostitution. This area was beyond
respectability then, it was the frontier. Because Broadway ran through it,
you could imagine how one day entertainment would extend into Long Acre,
but it was Hammerstein and his audacity that pulled it off. |
| JJM
Hammerstein became known as the "Father of 42nd Street." How
did he earn that title?
AB He built the Olympia on 44th and Broadway,
and then, on the corner of 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue, he built the Victoria.
It was the second proper theater on 42nd Street, but the one that really
established the street as a theatrical address. The Victoria actually didn't
last that long, but it had lots of really interesting incarnations, and it
became the first great national center of vaudeville in America. Hammerstein
built a second theater next to it, the Republic, which was a theater of a
very different sort -- a drawing room of drama. He then built two more theaters
down the street. He built four theaters of the ten on 42nd Street at its
theatrical peak.
JJM So he promoted a whole variety of shows
within these theaters.
AB Yes, although his love was opera, and
he himself was musically talented, he had a democratic notion of entertainment.
Within one theater building, he had an ability to offer different forms of
entertainment to appeal to different segments of society, and they were priced
that way, especially when the roof of the Victoria was opened. Because his
venues were priced for all classes and to all tastes, they established the
basic character of 42nd Street as a place where everyone would go for excitement
and entertainment.
JJM Yes, it was like a one-stop shopping center
for entertainment at the time.
AB Its appeal was enhanced by the fact that
so much was pushed together in essentially a block or two. It was really
over-the-top night time glamour and excitement concentrated in a small area.
JJM It was written of Hammerstein that he
was a modern day folk hero. How did he win over the New York audience?
AB He was an eccentric character, for real,
and then he also played to his eccentricities; for example, he only dressed
in formal evening wear at all times of day. He also really knew how to cultivate
the press. Reporters liked him, and he was accessible to them. So, in his
day, he was one of the most famous people in America and his every foible
and exploit was duly recorded by the press. Although he was a product of
high culture, he had a genuine connection with the little guy, and he spanned
the gap between high and middlebrow cultue, which was especially hard in
that era, when the gap was larger than it is now. He understood all segments
and had something that appealed to all of them, and everybody read about
him all the time. |
Long Acre Square, Times building (center), Olympia Theater
(left)
*
Vanity Fair print
Oscar Hammerstein, I
"Because of his determination to work independently in order to
achieve his ambitions on his own terms, he became a modern-day folk hero
to the thousands of immigrants , who, like himself, had come to America believing
that every man could create his own opportunities for advancement."
- Oscar Hammerstein biographer John F. Carroll
_____
-
At
a Georgia Camp Meeting, by the Edison Grand Concert Band
|
Photofest
The Paradise Roof Garden atop the Victoria Theater, 1901
"The Victoria would become the most famous and profitable of all
of Hammerstein's theaters, but it was the least impressive looking of the
lot. By necessity, its construction was an exercise in artful
penny-pinching overseen by Arthur Hammerstein, who, at his father's insistence,
had trained as a professional plasterer. Althogh the Victoria was planned
from the start as a theater, the Hammersteins engaged in a protracted charade
designed to convince city officials that the 1,250-seat venue would be a
concert hall, and thus subject to less stringent and costly building
requirements."
- Anthony Bianco
*
42nd Street, c. 1920s
_____
Forty-Second Street
, by the Boswell Sisters
|
JJM He had a streak of independence that seemed
to appeal to the immigrants of the era who wanted to find success as well.
AB That's right. He was an immigrant himself.
While he was from a pretty affluent background in Germany, he had come to
America with nothing. Since he then made a series of fortunes on his own,
it's easy to see why he had such appeal with those who were struggling and
trying to imagine a better life. He epitomized that to a generation of
immigrants.
JJM
You wrote that he had "defiantly expensive booking policies" that assisted
independent producers. Did his independence change the face of theater at
all?
AB Hammerstein was the first major independent
producer to stand up to the Theatrical Syndicate, which meant, in part, that
he was paying entertainers more than the Syndicate would, and was also allowing
them a latitude the Syndicate's tightly controlled scheduling wouldn't. He
caved in for a bit, and backed off from his fight, but then came back at
them. That certainly gave exposure to theatrical talent that might never
have been able to get into the syndicate system, so it had a broadening,
democratic effect on who was doing the entertaining. Hammerstein didn't break
the syndicate, though; it was the Schubert Brothers who did that. They also
emerged on 42nd Street, and then acquired many theaters in New York and across
the country. They took on the Syndicate head on and really bested them. But
they coexisted on the street at the same time, and since Hammerstein and
the Schuberts were friendly, they were sort of spiritual allies.
