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from Times Square. Nevertheless, when the Times Square Business Improvement District (BID) was established in 1992, local property owners concluded that they would have to take on the porn industry in order to stimulate change in the area. Gretchen Dykstra, the BID’s executive director, says that she approached Norman Siegel, then the head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who, she says, “hated the whole idea” of targeting the sex industry, but explained that she could succeed only by proving that the stores had a harmful effect on property values and local conditions, and then seeking to regulate them through zoning. So in 1994 the BID produced a report showing—though far from conclusively—that “adult use establishments” had baneful “secondary effects” on Times Square.

By this time, Rudolph Giuliani had become mayor of New York. Giuliani was not even remotely troubled by the thought of limiting access to sex shops; what’s more, he had promised Michael Eisner, the chairman of Disney, that he would eliminate pornography and suppress crime in the area around 42nd Street. At the same time, the mayor understood that he could not simply ban sex shops altogether. Both he and the BID favored “dispersal zoning,” which limits certain uses to a city’s periphery. Giuliani wanted to remove all sex establishments to manufacturing areas in the city’s outer boroughs, but members of the City Council representing those districts bridled at the prospect of their becoming a pornographic dumping ground. In March 1995, the mayor and the City Council agreed to a compromise that would permit the stores to remain in designated commercial areas, including Seventh Avenue and Broadway from 48th to 55th Streets, and Eighth from 38th to 41st. All stores with “a substantial portion of their stock in trade or materials characterized by an emphasis on specific anatomical areas or sexual activities” would be subject to stringent regulations: they would be prohibited from operating within five hundred feet of residences, schools, churches, or one another. Gretchen Dykstra triumphantly declared that the number of sex shops in Times Square would drop from forty-seven to five or six.

The new ordinance was part of Giuliani’s larger effort to redraw the boundaries between collective goods and individual rights; and it ran into some of the same resistance that his campaigns against predatory and antisocial street behavior had. Gay and lesbian activists complained that the law would eliminate harmless sex-toy boutiques in Greenwich Village. Norman Siegel described it as “a sign of the times and of a repressive new climate toward sexual expression that is totally contrary to New York’s rich cultural history.” Through its chief lawyer, Herald Price Fahringer, the sex industry disputed the secondary effects study. Nevertheless, in late October the law was passed by the city’s community boards, then once again by the City Council, and it went into effect the following year.

The authors of the legislation had clarified the term “substantial portion” by declaring that any store more than 40 percent of whose stock consisted of adult articles would fall within the new rules. One of the city’s more high-profile pornographers observed at the time that he could evade the rule with ease. “A lot of fetish movies don’t have sex in them,” he noted. “And if I have to put violent and horror movies in, I’ll do that too.” It was a prescient comment. Though many sex shops closed up rather than attempt compliance, others filled their shelves with kung fu movies. And when an inspector from the city’s Department of Buildings tried to shutter a store, the owner would turn to Fahringer, the silver-haired and silver-voiced chief attorney for the adult entertainment industry. Fahringer was, he says, “27 for 27” on such cases; he claims that the net effect of the “60–40 rule” on Times Square was zero. Eighth Avenue remained a hive of sex shops, as well as a happy hunting ground for drug dealers and pimps. Nevertheless, pornography was eliminated from 42nd Street; in the central areas