I am watching this thread with interest, since we will be honeymooning in NYC next month.
Wow. I saw this show twenty years ago on Broadway at the Royale (now the Jacobs), with Tovah Feldshuh and Philip Bosco, who both won Tonys for their performances that year.
And I might have paid $26 for my seat back then!!
We did luck out, – they do sell extra tickets for $26 at the box office each day right now (it’s in previews). Shalhoub was magnificent – great physical comedy – and LaPaglia was also excellent. I can’t remember when I laughed as much. And we were so close that when they slammed a door, you could feel the breeze.
I stayed at a hotel just north of Times Square during Spring Break 1982, and went through every night on my way to to clubs in the Village and every day when I went to see the galleries in SoHo.
This was before they cleaned up the subway cars, and there was a lot of street art around. Keith Haring was still anonymously making baby-figure graffitti back then, and If you knew where to look you could see where an artist (who’s name I forget) had carved tiny Indian pueblos into the sides of brick buildings.
I got coffee at Chock Full O’ Nuts, but was too shy to look at the the porn. I’m sure it would have out-classed the porn available in small-town Midwest USA, but I was too shy to look at that in the first place.
It was during the Regan Recession and the whole country was in pretty shitty condition back then, with people lining up to get old surplus bomb-shelter cheese and cracker rations. Actually, I was amazed by the stuff people in NYC threw out in their trash. Furniture & clothes better than what I saw back home at the Goodwill.
Oh, one night at 2 AM after I jaywalked across the triangle with George M. Cohan’s statue and went up a side street a protitute came out of a doorway. I tried to gently rebuff her, but she was drugged-out and mistook my gentleness as encouragement, and stuck her hand down my pants.
Four years later I was in Subic Bay, Phillippines, with the Third-World smell of shit & charcoal, seeing people desperate for food, not drugs, and so I don’t remember Times Square as having been really bad.
There are many more LCD screens now, and of higher quality. In 2008, Broadway wasn’t blocked off, and that in itself is a major change. Many of the stores that were there in 2008 aren’t in 2010, especially the smaller, touristy stores.
Times square in 2008 wasn’t brighter than daylight. (It’s actually brighter at night because in the day the buildings shade the street.)
Try over on 8th Avenue by the Port Authority Terminal. (Although admittedly I haven’t been over that way in some years, so that might be cleaned up too.)
“Free look – Check it out!”
1955–ate at a Horn and Hardart’s automat. Putting in coins and getting out a plate of what you wanted was too cool. Probably ate there many times before and some after. Last time was visiting the 1964 World’s Fair.
Did a coin show in New York every December from 1977 to 1990, in December. Walking around Rockefeller Center and the tree and watching people ice skate in the late evening was magical, especially if it snowed.
Eating at Carnegie Deli for lunch and breakfast–not to be missed.
Junior High class went there on weekend trip, 1958. Visited UN and a few other places. Took my dad’s camera, and surprisingly took great photos. Staten Island Ferry, Statue of LIberty, UN.
I love this thread. I’m going to NYC for fun next week and I’m looking forward to seeing how much it has changed since I lived there (well, on LI, but I went into Manhattan all the time) in the 80s. Back then, Times Square was a gritty place where I would be continually accosted by panhandlers and sad sacks handing out flyers advertising live sex shows. I remember stepping over homeless people and seeing heroin addicts nodding out on sidewalks. The only definite thing I have planned for next week (already bought and printed out my ticket) is the Tim Burton exhibit at the MOMA, but in NYC there’s always something fun to do–or at least that’s how it was back then. When I get back next Sunday maybe I’ll come back here and report what I noticed that was different from the last time I was there, which was in 1989! Ages ago.
I’m hoping to see this next week! Did you buy the tickets from TKTS? I used to go there all the time when I lived in NY and noticed that tickets to that show were on sale there last week.