JJM
Of Hammerstein's downturn, you write, "Utterly broke, Oscar had to
borrow $500 from son Arthur to buy food. The elder Hammerstein seemed to
take a certain perverse pride in the totality of his ruin. Meeting a friend
on Broadway, he offered him a cigar. 'I have lost all my theaters, my home,
and everything else,' he said. 'My fortune consists of two cigars. I will
share it with you.'" What was the cause of his downfall?
AB I think that period you are quoting from
is after the fall of the Olympia, which was a huge financial failure. He
was overextended commercially.
JJM And he came back after that…
AB Yes. That story is very much quoted about
him, and it could be true. He wasn't that interested in making money. Like
many great promoters, he was more interested in the venture than the profit,
and he had a compulsion to do things first class. So from time to time, he
would get overextended financially and collapse. But he had so much drive,
imagination and personal appeal that he could always pick himself back up
and start over again. |
| JJM
How did the emergence of the subway affect 42nd Street?
AB The subway expanded 42nd Street into a
hub of entertainment for the whole city. The first subway stations opened
in 1904, and one of the first important ones was at 42nd Street, Seventh
Avenue and Broadway -- the "crossroads of the world" intersection -- which
made this area accessible from distant parts of the city for the first time.
It also created a tremendous amount of traffic through there, which is of
course vital for a popular entertainment district.
JJM Why was the subway station on 42nd Street
and not three blocks down, or four blocks up? In other words, how did it
get to be there?
AB It was mainly determined by the street
grid of Manhattan. The grid was laid out well before this time -- I believe
it was 1868 -- and at intervals, there were double-wide streets. There is
one on 42nd Street, then as you go toward downtown they are found on 34th,
23rd, and 14th Streets. These double-wide streets, of course, were bigger
thoroughfares, so 42nd Street's fate partly was decided by that mapping.
The midtown nexus of the subway system was there, and just a few blocks to
the east is Grand Central Station, which also had concentrated traffic. All
this mass transportation brought many thousands of New Yorkers through the
site every day. |
Subway passengers, c. 1904
*
-
Nobody,
by Bert Williams
|
Culver Pictures
Balloon girl Helen Barnes
_____
-
The Old Crooner, by Will Rogers
|
JJM
You write, "The Great White Way was steeped in sex from the
outset, onstage and offstage -- especially off." How so?
AB The whole Times Square area was a center
for prostitution. There is a long history of theater districts doubling as
red light districts, and part of it has to do with the prevalence of aspiring
young actresses who can't get the work they want. This was certainly true
of Times Square, which was home to hundreds of brothels in the early 1900s.
42nd Street really began to flourish at the turn of the century, and very
quickly there was a parallel evolution of prostitution. There was this
dovetailing of theatrical entertainment and prostitution -- nightlife in
all its forms. It was quite open and public in many ways. The most popular
brothels had people lined up outside them on a Saturday night. It was tolerated
because New York was a real open city for a while. The story of 42nd Street
is a series of moral crackdowns led by the police and other independent reformers
against open vice.
JJM
The original concept Hammerstein and some of the other visionaries
had for 42nd Street began to transition as the market changed. How successful
was the assimilation of vaudeville into this area known for theater?
AB Vaudeville came on the heels of the legitimate
theater and coexisted with it on 42nd Street for two decades. A huge theater
boom occurred along the blocks going uptown from 42nd Street, especially
on 44th. 42nd Street was really where the modern Broadway district started,
and the street was pretty quickly filled by 1910, although there was some
building later. Then, on 43rd, 44th, 45th and up, larger and more modern
theaters by the dozen were built. So, in a technical way, the theaters on
42nd Street were pretty quickly outmoded and not very cost effective to operate
compared with these other theaters, which did not have a third balcony and
had better sight lines. After a time, then, the theater owners and impresarios
of 42nd Street were stuck with outmoded theaters. Although it resulted in
a lot of good entertainment, as a business strategy, being on 42nd Street
fairly quickly became a disadvantage for theater producers. |
| JJM Some of the vaudevillians who performed
on 42nd Street were the "who's who" of entertainment then. W.C. Fields, Charlie
Chaplin, Will Rogers, Buster Keaton, Harry Houdini…
AB Yes, and many of them also appeared directly across the street at the New Amsterdam in its heyday.
JJM
Who were some of the freak acts that earned the Victoria the reputation
as vaudeville's great nut house?
AB The Cherry Sisters were three sisters
from some parts distant, who thought they were pretty good singers but in
actuality were absolutely awful. They were so awful, in fact, that people
took a liking to them. Hammerstein booked them a number of times, and they
succeeded, so theirs was entertainment that was so bad that it was good.
