The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [71]
The Supreme Court rulings also cleared the way for “massage parlors,” which were storefront shops with booths where men could buy sex—in effect, street-level brothels. By 1967, Eighth Avenue was lined with massage parlors: the Sugar Shack, the Honey Haven, the Danish Parlor, the Love Machine. According to Josh Alan Friedman, the author of Tales of Times Square, a zestful romp through the neighborhood’s lower depths, the first live sex act, where customers paid to watch a man and a woman have sex on a stage tilted toward the audience, was conducted at the Mine-Cine, on 42nd Street, in 1970. Friedman dates the first “Live Nude Girls” act, where customers could look through a slot as the girls touched themselves, to 1972. Within a few years, he writes, the partitions separating customer from performer came down, so customers could pay extra for quickie sex, or just a feel. The films became more explicit, and kinkier. At Peepland, a customer could rent, according to show cards cited by the unflinching Friedman, films in which “Two wild girls shove live eels up snatch and asshole,” “Farmboy fucks cow,” “Man fucks a hen,” and “Girl takes on dog, horse and pig simultaneously.” These are among the less baroque subjects Friedman lists.
By the mid-seventies, many of the 42nd Street movie theaters had switched to pornography, a change that further degraded the life of the street. Prostitutes often worked the aisles of the theaters, bringing johns to bathrooms in the basement, while thieves preyed on the derelicts who often camped out in the theaters all day, slashing open their pockets while they slept. Adam D’Amico, a New York police detective who worked in Times Square, recalls a time when a wall was torn out of a theater being refurbished, and forty to fifty wallets, some with identification dating back to the 1950s, came tumbling out; thieves had apparently tossed them there after removing the contents. D’Amico says that he spent several months staking out one fetid movie-house bathroom where gangs of kids would wait for a patron to go to the urinal and then grab his wallet, yank his pants down to his ankles, and run. Usually, he says, they targeted Asian men, who tended to carry a good deal of cash, speak little English, and feel too humiliated to report the crime.
In 1960, the decay of 42nd Street had seemed anomalous; but by the end of the decade, the downtown of virtually every old northeastern and midwestern city had begun to totter, or collapse. Suburbanization had robbed the department stores and the restaurants and the movie theaters of their customers; and as companies followed people, the cities’ employment base had begun to dwindle as well. And just as middle-class whites were decamping, large numbers of blacks, most of them poorly educated and unskilled, were migrating up from the South—2.75 million between 1940 and 1960 alone. They were arriving just as the low-level manufacturing jobs they might have taken were leaving. It was a recipe for catastrophe. Crime rates, which had been remarkably low during the urban efflorescence in the middle decades of the twentieth century, began to surge. New York City had 390 murders in 1961; by 1964, the number had reached 637. In 1972, almost 1,700 New Yorkers were killed—a more than fourfold increase from barely a decade before. The number of reported robberies almost tripled from 1966 to the early seventies. Not only the volume but the nature of crime changed; knives and blackjacks gave way to the Saturday Night Special. Heroin hit the streets around 1964. The combination of guns, drugs, and enormous amounts of cash produced a lethal