“42nd Street. Once The Great White Way. Now strange kind of side-street side-show. A Coney-Island seediness, the street looks like a pin-ball machine, all bumpers lit and bonus and billion and TILT. All it needs is sawdust. It's got Grant's Cafeteria, a Last Judgement skinless frank, brain-salad, chili-chowder soup production from Breughel-Chaplin Studios: it’s got novelty souvenir and How To Sex-Life shops; all back numbers of Drool, Quiver, and Queer; the original Army and Navy store, golf driving range on the second floor; a loudspeaker playing for the last 72 hours, “Mambo Mambo” by the Sisters Sisters; sailors, lushes, tough, teat-less girls in jeans and jackets, cigar-smokers, feelers, fat cops, telephones, yellow taxis, electric lights, caramel, knishes, the BMT, the Rialto, Hilarious Headlines, Magic Dog, What Adam Saw, sneeze powder—Achew!—Stink-O-Matic, Vomitoriums, Pokerino, the Flea Circus—but, best of all, the movies.The best in the world—in fact, all the movies in the world. Films that have disappeared from every screen except, maybe, Ankara’s or Bangkok’s are here in double features. Movie heaven: all films go here, never die; the history of the movies is told non-stop on 20 screens.
Tarzan and His Crocodile Mother, The Sign of the Cross, Little Miss Marker, and forever Gunga Din; the Three Stooges, Duck Soup, Kit Carson, Ruby Keeler; a Mickey Spillane Festival, a Bela Lugosi Festival, Dr. Mabuse, Mr. Magoo—and all this in sublime palaces.
Long-ago theatres, or Ziegfeld Follies, until the war; burlesque houses, Santa Fe Opera House–style: sepulchral, empty, green neon arrows to the men’s room, solemn candy stands. Inside, ideal movie atmosphere: something like an opium den, a barn, a bedroom, a mission dormitory, depending where you sit; an elephant’s womb, the whale’s belly; the air thick with digestion, dreams, smoke, snores, groans—but vast. You can’t see the ceiling. All is calm, grave, caressing, infinitely soothing, as the grey films rush on 18 hours a day."
~ William Klein
(1926-2022)
I’m sure Bill was somewhat shocked when he returned to visit Times Square fifty years later.
The raw grit had gone post Disneyfication and the family friendly clean up had taken place
Of course real estate values have drastically risen in the gentrification process. But that’s New York right? Is it much better? You decide.