Part of the ritual of appreciating a performance by the Cherry Sisters was
throwing rotten fruit at them -- which I believe started at the Victoria
-- and even then, according to Hammerstein, the performers didn't get it.
Of course, Hammerstein in his persuasive way encouraged his performers to
believe that rotten fruit was a form of appreciation. The Cherry Sisters
were kind of a freak category to themselves.
JJM Hammerstein also hired people who weren't
necessarily entertainers, but who gained notoriety through bizarre circumstances,
criminal acts…
AB Yes. The term "freak act "goes beyond
the circus freaks. It included giants, malformed people of different sorts,
as well as notorious people in the headlines -- accused murderers, disgraced
playboys, boxers, and famous athletes of all kinds would be included in the
term "freak act."
JJM Jack Johnson was in vaudeville and must
have performed in these theaters.
AB At the ignominious end of his career,
I believe he appeared at Huber's, the dime museum down the street. So the
term "freak act" was very broad, and it reflected Willie Hammerstein's great
feel for what we would today call "tabloid journalism." Willie, who
was Oscar's son, was a great promoter in his own right. Willie had a talent
for finding all the misfits and notorious headline grabbers of the day. Perhaps
the ultimate one was Evelyn Nesbit, who was in a famous murder triangle with
Harry Thaw, a playboy from Pittsburgh, and prominent New York architect Stanford
White. Nesbit had a series of salacious incarnations on 42nd Street, and
ended up at the Victoria. She was another person who fancied herself an
entertainer, though she really couldn't sing or dance -- not that it mattered,
because her notoriety was such that she packed the house just with her presence.
JJM Were people able to earn middle class
incomes from this kind of work?
AB The stars did much better than middle
class money, and even some of the rank and file strippers made a working
class salary. Someone like Gypsy Rose Lee did considerably better than that
in burlesque, which followed the vaudeville era. |
Culver Pictures
New Amsterdam Theater, 1905
*
Brown Brothers
Victoria Theater, 1903
*
Cherry Sisters
"At houses controlled by (Benjamin) Keith and by the E.F. Proctor
circuit, even audience members were reprimanded for bad behavior, including
booing. But at Hammerstein's, almost anything went, including drinking and
smoking, both of which were prohibited at most other vaudeville venues. Not
only did the Victoria not censor performers, but it also encouraged them
to try out new, unproven material."
- Anthony Bianco
_____
-
Livery
Stable Blues, by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band |
Culver Pictures
Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr.
*
Culver Pictures
Evelyn Nesbit
*
Culver Pictures
Unidentified stripper, 1937, Republic Theater
*
The Follies theme song,
A
Pretty Girl is Just Like a Melody, written by Irving
Berlin and sung by Allan Jones |
JJM
Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr's biographer Charles Higham wrote of Ziegfeld,
"His driving force was one of demonic sensuality and a passion for vivid
artifice. From the very beginning his stage productions were direct expressions
of his essentially primitive sexual character. He was at once witch doctor
and organizer of tribal dances. The Follies were an astonishing demonstration
of the mind of a man who sought to release his need for women in displays
of adulation." What would an audience see during a Follies performance?
AB The Follies entertainers were very diverse;
there would be comics and singers and entertainers, but what they were famous
for were large chorus groupings of beautiful, voluptuous women dressed in
very flamboyant and creative ways, all moving in synchronized fashion. The
Follies were great dramatic displays of female beauty and fashion, woven
together at the highest level of theatrical artistry. They were spectacular
in that way, and in between the chorus girls were comedians like W.C. Fields,
Will Rogers, and acts like that. It was a very diverse set of entertainments,
but the stars of the show were the anonymous chorus girls en masse.
JJM
It was a time for the "cult of the chorus girl."
AB The cult went beyond the Follies and also
predated it. Some years before the Follies started, Evelyn Nesbit had made
her debut in a show called Floradora, which was sort of the founding
of the "cult of the chorus girl." During its performance, six chorus girls
would come out and parade around on stage but say hardly anything. It created
such a sensation that they packed them in every night.
JJM And this work provided attractive women
with an opportunity to make it on Broadway even in that small way, although
there was certainly a down side as well. In Sister Carrie, Theodore
Dreiser wrote of them, "Girls that stand in line and look pretty are as numerous
as laborers who can swing a pick." So, while it was an opportunity, there
must have been a lot of disappointment among the performers as well.
AB The fame of 42nd Street was featured all
the time in national publications, so its allure reached deep into the heartland.
Thousands of young women would come and try to make it on Broadway. There
was one estimate at the time from the early twentieth century -- I can't
be sure of how credible it is -- that indicates there were ten thousand
unemployed chorus girls in New York. That is an enormous number, and since
there were nowhere near that many chorus girl jobs, many of them no doubt
ended up as prostitutes. Broadway was a tremendously alluring attraction
for young women, and also, of course, for admirers of young women.
