Downtown: My Manhattan

by Pete Hamill

  The critical factor in Ochs’s decision was the subway, which would stop at Forty-second Street and Seventh Avenue (in the original plan it was a mere local stop). After consolidation of Manhattan and the outer boroughs in 1898, Greater New York now had a population of four million. About 800,000 immigrants were arriving each year and they could not all live in Manhattan. The Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges were under construction, preparing to join the Brooklyn Bridge in opening Brooklyn to the New York millions, but if the immigrants lived farther from their Manhattan jobs, they would need the speed of the subway to make up for lost time. Then as now, the subway’s advantage was blunt and powerful: If you went under the traffic jams, you got there faster. The projected subway would move faster than anything on the streets and three times faster than the elevated trains. For Ochs the businessman, Longacre Square would have been unworkable for a newspaper without access to the subway, and in his discussions he insisted that the new system must allow him to use the subway as a freight train too. He also wanted a change in name, as James Gordon Bennett Jr. had obtained for Herald Square. In April 1904, Ochs got what he wanted. By mayoral proclamation, Longacre Square became Times Square.

  The subway plans were also revised, and the station would become an express stop, integrated with the foundations of the Times Tower, which was finished in October. The tower was modeled on Giotto’s famous Campanile in Florence, rising twenty-two stories above street level (375 feet) and driving 55 feet into bedrock. The press room would be under the subway station, which allowed Ochs to move bundles of newspapers directly to subway cars. Before the end of 1904, Ochs had jammed eleven new Mergenthaler Linotype machines into that subterranean press room and moved another twenty-seven machines from the old building at 451 Park Row.

  That spring of 1904, before all of that was done, Ochs left for a family vacation in Europe. Coming down the North River on the liner Deutschland, he moved to the rail and gazed at Manhattan island. Later, he wrote to his mother:

  The new building loomed up in all its beautiful and grand proportions, out of mid-New York, as we sailed away, and my heart swelled as I thought of association with its erection. Then it stood foremost and most conspicuous among the best buildings in the Metropolis of the World—and I really grew sentimental. It is a beauty, and even though the $2,500,000 that went into it cost some anxieties, it is there and it will be a monument to one man’s daring.

  Ochs chose to officially open the new tower on New Year’s Eve. Many years later, in his centennial history of the newspaper, the great Times reporter Meyer Berger wrote an account of that first midnight hour in the Metropolis of the World:

  On New Year’s Eve in 1904, Times Square was crowded with hundreds of thousands of horn-blasting, bell-ringing celebrants, some to witness a brilliant fireworks display touched off in the Tower. Midtown skies reverberated with the thunderous bursting of flights of bombs. Skyrockets and flares streaked against the midnight sky in the first Times Square New Year’s Eve show, centered around the Tower. These assemblages became traditional, with Times electricians controlling incandescent figures that spelled out the dying year, and spelled in the new. The signal for the old year’s passing was a massive illuminated globe that slid down the Tower pole while the crowds far below on the sidewalk cut loose with ear-splitting din. A final burst of fireworks wrote “1905” in flame against the heavens, and the throngs screamed and shouted themselves hoarse. It was one of the greatest promotion projects of the age. The idea was Ochs’. He knew the value of such advertising.

  With that first crowd of more than two hundred thousand, the New Year’s Eve tradition had begun, and it would grow, continuing all the way to now. The crowds did not always wait for New Year’s Eve to make Times Square their public plaza. At the end of World War II, on V-J Day, August 14, 1945, more than two million people jammed the square in an atmosphere of impending joy and relief. At 7:03, the electronic “zipper” on the Times Tower flashed the words all awaited: OFFICIAL TRUMAN ANNOUNCES JAPANESE SURRENDER. Delirium erupted. The roar of the crowd could be heard for miles.

  I remember the sheer joy on my own street in Brooklyn, where so many young men had been among the nine hundred thousand New Yorkers who helped fight the war. Some had been among the sixteen thousand who had been killed. On my street, people hugged and kissed too, and some of them wept.

