Indeed, male “hustling” became pervasive in the area as people exchanged money, illegal drugs, or other forms of payment for sexual favors. In 1981, Rolling Stone declared West 42nd Street the “sleaziest block in America.” Likewise, one scholar wrote, “The Great White Way is now a byword for ostentatious flesh-peddling in an open-air meat rack.” The area bounded by 40th and 50th Streets and Seventh and Ninth Avenues saw over 15,000 crime complaints per year. Conditions only worsened and the crime took the city. In the late 1970s, Times Square was depicted in Midnight Cowboy as gritty, dark, and desperate. Inside, crime thrived in the underground corridors of the subway and the passages at the Port Authority Bus Terminal despite the abundance of police.Ī man looks at the offerings of a peep show store adjacent to a “sensitive meeting place” with “lovely girls.” Profits rose, the cost of leases skyrocketed, and then the mob “muscled in around 1968.” On the streets, prostitution by all genders, open drug trade, alcoholism, and con games, like three-card monte and clio, became commonplace. As one scholar notes, “the libertarianism of the sixties” changed the meaning of “obscene,” thereby opening a space for the public sale of adult allurements.įor example, the success of the twenty-five-cent peep show, introduced in 1966, spurred other small businesses to follow the trend by selling adult films and erotic merchandise. In the 1950s, attempts to stop the growth of disreputable businesses through zoning rules met with few results. The decline of Times Square can be traced to the negative impacts of the Great Depression and World War II. These vintage historical photographs, taken by photographers Andreas Feininger and Maggie Hop, give us a glimpse of Time Square at the peak of its social and urban degradation. Felony and crime rates were high, despite heightened police existence.Ī plethora of go-go bars, sex shops, peep show establishments, and adult theaters became symbols of the city’s very apparent decay. Shocking vintage pictures of Times Square at the height of its depravity in the 1970s and 1980sįrom the 1960s to the late 1980s, New York City’s iconic Times Square was a difficult place to be.
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