JJM
When was the first instance of on-stage nudity on 42nd Street?
AB I don't know what the very first instance
was, but there certainly was nudity in Oscar Hammerstein's shows.
JJM Blatant nudity?
AB It would be done in what we would think
of today as being tasteful, but it was actual nudity. The chorus girl shows
that came later had quite a bit of nudity in them, but ironically, Ziegfeld
set himself up as a moral reformer against nudity, although he had it in
his own shows. There were others among his competitors who would take nudity
farther, and it was really a sort of competitove reaction to Ziegfeld.
JJM What, if anything, were the politicians
of the era doing about that?
AB There was a crackdown. Anti-vice reform
groups involving church people, society people and others eventually organized
a movement that cracked down pretty hard on nudity on the Broadway stage,
and it did disappear.
JJM What era was this?
AB This is before the burlesque era, in the
twenties, and even before then. There was a constant tension. In the teens,
right after World War I, there was a wild outbreak of dancing, which at the
time was seen in some circles as being licentious. So, in addition to the
nudity on stage, explicitly sexual dances were being performed -- popular
dances that would catch on. There would be wild carrying-on in the dance
palaces and the nightclubs that also grew within this entertainment district.
This also incensed reformers. At the same, throughout America, the building
of political sentiment that led to prohibition was taking place. All these
things are tied up together. All of the forms of licentious behavior that
were censured by reformers were epitomized by 42nd Street. |
| JJM Well,
it must have been an interesting place, particularly at that time. Legitimate
theater was playing right next door to burlesque, and to the marketer's credit,
they were able to succeed in filling both of the venues. Whether you were
going to attend a theater performance, a burlesque show, or go to a dime
museum, there didn't seem to be a lot of fear about walking down the street
that was an impediment to success years later.
AB From what I was able to tell, the fear of what
might happen to you on 42nd Street started in the early thirties, when the
character of the street began to change. There was no sort of general fear
of crime on 42nd Street before then.
JJM You wrote, "By 1934, Father Joseph A.
McCaffrey, the outspoken new pastor of the Church of the Holy Cross at 329
West 42nd Street, was publicly complaining of 'a hoodlum element that was
frightening decent people off the street.'" Was 42nd Street any more dangerous
than any other parts of the city during the Depression?
AB From what I was able to find from crime
statistics, I don't think it was. There was a perception that it was, because
it was always a place where diverse kinds of people congregated -- people
who were roving from city to city, homeless people, hoboes and others, would
naturally go to 42nd Street. So there was a great deal of "riff-raff" there,
and it could look menacing through certain eyes, but the crime statistics
of the time don't really support that it was a center of crime. Politically,
though, just the sense that it was menacing was as important as if it actually
were.
JJM
When Fiorello LaGuardia became mayor, he went after the marketers of
burlesque. His biographer Lawrence Elliott wrote of him, "(La Guardia's)
puritanical streak, that sense of moral outrage, was so highly developed
that he could make no distinction between a truly original theatrical genre,
and ordinary prostitution; or between a work of literature with some four-letter
words, and magazines with flagrantly lewd cover illustrations publicly displayed;
or between church bingo and the numbers racket. To him, they were all the
same." Was La Guardia's crusade against burlesque at all successful?
AB Yes, ultimately it was successful, but
it took a long time. Burlesque basically survived through the thirties and
into the early forties on 42nd Street. La Guardia was outraged by its presence,
but legally speaking it was not a simple matter of just shutting the burlesque
houses down -- there was a whole legal song and dance that went on. Gradually,
though, the city government squeezed burlesque out of existence on 42nd street. |
Photofest
Minsky's Republic Theater
*
Fiorello LaGuardia
"There are chow-meineries, peep shows for men only, flea circuses,
lectures on what killed Rudolph Valentino, jitney ballrooms and a farrago
of other attractions which would have sickened the heart of the Broadwayite
of the period of even ten years ago."
- Broadway critic Stanley Walker, in 1933
_____
Night And Day
, by Fred Astaire, from the Gay
Divorcee |
The Hermitage Hotel, 572 7th Avenue, 1938
*
The Criterion Theater
"Witnesses at the clean-up hearings…testified that idlers
along 42nd Street have been eating peanuts and commenting on passing women.
It is a short step between that and whittling."
- A.J. Liebling in the New Yorker, 1932
_____
-
Ain't Misbehavin'
, by Fats Waller, from Hot Chocolates
|
JJM
Following World War II, what was big business's view of 42nd Street?