I lived in NYC for a while in the mid-60s, then lived in or around the City for 25 years, 1970-1995. I remember Times Square at its seediest, with all the sex shows, prostitutes, drug pushers, and an assortment of unsavory types. In a way I kind of miss it. I believe that a city of that size should have areas like that, but not where tourists are likely to go. But I believe they’ve gone too far in cleaning it up; it just doesn’t seem authentic anymore.
I visited NYC shortly after 9/11, and was amazed at the changes that had taken place in the six years since I had left. Everything seemed so over-gentrified, and a lot of the places I remembered were gone.
There’s so much I miss about New York; one of these years I want to go there for a few weeks, and see the City as a tourist . . . possibly on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
I started going to NYC in the 1960s. I loved the city – I used to go to the museums (especially the Natural History Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but there were lots of others, some tiny and obscure) and Broadway shows (which were outrageously cheap back then. I paid less that $20 to see 1776 at a matinee in 1970. I saw Sherlock Holmes in 1975 for a mere $2.50. You read that right. Two dollars and fifty cents. It was SRO, but still…).
Living in New Jersey, I came in on the bus that stopped at the P{ort Authority Bus Terminal at 8th avenue and 42nd street. To get to Times Square you ran the gauntlet of 42nd street, which others have written about above. I never heard it called “the Deuce” back then – only within the past decade have I encountered that term. There were a lot of burlesque houses, peep show emporia, and “adult” book shops. But there were also cheap-run movie theaters with recent films and exploitation flicks, besides the dirty movies.
I got there a little too late for the Flea Circus and other such stuff, but I did get to sample the Automats and the Howard Johnsons in Times Square.
times Square was always into exotic and eye-catching signage. It had the famous Camel billboard that blew smoke rings (that I think was still there when I was a kid). There has been a “television”-like billboard there since long before I was around. I believe the original one used a bank of lights that were either on or off, linked to a bank of photocells that performers danced in front of, causing the sign to have their silhouettes on it. When I was a kid, Timex ran that billboard. You can see it – if you’re interest – by digging up a DVD or VHS of Godspell, which has a dance number performed on it. This was the ancestor of the many LCD and LED displays now there. By the mid 1970s the newest screen was a LED screen affixed to the building that once was the Times Building. They used it for the opening credits of Saturday Night Live in its first couple of years.
That building sitting on the triangular space at 42nd street used to be the Times building, where the New York Times was published, and the reason they rennamed it Times Square (from Longacre Square). By the time I was there the Times was long gone, but its iconic wraparound news banner was still there – sequenced lights gave the latest news. It had been doing this since the 1940s (You can see it in old Superman cartoons and in newsreels). But the 1960s it had acquired a rectangle permanently lit in red and white advertising LIFE magazine. By the 1960s, Allied Chemical owned the building. I think they had an exhibit in there for a while. It passed through many hands over the years, and the ground floor was a Warner Brothers store in the 1990s.
Times Square itself was a woinderful mixture of new and shiny and absolute crud. There were sleazy gift stores with adult items that a kid could only puzzle over – Mets crying towels, T-shirts with a picture of a drunk cat that read “Happiness is a tight pussy”. Bottles of thunderbird wrapped in paper bags, lots of chewing gum stuck to the street, perpetual street repairs, Tad’s Steaks, the TKTS booth. Loyts of garbage. Posters for the latest Broadway shows and movies (Alien had a three-part billboard utterly unlike posters I saw elsewhere for about a year).
I got them at the box office. They currently are selling “General Rush Tickets” for $26.50. That may end when they show official opens on Sunday, though.
I’m old enough to remember Times Square at its worst, I guess. I went to high school in Manhattan in the mid-1970s. I certainly remember 8th Avenue from 42nd Street north being filled with hookers, at least once the sun went down. Howard Johnson’s (mentioned by CalMeacham) was still there. As were the Terminal Bar, an incredibly sleazy joint across the street from the Port Authority bus terminal, and all the peep shows and live sex joints and cheap “massage parlors.”
