Simeon Bankoff would walk up and down 42nd Street all the time during David Dinkins’s mayoral administration. As a facilities manager for theater company Playwrights Horizons, the fourth-generation New Yorker was frequently at the organization’s Theater Row home near Times Square. One specific walk remains ingrained in the 46-year-old’s mind: Easter Sunday in 1992.
‘It was eight in the morning on Easter Sunday, and I passed a 24-hour video store that sold videos, wasn’t even a rental…and it was bustling.
‘And I’m thinking to myself, “What kind of people feel the deep need to go out and buy adult movies at eight in the morning on Easter Sunday?” No, I mean this is before the Internet. You can’t just download it, I suppose, but I was like, yeah, “Stocking up on some of your porn before going to Easter lunch? Before going to the service?” This is very weird,’ recalled Bankoff, the executive director of New York City’s Historic Districts Council.
The era when theater marquees promised peep shows and massages, and prostitutes might have accosted passersby in and around Times Square was part of the city’s infamous decline throughout the 70s and 80s. It was immortalized by such films as Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver.
And James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal are about to give it an update in The Deuce, a David Simon-created HBO series chronicling the rise of the porn industry around Times Square that debuts next month and is named for 42nd street’s former epithet.
Pictured is a view of Times Square with marquees lining 42nd street between 7th and 8th Avenues in the mid-1960s. The intersection known as Times Square has been branded as the ‘crossroads of the world’ and has gone through many iterations since 1895, when Oscar Hammerstein I opened a theater on what was then called Longacre Square
Pictured is a Times Square sex shop on a rainy night in 1973. Perhaps most notorious of the transient intersection’s eras was in the 70s and 80s, when it was a center for pornography and its stores advertised peep shows and live sex
Pictured is the Show Palace Theatre, which provides an illustration of what passersby might have seen while walking in and around Times Square in the 1970s and 80s. The photo was taken in 1986. After a series of 1960s Supreme Court decisions that gave pornography First Amendment protections, pornographers transformed many of the area’s stores and theaters into sex shops
While its gaudiness might be timeless, Times Square has worn many hats through its history. One such epoch was capital of the pornography industry, which began seemingly overnight due to the 1960s Supreme Court decisions that protected pornography under the First Amendment.
‘It was very sudden, they were out in the open, and these sort of XXX marquees came to dominate Times Square. And what was weird about that was that it was still the theater district, I mean, it was still the place, you know, where these elderly ladies from suburbia would get off the bus, a chartered bus, and go to see Annie, you know, it was still both things at the same time. But the seediness became visually dominant,’ said Francis Morrone, an architectural historian at New York University who moved to the city in 1979.
The Times Square-as-porn-capital era lasted into the early 1990s before Rudy Giuliani forced pornographers out as part of his ‘clean-up’ of the city.
Today, of course, the so-called Crossroads of the World and its surroundings are an international tourist destination visited by hundreds of thousands people each day. The intersection’s mostly high-rise buildings are required by law to have illuminated signs, which generally function as advertisements. But its mainstream popularity is a far cry from the area’s reputation three decades prior.
James Franco will play twin brothers Vincent and Frankie Martino on The Deuce, a new series that will look at the rise of the porn industry in New York
Maggie Gyllenhall plays a sex worker named Eileen ‘Candy’ Merrell on the show, which was created by David Simon, who also created The Wire
Times Square began its role as an entertainment center in 1895, when Oscar Hammerstein I (grandfather to the famous lyricist) opened his Olympia Theater on the intersection, then known as Longacre Square. The area quickly evolved into a commercial playground for adults filled with music halls and cabarets. Part of its early appeal lay in sex, notes historian James Traub.
‘Forty-third Street between Broadway and Eighth, where The New York Times was to move its office, was known as Soubrette Row, for most of the brownstones on the block functioned as brothels. A man could scarcely walk a few blocks in the area at night without being propositioned,’ he writes in The Devil’s Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square.