AB The dominant business interests in the
Broadway theater district were the owners of the big legitimate theaters,
which were no longer on 42nd Street following World War II. On 42nd, the
so-called legitimate Broadway theater had been replaced by all-night movie
houses and burlesque houses. The legitimate theater interests saw the burlesque
palaces and 'B movie' houses of 42nd Street as tawdry stains on the image
of the Broadway theater, so they were lobbying and pressuring the city to
shut them down. Even though in a sense they were in the same business, they
considered themselves far above what was taking place on 42nd Street, and
they agitated for the city to take them down.
JJM But, basically nothing happened.
AB Gradually, political pressure did build,
and the city made it impossible for the Minsky brothers and other burlesque
promoters to operate on 42nd Street. The same sort of thing happened again
in the sixties and seventies, the porn era, where you had the police going
beyond the law in their zeal to put XXX operators out of business. There
was constant monitoring, constant arrests, and constant prosecutions. The
judges would rule that there was a difference between what was politically
popular and what the law allowed, so new laws would be passed. It wasn't
a simple thing to shut it down. Also, the adult bookstores, peep shows and
massage parlors had a constituency -- people wanted to go there, and they
didn't want these businesses to be shut down. They usually weren't as politically
influential as the enemies of lewd public entertainment, but still, there
they were, buying tickets and dropping quarters in slots.
JJM
During the fifties, 42nd Street became a glamorized block to the hipsters
of that era. What was going on during that time that would have attracted
them to that neighborhood?
AB In the thirties, 42nd Street -- and to
some extent Broadway -- basically became a kind of carnival street in the
middle of Manhattan. From that time on, there was no new construction, and
the district became conspicuously different than the rest of Manhattan. There
was a concentration of entertainment that remained there that was no longer
legitimate theater. Movies that in some cases were not shown elsewhere in
town would run in continuous fashion all day and all night. There were the
beginnings of the adult bookstores and different game arcades as well. And
because 42nd Street was a place that stayed open all night, it attracted
everyone in the city who had unconventional notions of what was fun. Even
with all the changes, it remained a heavily trafficked area, so just walking
down the street was entertaining. While it wasn't quite an X-rated carnival
during the fifties, 42nd Street remained a raffish, "anything goes" kind
of street, and that appealed to hipsters. |
| JJM Many of the businesses that populated
the neighborhood during that time -- the all night movie houses, the cafeterias
that didn't have waiters -- were all pretty easy to just hang around in.
AB The Automat, where you would buy your
food through an automatic machine, stayed open all night, and for anyone
who didn't have much money and no place to go, it and the other all-night
cafeterias on 42nd were havens. Herbert Huncke, the hobo hipster patron of
the beat writers who was the unofficial mayor of 42nd Street for a time,
would hold court in the all-night cafeterias.
There was illicit trafficking going on at the time on 42nd Street, but the
scene wasn't yet defined by it. The X-rated element wasn't yet predominant,
nor was 42nd Street fundamentally a center for prostitution or drug trafficking,
although those things went on. Because there was such a swarm of humanity
of all kinds, it was still a benignly unconventional place in the fifties,
and in some ways it was the height of the movie era on 42nd Street. |
photo
by Berenice
Abbott
Automat, 977 Eighth Avenue, 1936
"I recall hanging around Bickford's under the Apollo Theater marquee
on Forty-second, when it was still there -- an all-night population of hustlers
and junkies, and just sort of wandering…Street wanderers - intelligent
Melvillean street wanderers of the night."
- Allen Ginsberg
_____
-
Scrapple from the Apple
, by Charlie Parker
|
photo by Tom
Cirillo
"All the animals come out at night -- whores, skunk pussies, buggers,
queers, fairies, dopers, junkies. Sick. Venal. Someday a real rain will come
and wash all the scum off the streets."
- Travis Bickle, the Robert DeNiro character in Taxi
Driver
*
photo Peter Howard
A 1970's masseuse, inside "The Studio"
"I can't say I was afraid of 42nd Street after fighting in Vietnam,
but I did carry my knife in my pocket at all times. Every day you'd
get propositioned on the street, or get offered drugs, or see someone getting
head in an alley."
- Playwright Dennis Hackin
*
photo J. Michael Dombroski
"Every day I walk in I don't know if I'm in business or not.
There's no law prohibiting a peep show, and so the cops charge me with
anything. We're becoming a scapegoat for all the ills in the
city."
- Marty Hodas, "King of the Peeps"
_____
"New York needs this drag. It draws the crooks and the con men
and queers from the decent neighborhoods."
- Congo the Jungle Creep
_____
Aquarius
,
by Ronald Dyson, from Hair |
JJM Yes, the era of the grinders.
