Essay of the Day
Essay of the Day features selected essays from my separate, non-public online journals.
This essay originally appeared with many additional photographs in my journal Roamings.
Times Square 1980s — Day
Times Square in the 1980s was exciting, liberal, grimy, lewd, audacious, immoral, rude, enticing, rundown and sometimes dangerous even in broad daylight, but like the rest of New York City, it was never guilty of being boring.
It had a diverse clientele. It was a place you went to (in no particular order) if you:
— wanted to see a Broadway play or musical
— were an office worker heading to or from the Port Authority Bus Terminal for your commute to New Jersey
— wanted to experience young men offering to help you with your luggage in front of the bus terminal, who then demanded a fee with a threatening attitude
— wanted to see a kung fu movie at a cheap theater while smoking marijuana
— wanted to stay in a cheap hotel
— wanted to be pickpocketed on the street or in crowds
— wanted to watch or play three-card monte, a betting game that was a scam often played briefly by males on the sidewalk before cops broke it up
— wanted to eat a cheap meal at Tad's Steak House restaurant, or buy hot dogs from Nathan's Famous or get coffee at Chock Full o' Nuts
— wanted to buy drugs, whether marijuana or something else
— wanted to be ripped off by stores selling cheap cameras, souvenirs, clothing or other merchandise
— wanted to watch porn scenes for twenty-five to fifty cents in a private booth for a few minutes in a porn store, or pay more and watch live women dance topless or fully nude in front of multiple booths
— were a man who wanted to pick up a young male prostitute with the option of masturbating in a men's room or receiving/giving oral sex in a dark movie theater showing pornographic films
— wanted to simply buy a porn movie on VHS tape (the technology of those days) to take home and watch it in privacy
— wanted to go to a bar and restaurant with female strippers
— wanted to see live male nude dancers on stage in a theater dedicated to the desires of gay men
— wanted to catch a taxi who might, if you didn't know the city, take you on a longer than necessary route or, if you were not careful, even drive off with your valuables
— were a tourist who wanted to marvel at the city's most unique and famous district, a place you were told to avoid, but went anyway for better or worse
— and any number of other reasons
I first saw Times Square in 1973. By the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s it had become a place that was reaching its low point. One block of 42nd Street between Seventh Avenue and Eighth Avenue was known as "the Deuce" (originally “forty-deuce”), and was supposed to be the most crime ridden stretch in the entire city.
The deterioration was obvious and also an acute embarrassment as well as a true headache for New York City because of its close proximity to the rest of Midtown and the skyscrapers holding the offices of major corporations that the city was trying to retain. The justified fear was that the CEOs and employees of huge companies didn't want to be confronted daily with the challenges of Times Square, and the degradation turned off the patrons of Broadway theaters. Sooner or later everyone would give up and go elsewhere.
Proposals to get rid of as much of Times Square as possible and replace it with more (disastrously sterile) office towers were genuinely considered the solution. Fortunately, some of the most sweeping plans never came to fruition.
The improvements in Times Square began by recognizing its strengths which were the glowing neon advertisements and the theater district. Renewal began with two major developments: Marriott constructed a huge new hotel designed by architect John C. Portman Jr. in 1985 (although it was originally planned to be so big that it would have blocked Broadway and ironically damaged Times Square), and Disney took over and renovated the New Amsterdam theater in 1995. It also took a while before laws were enacted to make it inhospitable to porn. But the birth of today's Times Square did not really occur until the 1990s were well underway.
In the meantime, in 1984 I was a freelance photographer working with educational publishing companies and other clients, as well as photographing for myself. One publisher asked me to photograph Times Square to accompany an examination of the area that would be a brief essay in a major college textbook on Sociology.
I had an adventure of my own while taking pictures for the book. I was standing on the south side of 42nd Street between Seventh Avenue and Eighth Avenue, aiming my camera across the street to the north side to capture the façades of buildings. As I turned to walk away, suddenly two guys, both bigger than me, came running toward me from the general area where I had been focusing my lens. They were quickly aggressive and intimidating. Was I taking their picture?
I was surprised because I hadn't even noticed them. They wanted to know what I was doing since, apparently, they had been engaged in a transaction (I assumed it involved drugs) that they didn't want seen. I told them I had been taking pictures of buildings, which was true. I must have seemed genuinely mystified by their concern because they reluctantly accepted my explanation. Their worries were to me weird or paranoid because, as I thought about it later on, the police wouldn't send a guy like me to take pictures openly on a sidewalk if they wanted evidence of an illegal transaction taking place in a public space. The police would just swoop in an arrest the guys. But to the guys who questioned me, I didn't quite fit in, despite my being a black male (as they were). I had a decent camera (not something many black males possessed) and therefore I was suspicious.
The resulting photo essay was topical during that time but the images are now historic and provide a new perspective. The photographs appear in a separate online journal along with a companion essay, Times Square 1980s — Night. They capture a Times Square that current visitors to New York have no idea existed, a place that is long gone.
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