With the arrival of the Times in 1904, the area bounded by Broadway, 7th Avenue, 42nd street and 47th street became known as Times Square. While sleazy elements existed on its periphery, Times Square became a glamorous center filled with so-called lobster palaces and theatergoers; in 1927, a mere 32 years after Hammerstein opened his Olympia, there were 264 shows on Broadway. But even then, it had a certain gaudiness.
English writer G K Chesteron visited Times Square in the 1920s and came away with a sentiment that would perhaps resonate today.
‘How beautiful it would be for someone who could not read,’ he remarked upon seeing the intersection’s signage.
And its openness made it a center for mass gatherings – whether Victory over Japan Day in 1945 or the annual New Year’s Eve Ball Drop, which has been held almost every year since 1907.
‘Times Square has always been unusual because, it’s architecturally been not the most interesting part of New York, but also not as densely built up as a lot of the rest of New York, at least not until recently. It was always low rise. And it was always, the sky over Times Square was a really important part of the place,’ said Morrone, 59.
Pictured is the construction in 1904 of the former New York Times building, which occupied what is today One Times Square and is the reason for the name change from Longacre Square to Times Square. In its current iteration, the slender high-rise is covered in billboards. The current New York Times Building is at 242 W 41st Street and is the seventh tallest building in New York City, at 1,046 feet
Crowds have traditionally congregated in Times Square, which until recently had low-rise (for Manhattan) architecture and a more open street plan than other parts of the island. Pictured is a view of the parade for V-E (Victory in Europe) day in 1945. The day celebrated the triumph of the Allies over the Axis in World War II
Pictured is a crowd gathered to watch an account of the Jack Dempsey and Tommy Gibbons boxing match, which occurred in Shelby, Montana in July 1923
Pictured is a view of Times Square around 1950. The sex industry had operated in some capacity in Times Square since the early 1900s, when ’Soubrette Row’ on 43rd Street was lined with brothels. But in the 70s, the intersection became associated primarily with sex and sleaze
But the sleazy, seedy element lingered. Burlesque theaters, writes Traub, tried to lure customers with ‘giant posters of half-naked girls’. Morrone cites Sweet Smell of Success, a 1957 film noir about a newspaper columnist trying to ruin his sister’s relationship with a man, as emblematic of Times Square pre-pornography industry. Meanwhile, prostitution was given a boost, Traub argues, by the opening of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, which ‘increased the numbers of both teenage boys and girls available to be conscripted into the trade, and probably increased the supply of customers as well’.
Then, armed with a series of Supreme Court decisions used to justify, or at least tolerate, pornography, the pornographers moved in.
‘Real estate in Times Square had always adapted to the most high-profit uses; now with remarkable speed, pornography became the boom industry,’ writes Traub.
Peepland and Show World (the latter of which still exists today) offered peep shows and adult video rentals. Prostitutes worked the intersection’s street corners. Massage parlors – which, in Times Square, were basically brothels – proliferated in droves. Former camera shops and arcades became pornographic book and video stores. Old lavish theaters provided the perfect venues for the new ‘porn palaces’.
‘The scene is a crowded weekday lunch hour at a modern Times Square sex emporium in the late 1970s,’ writes Josh Alan Friedman in Tales of Times Square. ‘There are twenty occupied booths, each with a glowing red bulb that indicates a quarter has been inserted, giving the viewer his thirty seconds. C**** 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.’
‘Unsatisfied customers linger in the aisle, checking at each interval until they find a girl worthy of their j***. They’ve come in blue jeans, in cowboy hats, on crutches…But this being the workaday lunch hour, the business community prevails in suit and tie.’