AB These famous grinders influenced all sorts
of people in the film business, from Woody Allen to Stanley Kubrick -- all
sorts of up and coming filmmakers spent time on 42nd Street.
JJM
You wrote of Mayor John Lindsay, "To a man of Lindsay's sensibilities,
42nd Street was just plain ugly. How could he hope to beautify the city and
to elevate its cultural life with this honky-tonk strip running right through
its midsection?" What was Lindsay's plan for Times Square?
AB To his credit, Lindsay paid attention
to Times Square and 42nd Street in a comprehensive sense. He had an elevated
notion of the aesthetics of the entire city, which was something new for
New York. He had a number of ambitious projects for Times Square and 42nd
Street. There was to be a big convention center -- which was later built,
the Jacob Javits Center on 34th Street -- that was originally was going to
be at the end of 42nd Street. There were a number of different attempts --
none of which went very far -- to initiate concepts that would revive 42nd
Street as a street of theater. Lindsay was a great lover of theater -- his
mother was an actress who had appeared on 42nd Street in its heyday -- and
his administration tried to cook up some schemes to bring plays back to 42nd
Street. He envisioned these plays performed in restored theaters that would
also be tied to large-scale real estate development. He created an agency
-- Midtown Economic Development -- that moved into a building on 42nd Street
and came up with different schemes to try to provide incentives for property
owners who built or remodeled. All it led to, really, was the construction
of three or four small theaters in Times Square, not on 42nd Street per se.
Despite all its good intentions, 42nd Street continued to deteriorate in
real estate terms.
JJM
His attempt to crack down on porn was probably a larger task than he
thought it would be.
AB Yes, 42nd Street really exploded as a
porn center during Lindsay's years, not particularly because of anything
he did, but due to the invention of the peep film machine and its popularization
by the "King of the Peeps," Marty Hodas. Because there was a huge untapped
demand for pornographic entertainment, the peep film machine led to a wild
fire of commercial evolution that no government could control. By that time,
just in terms of the buildings and the real estate values, 42nd Street had
deteriorated to the point that the landlords were desperate for just about
anything.
JJM There was a ton of money in porn on 42nd
Street. You wrote that it was common for Hodas to deposit in the neighborhood
of 85% of all the quarters in the local bank.
AB In the local Chemical Bank branch, that's
right. These collectors were going down the street with big steamer trunks
filled with coins, a couple times a day, to deposit them in this bank.
JJM And then the Mafia got involved.
AB Quite early on, yes. The Mafia followed
the chink of coins, basically, and started to muscle its way in. Some fairly
low-level mob people bought and ran their own adult bookstores. They also
financed a coin peep show machine distribution business, in competition with
Hodas, and then they started muscling people for protection money. The cash
flow was irresistible for them.
JJM
In many ways, the hero of this whole story is a guy who sort of took
on this entire sordid community, not through intimidation but through courage
-- the playwright and Horizon Theater Company founder Robert Moss.
AB Courageous and desperate, yes.
JJM He needed to find a theater quickly because
he was on the verge of being evicted?
AB Yes, his not-for-profit theater group was going
to be evicted from the YWCA, so he had to scour the city for a place. By
this time, in 1974, 42nd Street was really pretty scary. It was the height
of the massage parlor era and street crime was epidemic. Moss was a theater
person who had no larger ambition than to find the cheapest place he could
to put on a play. He was so alarmed by what he encountered on the block of
42nd Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues that the first time he went there,
he walked down the traffic line in the middle of the street because he didn't
dare set foot on the sidewalks. Luckily for him, there was on this block
a half dozen Off Off Broadway theaters that had been built in the sixties
by Irving Maidman, a real estate developer who was years ahead of everyone
else in terms of anticipating the revival of 42nd Street. These places had
failed as theaters, but Bob Moss had the guts and the need to rent one of
them for Playwrights Horizons, his very prolific theater company. In the
most basic way, day by day, Moss and Playwrights Horizons recreated 42nd
Street as a theater street on a small scale. He had this tremendous enthusiasm
and charismatic power to get actors and other theater people to follow him. |
JJM Moss said, "The way to clean up this area
is not to harass the prostitutes, but to open up the theaters. The rest will
follow." He had a lot of success with that, and in the eighties, the 42nd
Street Development Corporation, in some ways, tried to do what Moss did,
but in a cynical sort of way. They wanted to deal with the problems of 42nd
Street by building skyscrapers surrounding it and then putting theaters inside
these buildings.
AB Theater Row, the development that grew
from Bob Moss's first theater, was organized by a man named Fred Papert.