  By 1945, the Times was long gone from the Times Tower, which proved to be too small and clumsy for publishing one of the country’s greatest newspapers (the building was sold in 1965). The Times opened larger quarters down the block on West Forty-third Street, where, as I write, it remains. But the early visions of a glittering, glamorous Times Square had all vanished by the time I started going there as a boy.

  In the decade after 1904, there were moments of extravagant glamour in and around Times Square. Rich young men showed up after the theater each night in the grand restaurants with members of the ensemble called the Floradora Girls and the later stars of Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies. Those lobster palaces were in the basements, so that all could make grand entrances down gleaming staircases. The rich mixed casually with the demimonde, their activities described by visiting newspapermen, and it was all part of a great loosening of the bonds of the imported Victorianism that had ruled the hypocrisies of the Gilded Age. Diamonds, wads of cash, and a sense of the forbidden were everywhere in the lobster palaces and high on the dance floors of the roof gardens atop the new theaters. They did not last.

  The first of a series of shocks came with the outbreak of World War I and the arrival in 1915 of Griffith’s full-length movie The Birth of a Nation. The world seemed to pause, as if wondering about the propriety of plunging into the mindless fun of the Floradora Girls shows while millions were being slaughtered in Europe. To be sure, new theaters kept opening, and the producers mounted many shows, but the customers seemed wary. Business was not good.

  And then other things happened. Most important of all, when the Armistice ended the war, Prohibition happened, depriving the lobster palaces and the roof gardens of their liquor revenues. They soon closed. Gangsters opened speakeasies on the side streets. Bootleggers became Gatsbyesque romantic figures. Many Forty-second Street theaters converted to vaudeville or to the new motion pictures. Bigger and grander movie palaces opened, draining away the customers from the legitimate houses (the Roxy had more than six thousand seats and cost $12 million in 1927). Live theater persisted west of Broadway in the forties, as it does today, but grunge had already started eating at Times Square itself. There were few pretensions to elegance as the Jazz Age took hold and the prewar subtleties of seduction gave way to a more blatant form of youthful rebellion. Few of the elites went to Times Square anymore. It had become a more populist place of assembly.

  Then the Depression happened, and Forty-second Street began what seemed a terminal decline. Vaudeville gave way to raw forms of burlesque. Drifters started showing up from other parts of the country, early versions of midnight cowboys. Mayor La Guardia closed the burlesque houses, but Forty-second Street replaced them with third-rate movies, and the place entered the stage that still lingered when I first saw the street. This was the time of the Pokerino game parlor and the Laffmovie and Hubert’s Museum and Flea Circus, of dance halls and papaya stands. During World War II the street was flooded with sailors on shore leave from the ships docked on the North River. They did not often come to see a play by Eugene O’Neill.

  By the mid-1960s, heroin was everywhere on Forty-second Street, and the owners of legitimate theaters lived in fear of the spreading contamination. After every earlier shock, nostalgia rose among those who remembered the good times. Now even nostalgia was no consolation. For most people, the only emotion that rose within them was disgust.

  By 1990, most sane people had given up on Forty-second Street, the street now called the Deuce. It had evolved into that most dreadful sort of human invention: a metaphor. This single street (they said) stood for the future of New York, perhaps the future o
f all American cities. Up and down the street, ugliness prevailed. Porno shops, peep shows, and kung fu movies provided the angular light. In the shadows were the peddlers of heroin and crack, the rapists of runaways, the transvestites who looked like Diana Ross or Carol Channing on steroids and carried razors in their hair. After 1985, AIDS was part of the deal, spreading as all plagues do, secretly, silently. And lunacy was there too. In the 1970s, many crazy people were released from New York institutions, a decision that combined the need for the state to save money with the idealistic belief that the deranged would feel “normal” if they could live with other people. All they had to do was take their medicine. They didn’t take their medicine. Many joined the legions of the homeless. And inevitably some wandered to the Deuce, and you would see one of them, wide-eyed and jittery, explaining that he was the lost brother of Ronald Reagan; and another hefting a tree limb, bouncing up and down, growling in a language of his own invention; and a third simply howling at the moon. Such men (there were few women) were dangerous but not truly menacing.

