Doin' the Deuce

 

I never spent a great deal of time on 42nd Street or Times Square growing up. When I was a kid, there simply wasn't much of a reason for it. It was still a hotbed of sleazery well into my college years. I became gradually more familiar with its legendary nefariousness as I grew older, its salacious character extolled by the late night, cable-televised rants of Al Goldstein and Ugly George and its mystique heightened by the prose of Jim Carroll and the poetry of the Beastie Boys. I always expected "The Deuce" to remain shady -- it was one of those things you just took for granted. And I liked it that way. It's not that I'm all for prostitution and crime, but this was New York City. As the t-shirt used to say, "It Ain't Kansas." Don't like it? Fuck off to Disneyworld, then.

Then a not-so-funny thing happened. As we all know, 42nd became Disneyworld. The smut was driven out and the neighborhood gradually became a family-friendly tourist strip. During the midst of that unfortunate transition, my good friend Rob D. moved to 303 West 42nd Street; the building that housed the fabled strip club Show World on its ground floor. Having just read T.J. English's true-crime epic, "The Westies" (all about the Irish mob's reign of terror over Hell's Kitchen), I started to explore this neck of the woods with more fervor. During Rob's relatively short tenure in that building (we're talking mid-to-late 90's, now), the neighborhood changed by jarring leaps and bounds. The gritty 42nd Street depicted in movies like "Taxi Driver" was all but a memory.

Once Rob split (briefly moving to City Island in the Bronx before settling in New London, Connecticut), my Times Square/42nd Street traipsing dropped off again. Then at the end of 2005, I landed a job at MTV News Online. My office was squarely in the heart of Time Square. For the next year and a half, I became a neighborhood regular. Easily the hardest thing about that whole experience (apart from that whole getting laid off part) was having to navigate through that teeming ant heap every day. While I didn't welcome my sudden dismissal from that place of employment, I assuredly did not miss having to duck and weave around corpulent tourists on 42nd Street every day.

So why am I doing all this reminiscing? Well, one of my favorite NYC photo blogs, Greenwich Village Daily Photo has been doing a series of "then and now" shots of that old neighborhood. Go check'em out.