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By Root 573 0

ordering the sea to turn back. The prostitutes and the drug dealers were back on the street almost as soon as they were rounded up. The daytime crowd of con artists and three-card monte players gave way every night to pickpockets and “push-in” robbers, who would throw a victim into a dark doorway and make off with his or her valuables. And the police were hobbled by a widely shared reluctance to view “victimless crime,” including pornography, vagrancy, prostitution, and even street-level drug dealing, as matters for serious enforcement. Much of what went on in Times Square was treated as the more or less inevitable and more or less tolerable consequence of urban life.

Police officers, says the Reverend Hansen, “would stand on the corner and watch drug deals going on like cigar-store Indians.” After a community meeting at which local residents had vented their outrage at the chaos on the streets, Hansen recalls that the precinct commander took him aside and said, “Father, you’ve just got to learn to live with it.” This was the kind of despairing surrender that drives Travis Bickle over the cliff of sanity; Hansen decided on a less violent, but almost equally shocking, course of action. At the time, a kind of citizens’ patrol known as the Guardian Angels had been formed. The Angels were teenage boys and girls, mostly from the ghetto, who wore red berets and affected a somewhat paramilitary air; they were widely condemned as vigilantes-in-training. But Hansen and the merchants of the area were desperate. They established a post near St. Luke’s and gave the kids free meals and walkie-talkies; Hansen blessed their berets in church. And the Angels essentially walked up and down the street; they were a presence, and very little more.

“At the height of the battle,” Hansen recalls, “we probably had twenty or thirty of them on the street at any one time.” The Angels, it is generally agreed, eliminated some of the more outrageous behavior on the street—though they could hardly suppress crime itself—and brought a novel sense of calm. Hansen was perfectly happy to live with the charge of encouraging vigilantism. But, of course, the very fact that the beleaguered citizens of West 46th Street had had to turn to a private security force—and a force consisting largely of impoverished teens—was an appalling indictment of the collapse of order in New York City.

In the summer of 1981, The New York Times ran one of its periodic articles on 42nd Street, which constituted the paper’s backyard; the difference between that moment and 1960, when Milton Bracken had explored the block, was far greater than that between Bracken’s 42nd Street and the one the Beats had discovered in 1940. The 42nd Street of 1981 wasn’t troubling; it was depraved. The reporter, Josh Barbanel, went to talk with the street people who had, he wrote, “witnessed the final moments of a naked 26-year-old man from Connecticut as he was chased to his death on a subway track in Times Square by a bottle-throwing crowd” nine days earlier. There was, it turned out, a simple explanation for the man’s death, and Barbanel heard it from a thirteen-year-old girl hanging out on the street in the middle of the night. “They wanted to see some action,” she said. “He was just bugged out, and everybody started going wild on him. They had nothing better to do.” A drug dealer, standing a few feet from a police officer, describes the stream of summonses he had received as the cost of doing business. A “squat young man with a crewcut” comes by to announce, “I rob people. I like to rob people.” A copiously bleeding man bangs on a theater door, demanding the arrest of a security guard who he says beat him with a nightstick. And the night rolls on, in its lassitude and its lunacy.

OVER THE PREVIOUS three quarters of a century, Times Square had inspired a literature of revelry and celebration, of withering contempt, of arch delectation, of prophetic disgust. And now something quite new appeared: a literature of diagnosis. Times Square had become not only a place, or a state of mind, to be limned,