Peepland was still in business on the Deuce (and yes, I knew that term in 1975) was famous for having the dirtiest movies imaginable. Animal stuff. Also the peep shows described by ethelbert, except that at Peepland there was no glass between the spectator and the performer, and one, in return for tips, could, ah, “interact” with the performers. The extent of interaction was determined by the size of the tip. There were plenty of other peep joints, mostly straight, but some catering to gay men. The biggest one (Show World, maybe?) was on the northwest corner of 42nd and 8th. In the basement, the girls working the booths weren’t necessarily actual girls.
You could get a hot dog and a coke at the Grand Luncheonette, which was a genuine architectural jewel right on the Deuce.
Blues (later known as Sally’s), a bar that was a hangout for black trannies, was on 43rd Street, across the street from the Times’ loading dogs. The drag shows there were great, but the place could be a bit scary for a young white kid.
There were three-card monte hustlers everywhere, always working with a shill. People actually used to fall for that one. Even if you didn’t play, you’d likely have your pocket picked while you watched the game.
You could still buy all kinds of “martial arts” weaponry at a few stores in the area. Need a ninja star? Times Square was the place to go. You could get a steak at Tad’s (actually, I think you still can).
The new New York Times building and Eleven Times Square are there now.
The sleaziest you’ll get on 8th Avenue are a couple of adult video stores and a few strip clubs like Lace, Lace II, Cheetah’s and Private Eyes.
Interesting story in today’s New York Times about the last homeless person in Times Square:
I started frequenting Times Square in the late 1980s, when I was 16 or so. Definitely seedy, but I never felt like it was overtly dangerous, at least in the daylight hours. I got a fake ID card at an arcade and then used it to visit porn shops in the area, never checked out any live shows or anything like that though, just mags and vids.
I saw a lot of homeless guys and also your old fashioned street nuts (political and/or religious) that you just don’t see very often in NYC any more. The kind who stands on a corner with a megaphone or sandwich board or folding table with pamphlets, preaching the evils of the black/white man, the socialist/fascist state to come, the End of Times or the coming era of world harmony under (Religious Leader), about government cover-ups about UFOs, AIDS, etc. They all agreed about one thing though: New York City was a reflection of the rot in the world, the Whore of Babylon, and Times Square was her navel. Or more accurately, her Unmentionables.
I started an argument once when I walked down 42nd St. from the Port Authority on 8th Ave. towards the IRT train on Broadway (about two blocks away), and first passed by a table with two Black Muslims with a megaphone and posterboard preaching about how the White Man Was The Devil, then a block later passed a white guy with a megaphone screaming about how the Jews were to blame for the world’s ills. I asked him if counted Jews as “white” (I’m not black, white or Jewish but East Asian), and he said no, and when I pointed out the Black Muslims down the block he went over to “clarify things” for them.
Good times.
There were also the Black Jews (I’m sure that’s not what they actually called themselves, but it’s what they described themselves as, anyway). They would dress up in colorful Middle Eastern costumes (really more of a cartoon version of Middle Eastern clothing) and rant about how Africans were the real Jews and the so-called Jews had stolen their identity. They’d quote the Bible to prove their point.
Times Square was always good for street theater.
My first time in New York City was in 1979. For some reason, we stayed at the Travelodge on 42nd Street at 10th Avenue, if memory serves. To get to Times Square, we had to go along 42nd Street, past all the peep shows and porn theatres and such. Many people just hanging out with huge boom boxes, and lots of hookers. I was offered drugs countless times, and I was even offered a gun.
I did stand in line for an hour at the TKTS booth. It was pouring rain, and I was glad to get my tickets finally. As I recall, the show was Dracula.
I’ve been back once or twice since, but not after they’ve cleaned up the area. The posts here now have me curious about visiting again, to see the changes.
Yeah, it was the law. You had to carry it. (I don’t know whether it was ever seriously contested in court. I suspect it would have failed.) Whenever I tried to bullshit an authority figure that I was 18, I was asked for my draft card. (Funnily enough, as circumstances happened, my birthdate (when I really did turn 18) fell into the window that I never had to register.)