Ghosts of 42nd Street by Anthony Bianco

Author:Anthony Bianco [Bianco, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, General, Social Science, Sociology, Urban, Modern, 20th Century
ISBN: 9780061847653
Google: qq0VqF9vK4EC
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2009-10-13T01:13:56+00:00

Other than Hodas, very few of the kingpins of Times Square’s sex trade ever went to jail, at least not for more than a night or two. The city—under Lindsay and his successor, Abe Beame—tried to criminalize activities that, in the considered opinion of judges and juries—especially federal ones—were not illegal and should not be made illegal. And even with the financial damage done by police harassment and forced closures, not to mention lawyer’s bills, supply and demand remained profitably aligned in the Midtown sex trade. In short, the powers that be again had demonstrated the futility of using the blunt instrument of law enforcement as a tool of urban renewal. “We were the Band-Aid applied to a financial-political failure,” contended Chief Schwartz, who succeeded Charlie Peterson as commander of Midtown North.

As part of the city’s desperate attempts to stave off municipal bankruptcy, the NYPD fired three thousand officers in July 1975, paring its specialty antivice units to the bone. “We have…very little street enforcement of prostitution, massage parlors and the porn stores,” admitted a top police official. The NYPD continued its round-the-clock foot patrols of 42nd Street, but with the limited objective of keeping all hell from breaking loose. “We did not want a riot breaking out there over a prostitution arrest,” Commander Schwartz recalled.

The sex trade’s offenses against conventional morality fast became a sideshow to crime and mayhem on the streets. In 1975, more rapes and robberies were reported within Midtown South than any other precinct in the city, by a margin of two to one. Times Square’s prostitution hotels and massage parlors were particularly dangerous. During a single month, the police counted two murders, three shootings, five stabbings, six drug overdoses, and fourteen robberies at a single hooker hotel—the infamous “123,” located in the heart of Durst country at 123 West 44th Street. Forty-second Street—better known now as the “Deuce” or “Forty Deuce” to its denizens—had become an open-air black market. Sidewalk merchants of dubious provenance hawked illicit wares of all sorts, from stolen typewriters and televisions to handguns and underage sex. But drugs were the staple of the Deuce’s economy. Every narcotic imaginable was available, including heroin, but the heaviest traffic was in marijuana, mainly “loose joints” going for a dollar apiece. “I stood on that corner last year [42nd and Seventh Avenue] and sold 240 joints in one day,” one dealer boasted to a researcher. “Most of these dudes sell 100 joints a day easy. I got a bunch of regular people who be coming to me every day. Even when it rains I make money—sometimes more money because people be buying a whole bunch of joints at one time before they go to the movie. I never make less than $50 a day.”

The intersection of 42nd and Eighth Avenue was particularly rife with miscreants and vagrants of all sorts—both aboveground and below, in the IND subway and adjoining arcade, where the Time Square Boys, the Sabbath Skulls, and other youth gangs liked to hang out.

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