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165 PArt v Times Square A r o u N D 1 9 0 0 , N E w York’s theatrical district crept up Broadway from the 20s and 30s to 42nd Street, nestled into Longacre (later Times) Square, and, despite a further incursion toward Columbus Circle, decided to stay. There really was nowhere else for show business to go: large sections of the Upper West Side had already been developed for residences, and Central Park lay outstretched for two and a half miles above 59th Street. So theater life remained largely between 42nd and 53rd Streets and flourished, helped no doubt by the nexus of streets that comprised the “Square” (a square, in the classic sense of the term, never existed) and made it seem like a gigantic bus depot, the destination of thousands. In keeping with this image of an urban receptacle, other branches of the entertainment industry outside legitimate theater joined the throng. Although what is generally regarded as Manhattan’s first movie “palace” was actually built in Harlem, at 116th Street and Seventh Avenue (the 1913 Regent, preserved today as the First Corinthian Baptist Church), Times Square could soon boast its own collection of various Egyptian, Moorish , and Persian inspired motion picture temples where patrons actually dressed up as if they were going to a first-night theatrical opening. Vaudeville , of course, added just the right bit of Barnumesque seasoning to this mix, reaching its giddy apogee with the 1913 opening of the Palace Theater at 47th Street and Seventh Avenue, for years the showplace in which all vaudevillians aspired to play, at least once in their lifetime. By the late 1920s Times Square had become the playground we have seen depicted in Alice Faye movies and the stories of Damon Runyon, a place of brilliantly lit signs advertising Wrigley’s Gum, gangster massacres like the one that riddled the Hotsy Totsy Club (where a Radio Shack now sits), bathtub Prohibition gin, and Charleston-dancing chorus girls. Broadway shows thrived, at least until the combined effects of sound pictures and Depression-era breadlines made New Yorkers hold onto their entertainment dollars a bit more cautiously. Even then, new types of entertainment evolved, as we shall see, to stoke the nighttime fires of those 166 Part v longing for escape. The Broadway theater itself held on through an early1930s retreat, a comeback during the golden age of musicals of the 1940s and 1950s, and then another decline as the city’s economy plunged in the 1970s, all before regaining what appears to be a secure footing—at $120 a ticket. But beyond the movie palaces, theatrical houses, and vaudeville emporia, Times Square incubated a boggling number of side concerns, stepchildren of the “legitimate” entertainment industry, devoted to nudism , ticket brokerage, tabloid scandal, racetrack betting, flea circuses, gags and magic novelties, striptease, taxi dancing, burlesque, and other pursuits that often managed to skirt the boundaries of law by little more than the thread of a g-string. The idea underlying these observations is that throughout its history— at least, that part of it which begins with Longacre Square’s transformation from a district of horse stables—Times Square has been defined by commerce. If it sells to massive numbers of people, then chances are it can be found there. As if in a struggle to keep up with public taste, the rate of physical change in Times Square is accelerated, even by manic Manhattan standards. Movie palaces, having reached their peak of popularity during the 1920s and 1930s, lost ground as a fad; by 1990 they were all closed or destroyed with the exception of the Hollywood, now used as Times Square Church. Some of them, like the fabled fifty-nine-hundred-seat Roxy, on 50th Street near Seventh Avenue, barely managed to last thirty years, although one, the Mayfair, survived more or less intact (having been tri-plexed) until much of its interior was gutted in 2007. Other reminders of discarded popular culture—for example, Nathan’s hot dog eatery on 43rd and Broadway, with its Coney Island boardwalk-styled lights—were similarly knocked down during the 1990s and replaced with office towers. One aspect of Times Square has managed to hold steadily throughout the decades: its populist identity. It has remained a place largely inhabited by the working and middle classes. The people spending large sums for orchestra seats at a Broadway show are, by and large, not wealthy; they are theater fans who have saved...

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