  The menacing people hung out in the subway station at Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue. They smoked reefer in attitudes of surly defiance. Or rose to the street in groups of ten or twelve, slamming older people on their way along the Deuce or grabbing at wallets or purses. You could see them in open daylight or at the midnight hour, moving in packs along the sidewalks, hard cases from gangs such as the Savage Skulls, their ranks swollen by a few crack-hungry freelancers. They forced middle-aged people into the gutters. Those heading for the Port Authority Bus Terminal to grab buses for suburban New Jersey often arrived in a state of shuddering fear. The young men laughed. Most of them were young men who had never been children.

  All were part of the larger story of the unraveling city. In the late 1960s, cynical landlords began burning down their aging tenement buildings in the South Bronx and in Brooklyn, paying off underage arsonists, then taking the insurance money into retirement in Florida. In Manhattan, the old seedy buildings called SROs (for single-room occupancy) were steadily converted by their owners into more lucrative apartments, and thousands of men (and some women) were forced into the streets. Another phenomenon was under way: the mass abandonment of women and children. The women were often badly educated, struggling with drugs or alcohol. The children all wore baffled faces and spoke very little, as stunned by life as any child in the Five Points in the 1850s. The fathers of those children were not there. They were in prison, or living with someone else, or, as the women would say, “in the wind.”

  By the 1970s, even before the Fiscal Crisis, menace was becoming more general. There were several welfare hotels near Herald Square, and children of ten and eleven formed packs, attacking the shoppers from Macy’s and Gimbel’s like schools of piranha fish. The newspapers called them “feral youths.” Many people stopped coming to Herald Square. On the subways, where similar groups went “shopping” (as they called it), women no longer carried shopping bags that advertised the names of the stores. The kids often raided fruit and vegetable stores, and I once saw a Korean man chasing some of these kids with a machete down Eighth Avenue. In the summertime, there were very few outdoor restaurant tables anymore. There were nighttime concerts in Central Park, but many New Yorkers were afraid to attend. At a few concerts, dozens of people were mauled by the feral young gangs.

  Toward the end of the 1970s, every New Yorker, male and female, white, black, and Latino, had learned to live with fear. The number of subway riders dropped. Every apartment door seemed to have three locks, including a steel bar that was jammed into a slot in the floor. Every few months, there would be news of a family burned to death in a tenement flat where the windows too were barred and nobody had a key. Movie videos were developed, and the couch potato was born: staying at home to watch a movie while eating take-out food. On Forty-second Street in the afternoons, the sidewalks were often a mash of pizza crusts, orange peels, cigarette butts, scattering newspapers, and the anonymous debris of the long night’s journey into day. The marquees of the grind houses along the Deuce advertised films about emotionless sex or raw fear or both. And as time passed, a visitor heard something else in the aural compost of the street: the crunching sound of crack vials.

  On Herald Square, Gimbel’s closed forever. The 1930s Broadway stories of Damon Runyon now seemed like fairy tales, loaded with nostalgia. The welfare rolls would rise beyond a million, with hundreds of thousands of children now alive in the city who had never known anyone who worked. Several welfare hotels were opened on the Deuce itself. Junkie parents careened through their filthy hallways, with their children careening away from them. Some children made it on their own to the street, where sexual predators awaited them. A pedophile marketplace grew bolder, with sinister men waiting at the bus terminal for runaways, and customers vanishing into secret rooms before driving home to the suburbs. During one police crackdown in the early 1990s, some ten thousand underage human beings were rescued from this vile and terrifying underworld.

