I live near Times Square, just around the corner and down 43rd Street between 8th and 9th avenue near the theater district, a part of The Big Apple known as Hell’s Kitchen.
It’s noisy and busy, but its home and I love it. My apartment is 350 square feet and rents for $1678.58 per month. I can walk to Mary Poppins, Phantom, Wicked, or Lion King in ten minutes or if I prefer I can go visit my friend Cheryl’s off–off Broadway theater in fifteen. When I step out onto my stoop and look East I can see the spire of the Chrysler building dramatic against a morning sky or in the evening lit dramatically by the setting sun. The building never looks the same; Gotham is ever changing and never ceases to amaze me.
Times Square isn’t a square but a triangle where Broadway, Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street cross. It’s a focal point, a confluence of history and a nexus of City activity and has been for over 100 years. At one point the area was home to eighty-five legitimate theaters, the birthplace of vaudeville, the place where movies started to make inroads into popular culture; home to the only New Years Eve party that counts, a million people filling Broadway and Seventh Avenue up to Central Park seventeen blocks away, waiting for the ball to drop on the Times Tower. The Square is named for the NY Times after the paper was coaxed uptown from Printing House Square down by City Hall around 1902. In 1904 the Tower was complete, to celebrate, The Times staged a New Years Eve bash that continues until this day.
I walk through the Square daily, acknowledging its history and theaters, The New Amsterdam is still here and beautifully restored by the Walt Disney Company, the others are long gone.
In 1898 Oscar Hammerstein, the grandfather or Oscar Hammerstein III, the composer would open his magnificent Olympia theater, its marquee lit by hundreds of electric lights, Broadway becomes the Great White Way.
To discuss the Deuce’s history is also to acknowledge that by the early nineteen sixties and seventies the area was synonymous with pornography, drugs, prostitution, violent street crime, pedophilia, street hustlers and con men. It took years of effort by the police and the Times Square Business Improvement District to turn the area into the family friendly place you experience today.
Growing up in Queens, an outer borough of the metropolitan area I was forbidden by my mother to come to Times Square, I had to tell her I was going to Central Park or to The Village or visiting my cousin in Stuyvesant Town, but I’d head right for the Deuce to experience the danger and excitement first hand. One time I lost my carfare home, I had to ask people on the street for money, just like a hustler. Finally a kindly older lady gave me a token for the subway. I never told my mother about that.
On 42nd Street tucked between the long gone Liberty and Harris theaters was Hubert’s Museum and Flea Circus. There you could see trained fleas engage in a Roman Chariot race or spin around on a toothpick merry-go-round. There was a “real” headhunter, a sword swallower and a bearded lady; all for 50 cents. Later, if I felt flush, a steak at Tad’s for $1.19 was a treat.
I keep my eyes open, trying to see freshly; In 1898 two million people visited Hammerstein theaters, generating over a half billion dollars in revenue. Hammerstein died in 1919 just seventeen years later, alone and penniless I can’t imagine how.
The history of this wonderful area fills books, references to the Shubert’s and Hammerstein, Klaw and Erlanger, David Balasco, Gypsy Rose Lee, Minsky’s Burlesque, Frank Sinatra, Fanny Brice and Nicky Ornstein, The Flora Dora Girls and Squeegee Men, MTV and Lobster Palaces, ABC, The Paramount and NASDAQ.
Times Square is just one stop in our journey through the city.