Pictured is a raid on the S & H Bookstore at 251 W 42nd Street in the 1970s. A police sergeant is searching the store’s owner. In general, police did not combat ’victimless crime’ in the 70s and 80s
Pictured are multiple pornographic theaters advertising pornographic films in 1986. The Motion Picture Association of America introduced its rating system in 1968, and included an X rating that became associated with pornography. Films such as Midnight Cowboy and A Clockwork Orange also received X ratings, though both were later re-edited to receive R ratings. In 1990, the X rating was replaced with NC-17
Pictured is an exterior view of Circus Circus, an ’adult amusement center’ in Times Square in the 1970s. Regarding Times Square’s transformation into the capital of porn, historian Francis Morrone said: ’It was very sudden, they were out in the open, and these sort of XXX marquees came to dominate Times Square. And what was weird about that was that it was still the theater district…where these elderly ladies from suburbia would get off the bus, a chartered bus, and go to see Annie, you know, it was still both things at the same time. But the seediness became visually dominant’
Pictured is a man looking at a storefront featuring posters of scantily clad women in 1960. John Alan Friedman, the author of Tales of Times Square, described a typical 70s sex shop offering peep shows: ‘Unsatisfied customers linger in the aisle, checking at each interval until they find a girl worthy of their j***. They’ve come in blue jeans, in cowboy hats, on crutches…But this being the workaday lunch hour, the business community prevails in suit and tie‘
This Times Square emerged in the face of New York’s decline. In the 1970s, there was the fiscal crisis. Then-president Gerald Ford refused to grant the city a government bailout in 1975, which prompted the New York Daily News headline that read Ford to City: Drop Dead. The 1980s crack epidemic later ravaged the city, and soaring crime rates particularly affected the outer boroughs; for example, The Bronx is Burning became a well-known turn of phrase to describe the mass arson that claimed entire city blocks.
In 1984, on the single stretch of 42nd street between 7th and 8th avenues, right off Times Square, there were 2,300 felonies, reports City Journal. Rolling Stone branded the crossroads the ‘sleaziest block in America’.
Policing in the area did little to fight ‘victimless crime’ in the area, a philosophy that would later give rise to the ‘broken windows’ theory by which toleration of petty crime would, in creating a criminal atmosphere, give way to more serious crime.
This was the gritty Times Square illustrated in films such as Taxi Driver and Midnight Cowboy. In the 1976 Martin Scorsese film, Travis Bickle takes his love interest, Betsy, to see a pornographic film at a Times Square theater. And in the 1969 Oscar-winning best picture, Jon Voight plays a man from Texas who moves to New York to try to succeed as a prostitute.
‘”Midnight Cowboy” is a grim, raw, lewd drama of the people in this town from Times Square westward and other sections as thickly populated by those who have lost hope and a small minority who yearn for a better way of life,”’ a 1969 New York Daily News review reads.
Despite the era’s immortalized sleaze, life still went on at the busy intersection. The theater district continued to attract an international audience to classic and cutting-edge performances. And first-run movie theaters attracted families, predominantly from low-income neighborhoods in the outer boroughs that lost their own theaters amid the devastation of the city in the 70s and 80s.
‘To these people, Times Square was, you know, the place for a family outing. And that was going on at the same time that, you know, Times Square was this den of pornography and so on. So I think that’s an important thing to remember,’ Morrone said.
Pictured is another theater advertising X-rated films in 1986. The Times Square-as-porn-capital era was part of New York City’s decline in the 70s and 80s amid its fiscal crisis and later the crack epidemic
Pictured is a row of storefronts advertising their sex-related wares near Times Square in 1973
Films such as Taxi Driver and Midnight Cowboy portrayed the more seedy side of Times Square. In Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro portrayed Travis Bickle (left), a war veteran and loner living in New York. In Midnight Cowboy, Jon Voight portrayed Joe Buck (right), a man from Texas who moves to New York to become a prostitute
By the mid-1980s, there was a push to ‘clean-up’ Times Square and New York City more broadly. Ed Koch, who served as mayor from 1978 to 1989, tried to launch a Phillip Johnson-designed building project that ended up falling through. But under Giuliani, who was mayor from 1994 to 2001, the revitalization of Times Square began in earnest. Meanwhile, the pornography industry was changing.
‘What happened in the Giuliani years was that there was a kind of structural shift in the pornography industry, you know, because of first, home video and then the Internet, the pornographic theaters became a thing of the past,’ Morrone said. ‘The whole idea of a pornography district in a city is a very old-fashioned idea. It sounds almost quaint, you know, now that everybody can, you know, call up pornography on their computers or cell phones, the idea of going to a theater in public, you know, it just sounds hopelessly out of date.’