Its base was not-for-profit theater. The theaters within Theater Row were
small, ninety-nine seat theaters, mostly, that were subsisting off ticket
sales and donations. Theatre Row had a commercial effect, in that businesses
flourished around it and property values went up, but it was not fundamentally
a commercial venture itself. This development was on a block between Ninth
and Tenth, but when you move east to the center of old 42nd Street and Broadway,
there are much larger scale theaters, and therefore much more commercial
potential. So, instead of just conceiving of this as a theater reclamation
project, the city and state government wrapped the old theaters into a
large-scale commercial, office and retail development.
The idea was cynical
because the Koch government, in particular, pretended like the main object
was the theaters, when it really wasn't -- it was to revive 42nd Street and
Broadway as a commercial center. There was a whole series of misadventures,
and the project was stillborn a couple of times. It wasn't until in the late
eighties/early nineties, when a state official named Rebecca Robertson carved
out the revival of the theaters as the reason for the project, putting them
ahead of the office building component that had stopped short. In the end,
redeveloped 42nd Street included all of these things -- theaters, office
buildings and stores -- but it didn't really work as a development until
the theaters were made the priority again. |
Bob Moss (right), with Jackie Onassis, late 1970's
"(The office towers are) exceptionally repellent, great gray ghosts
of buildings, shutting out the sun and turning Times Square into the bottom
of a well. The idea that you can solve profound sociological problems by
building skyscrapers is transparently false."
- New Yorker architecture critic Brendan
Gill
_____
Day By Day
, from Godspell
|
photo Marilyn K. Yee
Rebecca Robertson (left), with Cora Cahan
*
The restored main auditorium of the New Amsterdam Theater
_____
Surrender ,
by Glenn Close, from Sunset Boulevard |
JJM Robertson had a real appreciation
for the area. She said, "You have got to feel its ghosts," and; "Do right
by the theaters and the rest will follow." Her plan was incredibly visionary,
and whether you like it or not, the result is that 42nd Street is a destination
for theater-goers and tourists, and amid a save environment again.
AB Yes, at its worst point of decay, 42nd
Street was a dangerous, rather depraved place, with lots of crime of all
sorts -- including child prostitution. Not only tourists but many New York
residents were afraid to see foot on West 42nd Street. The state didn't help
by condemning much of 42nd Street in the late eighties to pave the way for
its redevelopment. They condemned dozens of properties with the idea that
redevelopment would start promptly, but it was delayed for years and so what
you had was the worst of both worlds. It was like that for quite a bit of
time.
JJM
Concerning those displaced in the redevelopment you wrote, "The final
roster of 42nd Street evictees included fifteen video stores, six peep shows,
five porn movie theaters, eight sex paraphernalia shops, four action film
houses, two hairdressers, twenty-five lawyers, twelve fast-food restaurants,
ten artists, two sporting goods stores, two newspapers, one hatter, one
television studio, one joke store, one boxing gym, one pimp, and one
sadomasochist therapist." Where did these displaced businesses go?
AB Some of them went out of business, and
quite a number of them were redistributed around the edges of 42nd Street
in lower-priced real estate. A smattering of porn stores of different kinds
remains today along the far reaches of Times Square, and they keep getting
moved out, because the 42nd Street Redevelopment Project continues. The New
York Times is building a new headquarters building on another block,
so that is having another flushing effect. Some of those displaced, like
the radio host Joe Franklin, have landed on their feet, and in fact he owns
a restaurant there now. A lot of the old-time Times Square businesses found
other quarters, or they just folded them up.
JJM There is a tenderloin district in
every city. New York certainly isn't going to be without porn theaters and
pawn shops.
AB Yes, but they are far more dispersed and
less visible than they used to be. Much of it isn't even in Midtown anymore
-- it has moved out to the outer boroughs.
|
| JJM
You wrote, "In transplanting a particularly glitzy version of shopping-mall
theme-park culture from the suburbs into the heart of the big city, the
redevelopers of the theater district enhanced its tourist appeal at the cost
of disappointing and even alienating many New Yorkers." What is the overall
verdict on the redevelopment?
AB Mine, or the world's?
JJM Well, I can understand that New Yorker's
may feel there is something antiseptic to the area now. While there appears
to be a lot that is wonderful about it, at the same time, it leaves the
impression that the area -- in addition to the theaters -- has become a bunch
of big box retailers and restaurants that replaced much of its heart and
soul.
AB It is a bit monolithic, and it's a bit
too much like other big streets in New York and other big cities. The book
was an exercise in establishing and finding the distinctiveness of 42nd Street.
