By the mid 70s the Times Square of midnight cowboy Joe Buck and taxi driver Travis Bickle had made the Times Square of the V-girls, shooting galleries, penny arcades, and funky museums look quaint.

                                                                                                   


 In the 80s the arsonists, crack cocaine dealers, chicken hawks (pimps who controlled boy hookers) and AIDS-positive muggers were terrifying. From the 40s through the 80s, however, there is a remarkable consistency to statements about the dirtiness and social degeneracy of Times Square by municipal authorities, the daily tabloids, and The New York Times. Their mantra was that it harbored criminal parasites who used it as a base from which to infect the healthy community. However, during the 20th century, such public places were part of the business of the city. Civic officials cannot afford to eliminate vice. Police and politicians limit access to it, keeping it out of sight of respectable citizens and allowing
those who want it (who include many respectable citizens) easy access. The Mafia “kingpins” of the prostitution, gambling, and dirty-book rackets are confederate with not only police, politicians, and real estate moguls who provide them space, but also with those who provide financial backing, make loans, encourage money laundering, and give tips to the vice merchants about entering legitimate businesses and investing.  These men easily trumped the booksellers of the 40s and 50s, just as Ford and Disney, with Mayor Giuliani’s help, were able to trump them. Thus 42nd Street vice finally gave way to the family-friendly environment the corporations needed for their offices, shops, and restaurants. Its executives can adjourn to upscale strip clubs with as little concern about embarrassing themselves as Garment District high rollers had when they reveled in Café Society’s night spots and the “sex circuses” in Midtown’s classiest apartment buildings. The elite always has its privileges. A classy working and playing environment is still one.

    Until recently, the rest of us with prurient leanings had to shop under the disdainful gazes of Billy Graham, Father McCaffrey, or Donald Wildmon at the 42nd Street dirty book stores and sex-and-violence theaters. However, perhaps not any more. As book stores and movie theaters get condemned on the basis of the subjective criteria of their “negative effects” on surrounding businesses, bulldozers have been having a go at the vice areas of Boston, New York, Washington and Baltimore. Ironically, these developments further democratize, rather than suppress, sex-related businesses. Entrepreneurs now favor internet and phone sex, sex boutiques, hotel room cable TV, Hollywood’s NC17 films, day spas for men, and gentlemen’s clubs. It’s an Everyman’s “pornocopia.” Porn kingpins are no longer pariahs like Eddie Mishkin, Bob Brown, or Moe Shapiro. They are more sophisticated, and more respectable. With the mainstreaming of pornography into popular culture, sleaze is on the way out. Politicians, property owners, and media moguls can take a very dubious credit.  They have eliminated the transgressive atmosphere
of a Times Square, where criminality and creativity shared a common border, and where one felt guilty for being there, and yet free from the moral consensus which spurred him to visit.