Michael Eisner, who served as the chairman of the Walt Disney Company from 1984 to 2005, was looking to create live theater productions of the company’s animated films. Beauty and the Beast made it to the Palace Theatre in 1994 and in 1995, Disney began leasing the New Amsterdam Theatre, on 42nd street between 7th and 8th Avenues. This block counted 60 felonies in 1995, a notable decline from the 2,300 it accumulated in 1984.
But there were still tens of sex shops on and around Times Square in the early 1990s. A 1995 New York Times article notes: ‘Just around the corner from Show World, on West 42d Street, and less than 500 feet from the sign that trumpets “nude” and “sex,” is the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Cross. The church’s much smaller, unlighted sign whispers “Mass” and “vigil.”’
The Times Square Business Improvement District was inaugurated in 1992 and sought to expel much of the pornography industry from Times Square. Other revitalization efforts such as Theatre Row, which renovated theaters that once played host to peep shows, helped make the area more commercially mainstream and family-friendly.
Another visual shift was in the office buildings. Times Square was, until the 1990s, a mostly low-rise intersection that offered a respite from the mountains of Midtown. Skyscrapers with tenants such as Ernst and Young, Lehman Brothers and Condé Nast soon towered over the intersection. Madame Tussauds, the wax museum, opened on 42nd street in 2000.
Rudy Giuliani (left) and Ed Koch (right) worked to ‘clean up‘ the Times Square area while serving as mayor of New York City. Today, notes Historic Districts Council Director Simeon Bankoff, ‘The area really is the tourist beacon of New York‘
‘It was really private investment that was encouraged to some degree by the Giuliani administration….there was a long period in the 90s where everything seemed closed, you know, and that’s when you had kind of art installations going on in former porn houses. On all of the movie marquees where you had some of these 90s performance artists who did, you know, kind of zen-like kōans on the marquees that often talked to you politically about things like AIDS,’ Bankoff said. ‘Then all of a sudden it hit this weird critical mass with Madame Tussauds opening…and all of a sudden it went from being weird and closed to being a mall-like atmosphere.’
But as Times Square became more corporate, one unique facet of its landscape would remain: the signs. A 1987 zoning rule dictated that buildings were required to display signs of a certain size and of certain illumination levels. Traub writes that, in this instance, ‘Times Square would become a kind of protected neon enclave’.
Today, Times Square has only remnants of its former role in the pornography industry. An August report from the Associated Press analyzed how a June court decision to enforce a 2001 law barring any establishment with ‘live performances characterized by an emphasis on certain specific anatomical areas or specified sexual activities’ will affect the sampling of sex shops still in the area.
Instead, what exists now is an altogether different beast – though perhaps no less gaudy than it has been through the ages.
‘When I moved to New York, there were 20million tourists a year. And today, there are 60million a year. So tourists are three times more numerous today. And sometimes, I think most of them are in Times Square, you know, it’s just so thick with out-of-towners,’ Morrone said.
‘The area really is the tourist beacon of New York,’ echoed Bankoff. ‘People are told they need to go to Times Square because it’s the heart of New York. Why is it the heart of New York? Because it’s an enormous hotel area. Why is it an enormous hotel area? Because it’s the heart of New York. You know, it’s this sort of strange self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s no reason why you want to go, you know and spend a lot of money to stay in a hotel and eat at a Pizzeria Uno’s or Guy Fieri’s or, you know, another large chain restaurant or Carmine’s. But yet, that’s a thing, so in it’s own way, it’s its own strange theme park.’
Pictured is a contemporary view of Times Square. Morrone, who moved to New York in 1979, said: ‘When I moved to New York, there were 20million tourists a year. And today, there are 60million a year. So tourists are three times more numerous today. And sometimes, I think most of them are in Times Square, you know, it’s just so thick with out-of-towners‘
Pictured is the 2017 New Year’s Eve Countdown in Times Square. The annual ball drop tradition has occurred at the intersection almost every year since 1907