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The blast of the radios from the amplifiers hanging over dance-hall

doorways,

The pedlers and the barkers shouting at the top of their lungs:

“Buy a balloon an’ act natural”;

“Come in and see the great flea circus”;

“This way for a good time, folks”;

“No tights in this show”;

“Plenty of seats in the first balcony; ‘She Kissed Him to Death’ just

starting”;

“Magnificent love story; bring the children.”

The decline of Broadway provoked Stanley Walker, hard-boiled city editor, into a mighty blast of dismay. The street, he wrote, “has degenerated into something resembling the main drag of a frontier town. . . . There are chow-meineries, peep shows for men only, flea circuses, lectures on what killed Rudolf Valentino, jitney ballrooms and a farrago of other attractions which would have sickened the heart of the Broadwayite of even ten years ago.” The great old chophouses had given way to penny restaurants, “where a derelict just this side of starvation may get something known as food for as little as one cent.” The very faces on the street had become grotesque: “cauliflower ears, beggars, sleazy crones, skinny girls who would be out of place in even the cheapest dance hall, twisted old men, sleek youths with pale faces, the blind and the maimed.”

Broadway had, in short, turned into Coney Island, a street carnival staged for the tourist and the boob. Runyon had adored and immortalized the Broadway street life, but by the early thirties Runyon was spending more time in Miami than at Lindy’s. Where were the hoods of yesteryear? This new world was a ceaseless yammer of religious nuts and self-styled magicians and novelty salesmen—itching powders and exploding cigars— and hot dog vendors and con artists and even, late at night on the east side of Broadway, dope peddlers. Runyon’s Dream Street, the block behind the Palace, was no longer, just as the Palace itself was no longer. The gossip columnists Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer wrote, “Its 200 yards are lined almost unbrokenly by cheap hotels and rooming houses sheltering all manner of strange characters: retired vaudevillians, down-and-out horseplayers, dope fiends, grifters and grafters, pickpockets, derelicts (male and female), drunks, stage widows, miserly recluses, tars and their tarts, crap-game-steerers and bottom-dealers.” Here, by the way, was a subspecies of the new literature of decline: the epic enumeration of depravity.

Nowhere was the change more drastic than on 42nd Street, increasingly the home of shooting galleries and peep arcades and dumb movies. As the theaters passed into the hands of the banks, they emerged with very different owners. In 1931, William and Harry Brandt, who had made a living in movies and low-grade vaudeville in the city’s more humble neighborhoods, bought the Lyric Theatre, tried a diet of four-a-day vaudeville, and then switched to second-run movies. The Brandts took over the Apollo in 1932, and then the Times Square, the Selwyn, the Eltinge, and the Republic—the block of theaters that would later form the core of the porn empire of the 1960s. The Rialto, which had been showing movies at the northwest corner of Broadway and 42nd since 1916, was torn down in 1935 to make way for the New Rialto, whose first feature was Fang and Claw. The New Rialto was open all day and well into the night, and charged as little as 25 cents a ticket. These theaters, like the burlesque shows and the dime-a-dance halls and the penny restaurants, brought a very different kind of customer to 42nd Street: the lowlife whose many faces Stanley Walker had catalogued.

Burlesque actually had a very short life span in Times Square. Here was a species of show so crude that many of the critics found it as deplorable as the moralists did. But what killed burlesque was not so much dirt as menace. The burlesque theater spilled out into the street in the form of barkers and steerers who tried to whip the customers inside; giant posters of half-naked girls blared from under the marquees. The burlesque theater seemed to degrade the street