The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (15 page)

Only a few musicals took anything like the thematic risks associated with serious Broadway theater. Most of them were fantasies designed to reaffirm the conventional world of the viewer. Beautiful girls walk around unwed until the right man comes along, at which point the two fall in love instantly; the greatest tragedy, from which one is providentially saved at the last moment, is choosing the wrong spouse; and, as they say in
Brigadoon,
“If you love someone deeply enough, anything can happen”— including suspending the laws of nature under which the hamlet of Brigadoon operates. Virtually all musicals drive their way relentlessly to marriage; the obstacles along the way tend to be fashioned from balsa wood. A work like
South Pacific
is exceptional not only because it involves yearnings that summon a man away from duty—the siren song of Bali Ha’i—but because something terribly serious—unexamined, bone-deep racism—must be faced and overcome before the marriage rites can be enacted.

But who went to a musical for the story? The story was the framework upon which the songs were hung. Many musicals featured a song that had virtually no relation to the action or the characters, but had been shoehorned in because it was just too wonderful to exclude, like “Too Darn Hot” in Cole Porter’s
Kiss Me, Kate.
Indeed, Ethan Mordden, an indefatigable student of the musical, writes that “
Kiss Me, Kate
is a show we love not despite its sloppy realism and irrelevant hunks of Shakespeare”—it is a Broadway retelling of
The Taming of the Shrew—
“but because the score is so good that the rest doesn’t matter.” The score, by the way, includes “Why Can’t You Behave?”; “So in Love”; “Always True to You (In My Fashion)”; “Where Is the Life That Late I Led?”; and “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.”

Perhaps the prototypical musical—not the best or the most innovative—is Irving Berlin’s
Annie Get Your Gun.
It is worth pausing over the fact that this was the same Irving Berlin who had begun plugging tunes in Tony Pastor’s in the first years of the century. When he wrote “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in 1911, Berlin introduced ragtime to America, and got the country up and dancing in an era when the group dances of the nineteenth century were still in vogue. During World War I, Berlin told a simple truth that delighted both soldiers and their loved ones when he wrote “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.” In the jazz age, he presented some of the most artful versions of the musical revue in his own Music Box Theatre. Berlin conjured up an unsinkable answer to Old Man Depression in songs like “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee” from
Face the Music,
and evoked the suffering of black life in New York in “Supper Time.” In the thirties, he wrote the songs for Astaire-Rogers vehicles like
Top Hat
(“Cheek to Cheek” and “Let’s Face the Music and Dance”) and
Carefree.
In the years just before and during World War II, he wrote “God Bless America” and “White Christmas,” two of the most popular songs in American history. And then, after all that, still just shy of sixty, he wrote
Annie Get Your Gun.

Has there ever been such a career in the history of popular entertainment? It is not Berlin’s longevity that is astounding, but rather his ability to capture the sound, and the mood, of one era after another. He seemed, at all moments and in all settings, to retain his magical access to the hearts of his listeners. There was something almost mythological about Berlin, the unlettered Jewish ragamuffin who could barely read music but who had songs pouring from his fingertips—like the Shakespeare who had little Latin and less Greek. A misty-eyed patriot and a self-made American, Berlin was Broadway’s chief entry in the national pantheon; as Alexander Woollcott observed as early as 1924, “The life of Irving Berlin is a part of the American epic.”

Annie Get Your Gun,
like
Kiss Me, Kate,
is a Broadway show about show business. The show opens with the rousing anthem “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” in which strolling stagehands offer a rapturous tribute to the world Berlin had known and loved for half a century—the world that was, for him, the center of the universe.
Annie Get Your Gun
is a backstage musical about the rise of a Broadway star and her quest for the summum bonum of all musicals—love. Annie Oakley is torn between her desperate, doglike love for her fellow sharpshooter Frank Butler and her skills in a field where women are not supposed to excel. Thus her lament in “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun,” which, like so many great Berlin songs, is a complex mechanism built out of what feel like remarkably simple parts: “They don’t buy pajamas for pistol-packin’ Mommas, / For a man may be hot but he’s not when he’s shot. . . .”