For many years, there really was no place like it, and that was as a result
of an organic process of evolution -- or de-evolution, depending your point
of view. But for decades, starting with Oscar Hammerstein, 42nd Street was
the glamour theater and night entertainment spot in Manhattan. It evolved
in different ways, and each one of those evolutionary stages made it a
distinctive place. You could argue that one of the reasons for that was that
there was no new investment there, that there was none of the destruction
and rebuilding that typically goes on in the centers of big cities all the
time. Investment didn't happen there for decades, but, part of what made
it so distinctive in that sense also doomed it, because at a certain point
-- after eighty years -- economic forces are not simply going to tolerate
this kind of financial sink hole in the middle of a big city. |
*
photo by Marcelino
Martins
"Forty-second Street's tumultuous passage from the two-balcony
playhouse and the lobster palace through the heydays of the burlesque hall,
the movie grinder, and the adult bookstore and massage parlor brought the
definitive New York thoroughfare back in a general sense to where it began.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, 42nd Street is again
what it was at the outset of the last century: the most entertainment
intensive block in the city that is America's once and future cultural
capital."
- Anthony Bianco
_____
The Morning Report
, from Lion King |
|
The way the city and state handled the redevelopment, in my opinion, should
have been done more organically, on a smaller scale, step by step. But that
was difficult since they left it for so long they created a bigger and bigger
problem. The result was a monolithic redevelopment that was done all at once,
and all with the same basic aesthetic. What salvaged it to some extent is
that they did a really good job of preserving and fixing up the old theaters
that did survive. Those are distinctive. What surrounds them is not so
distinctive, and it would have been nicer if the current 42nd Street was
as distinctive and memorable a place as it seems to have been in the old
days.
It could be that 42nd Street will once again have that distinction, because
it is increasingly heavily traveled, and it will wear down. It is interesting
that many of the businesses that have opened stores there -- chain stores
with nothing special to offer, in particular -- have gone out of business.
There is a continual turnover as business people try to understand what will
work there. Going to 42nd Street is not going to be like a trip to the mall,
so people who are going to succeed there will have to find something that
is in tune with the surroundings in a way that the typical big box retailer
isn't.
I remain hopeful that it will become, again, as interesting a place as it
once was. Right now it is somewhere in the middle. From the point of view
of the locals, all of Times Square is so crowded with people that you can't
even walk down the sidewalk half the time, so they boycott the area for that
reason rather than for any sort of aesthetic boycott. |
__________________________________________________________
"...42nd Street was where tourists and locals alike went to mix with the
moving crowd, to feel New York's erratic, racing pulse. No place in
the city was as vividly present tense as 42nd Street and yet so redolent
of nostalgic associations, especially for the native New Yorker. Each
of the street's successive incarnations was deeply imprinted on the public
consciousness and lived on in the city's collective memory -- in the 42nd
Street of the mind -- long after its day had passed."
- Anthony Bianco
_____
Take The "A" Train
, by Duke Ellington
Ghosts
of 42nd Street:
A History of America's Most Infamous Block
by
Anthony Bianco
*
About Anthony Bianco
JJM Who was your childhood hero?
AB I would have to say it was Willie Mays,
which is a classic one.
JJM Yes. He was mine as well.
AB I was a sports fan, and Sports Illustrated
was the first magazine I subscribed to, and I did so at a very early
age. But I lived in Minnesota, so I had no real hometown reason to root for
Willie Mays -- I just really liked the way he played. He was an overwhelming
talent with such style. I lived in Rochester, Minnesota, and it did not have
a single black family -- not one -- so that was part of my fascination with
him too.
JJM I just remember watching him on television
when I was a little kid, and in that era there were only nine games televised
a year -- those against the Dodgers in Los Angeles -- and this underexposure
may have elevated our sense of fascination with him as well.
AB It is hard to believe that is how few
games were shown, isn't it?
JJM Yes, and when I was exposed to him, I
remember being in awe of his play in center field and at the plate, and thinking
that he was even more incredible to watch than he was to read about. I think
this underexposure may have elevated the appeal of guys like Mays and Mantle.
AB There were no questions of steroids then,
at least not that we knew of. Steroid use calls into question the basic
achievements of someone like Barry Bonds, but you never had that kind of
question mark over a player like Willie Mays. He probably didn't even lift
weights.
*
Anthony Bianco is a senior writer at Business Week. He is the author of two books, The Reichmanns: Family, Faith, Fortune and the Empire of the Olympia & York and Rainmaker: The Saga of Jeff Beck, Wall Street's Mad Dog. He lives in New York City.
Anthony Bianco products at Amazon.com
Products relating to Times Square at Amazon.com
_______________________________
This interview took place on December 3, 2004
*
If you enjoyed this interview, you may want to read our interview with Stork Club: America's Most Famous Nightspot and the Lost World of Cafe Society author Ralph Blumenthal.
_______________________________
Other
Jerry Jazz Musician interviews
# Text from publisher.
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