  Most of the victims were black or Latino. They grew up in a world where each night they could walk to Fortieth Street and watch pimps batter their female charges. They grew up in a world of plague, where the combination of drugs, guns, illiteracy, casual violence, and the rise of AIDS was creating a nihilistic hell never imagined by Dante Alighieri. There were people who tried to help, of course, men and women of selfless compassion. They were outraged that this was happening in the richest city on the planet. Some were as utopian as those who had gone among the poor of the Five Points. Others were more practical, believing, like George Templeton Strong, that if they could save one child, they would begin the much more difficult process of saving all children. Some children were saved. Some parents were saved. But not enough.

  It was no accident that many of those rootless children became adolescents with slivers of ice in their hearts. They embraced the new urban culture of cold-eyed violence. They insisted on sex without love and demanded respect without earning it. They all wanted guns and found them as easy to buy as drugs. They bought knives too, in the shops of Times Square. They donned figurative masks intended to create fear: dead eyes, blank expressions, tight lips. They adopted a style in clothes that emphasized their roots in urban poverty: unlaced heavy boots, oversize baggy jeans, baseball caps worn backward in what some academics described as a ghetto version of a postmodern statement. They were never going to work in offices. Their sound track was the music of hip-hop. Reform school or jail became their prep schools. There they learned even more about creating fear.

  And the creation of fear was their only success. The Deuce became one of their theaters. They scared away African Americans and foreign tourists and New Yorkers who once sought laughter or diversion in Times Square. Even priests and cops walked with wary steps. The Deuce was the place in which the hard kids lived most fully during that brief time between a lost childhood and the penitentiary. The prophets of social doom gazed at the Deuce and its feral youngsters, and convinced themselves that nothing at all could be done. This was not the road to perdition; it was perdition itself.

  There had been calls for reform for a long time, of course, starting in the 1960s, when the liberal Republican John V. Lindsay was mayor. Meetings were called, committees formed, studies made, plans drawn up. The newspapers published editorials whose tone ranged from hope to rage. But one of the last of the city’s calamities struck in 1975: the Fiscal Crisis. New York was suddenly faced with certain hard realities. After decades of liberal social programs that always expanded and never contracted, the city could not pay its bills. There certainly would be no public money for a major rehabilitation of Forty-second Street, of Times Square. After all, they represented only one combined fragment of an immense city. In fact, the Fiscal Crisis led to cutbacks in some services that were absolutely necessary. As just one example, thousands of policemen were laid off, which pleased the hard-core criminals and encouraged some of the amateurs. Crime in the city quickly soared, to nobody’s su
rprise. Everybody agreed that Forty-second Street was worse than it had ever been. Even reformers seemed to lose heart. I remember asking one policeman on the Deuce what he would do about the terrible street.

  “Brick it up,” he said.

  Very few New Yorkers expected a happy ending to the squalid saga of Forty-second Street, and yet a reasonably happy ending was what we got. Sometimes miracles do happen. In the 1990s, through a combination of planning, will, intelligent politics, and sheer luck, the Deuce was reclaimed. The first moves came on the frontiers of the street. The city first cleaned up Bryant Park, on the eastern side of Sixth Avenue, turning it into a sylvan gem to be used by ordinary citizens instead of pushers and junkies, the scene of concerts and fashion shows and simple afternoons on benches. Between Ninth and Tenth avenues, a giant housing development called Manhattan Plaza was opened in 1977, and after failing as luxury housing, became a subsidized home for writers, artists, musicians, and actors, along with older citizens. That helped stabilize the western end of the terrible Deuce. Across the street from Manhattan Plaza, seven theaters were soon combined into what was called Theater Row, bringing the concept of Off-Off-Broadway to a haven only a few blocks from the more conventional theaters. The Broadway theaters had for too many years been the venues for shows packed with tourists and exhausted salesmen and their clients while theater itself happened elsewhere (there were, of course, exceptions to this generalization). Now, suddenly, the Broadway of Shubert Alley was within walking distance of Off-Off-Broadway. Tentatively at first, and then with growing confidence, another kind of life began to rise around the new theaters and Manhattan Plaza: restaurants, grocery stores, dry cleaners.