Annie cannot bring herself to sacrifice one for the other. She celebrates her unquenchable competitive fires in “Anything You Can Do,” an exercise in the kind of western braggadocio made famous by Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce that somehow morphs into a meistersinger competition in which Annie—Ethel Merman, in the original cast—holds a note until she busts. “Anything You Can Do” is both a song about virtuosity and itself an astonishing display of virtuosity: the story goes that Berlin was asked to supply a new song for the two leads, and fifteen minutes later called the director, Josh Logan, and sang the entire first chorus. “Most amazing thing I ever experienced in my whole life,” Logan later said.

When Fred, the songwriting sensation of George S. Kaufman’s June
Moon,
is ludicrously praised as the next Irving Berlin, an otherwise cynical showgirl immediately demurs. “There’s something behind his songs,” she says of Berlin. “They’re sympathetic.” Berlin never lost sight of the fact— never had to be told, for that matter—that in popular entertainment, all the ingenuity in the world doesn’t matter if you don’t have the audience on your side. His songs were always sympathetic, even when they were busy doing something else. Annie Oakley wins us over by her artlessness and her ardor, and by the competitive fire that keeps getting in the way of her amorous designs. And she remains sympathetic even as she becomes a more worldly figure. The Annie who sings “Lost in His Arms,” with its lush, jazzy orchestrations, or the euphoric “I Got the Sun in the Morning,” is not the woman who belted out “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun”; but we root for her to win Frank, and to stay true to herself, every bit as much as we had before. Berlin was as beguiling as Cole Porter or George Gershwin; but he also knew how to hit you where you lived. He was the past master of what Gilbert Seldes called the lively arts—the art forms that seek to appeal to a mass public, that speak to concerns which are topical and local rather than universal, and which, nevertheless, at times transcend their own modest ambitions.

TIMES SQUARE IN THE forties and fifties, and even into the sixties, was a fabulously romantic place. The place showed its age, and its sores, in the daytime, but it was still glamorous and enthralling at night. The classy entertainment may have moved eastward, but in Times Square, and nowhere else, the night was charged with the glories of the spectacular. The giant bowl of Times Square, where Seventh Avenue merged with Broadway, was a great electrical circus. The theaters that lined both sides of Broadway had their names and their marquees picked out in lights; even the Horn & Hardart Automat at 46th and Broadway was brilliantly illuminated. And fantastic signs, with ingenious special effects, perched atop the low buildings on both sides of the street, as well as at 42nd Street, facing north, and 47th Street, facing south. To visit Times Square, in this last moment of its glory, was to be bathed in light.

O. J. Gude was long gone, of course, but the title of Lamplighter of Broadway now belonged to the charming, mercurial, and prodigiously inventive Douglas Leigh. Leigh was, in his own soft-spoken way, one of those mythical figures of Broadway, like Tony Pastor and Oscar Hammerstein and Florenz Ziegfeld, whose artfully shaped story was told again and again in the popular press. The son of a banker in Anniston, Alabama, he had come to New York to work as an adman, grown bored and frustrated with his lowly post, quit in the heart of the Depression, sold his beat-up old Ford, and set out to build spectaculars in Times Square. It was the kind of crazy impulse that comes only to the implacably selfconfident (or the crazy). Leigh kept his megalomania carefully hidden beneath a screen of southern politesse, unfailingly addressing the business executives with whom he dealt as “sir.” He was slight, and dapper, and always sported a fresh boutonnière; a writer once compared him to “a Princeton freshman.” He was, perhaps for this very reason, a salesman of the highest order. For his very first spectacular, Leigh imagined a giant coffee cup that would emit real steam from holes punched into the rim of the cup—a “special effect” none of his predecessors had ever tried. He then sold the idea to the A & P food chain and installed the sign at Broadway and 47th Street in late 1933. From this moment on, Times Square became Leigh’s canvas.

Leigh was a peculiar fusion of artist and pitchman. He would wander around Times Square looking for virgin rooftop and then lease the space for signage. Then he would sit in his office and dream up ideas for signs, or play with images already used by advertisers. A 1941 profile by E. J. Kahn in
The New Yorker
noted that Leigh “judged it would be artistically and commercially pleasant to place a large penguin over Broadway with a blinking red eye that would flash on every few seconds. He was influenced in his thoughts by the fact that the manufacturers of Kool cigarettes had been featuring penguins in their magazine advertising.” Leigh seemed to have a mind that naturally thought in advertisements. He lacked the technical expertise to make steam come out of coffee cups or make red eyes blink on and off, but he understood that the images would work, and he found engineers who could make them happen.

Leigh was, at least in his own mind, a visionary who dreamed in light, but not in light only. He was a great admirer of Henry Ford, and he spoke of going into politics, of starting a businessmen’s party, of delivering lectures over the radio. He once described to
The New York Times
a Times Square with wind machines blowing trees and flags, artificial snow and fog, signs that emitted smells, live animals, three-dimensional signs—the kind of brilliantly orchestrated fantasy we would now expect from Disney, or Las Vegas. He had an instinct for the new. In the late thirties, he purchased the rights to a new lighting technology called Epok, which allowed him to stage five-minute animated cartoons on the gigantic dimensions of a Times Square spectacular; it was an early version of the LED technology that has increasingly come to dominate today’s Times Square. Immediately after the war, he bought from the Navy dirigibles that had been scheduled to be cut up into raincoats; he attached rubberized fixtures lined with fifteen thousand tiny lightbulbs, and rented them to advertisers as spectaculars in the sky. MGM used one to promote
National
Velvet.

Leigh was also responsible for the most famous sign in the history of Times Square: the Camel cigarettes sign, atop the Claridge Hotel on the east side of Broadway between 43rd and 44th Streets. The ingenuity of the sign lay more in its conception than in its fabrication, for it consisted of a red-painted plywood billboard with a picture of a handsome, deeply contented smoker with a hole in place of a mouth. And through the hole, every four seconds, issued a perfectly formed smoke ring, made of steam, collected from the hotel’s heating system and driven by pistons through a yet smaller hole. Perhaps the most ingenious thing about the sign was that it didn’t depend on light. It was completed three days before Pearl Harbor, and six months before a blackout that switched off the lights in Times Square. But the smoker kept blowing his rings. Indeed, he continued until 1966, when, after a remarkable run of twenty-five years, the sign finally came down.

Leigh’s last masterpiece, and arguably his greatest, was mounted atop the Bond Clothing store, one block north of the Camel smoker, in 1948. Bond was the closest thing to an elegant haberdasher in Times Square, a place never noted for its stores. And what Leigh devised for his client was a block-long, ninety-foot-high montage of sex and swank, one of the most eye-popping tableaux ever seen in Times Square. Leigh ordered up fiftyfoot-high plaster casts of heroically proportioned nudes, a man and a woman, with swags of golden neon draped across their torsos like togas. At night, they seemed to be wearing evening gowns of light, and nothing else. The statues were posted on either side of a real waterfall, 27 feet high and 132 feet across. Ten thousand gallons of water tumbled over the falls and was recirculated by pumps at the base, while the scene was illuminated by 23,000 incandescent lamps as well as neon tubes. In
Signs and
Wonders,
Tama Starr, whose family firm, Artkraft Strauss, built the Bond sign as well as many other Leigh inventions, explains that the waterfall was meant to conjure up Niagara Falls, and thus honeymoons, and thus sex.

Like Irving Berlin, Douglas Leigh ultimately became one of the Methuselahs of Broadway. In the early 1960s, he bought the Times Tower, stripped off its marble cladding, and turned the building into a giant signboard, which of course is just what it ultimately became thirty years later. In 1979, with Times Square in a state of what must have seemed like irreversible decay, he sold his seventeen prize sites there to Van Wagner, a big national billboard firm, and embarked on an entirely new career doing exterior lighting for big buildings, including the Empire State Building. As late as the mid-nineties he was planning a light show for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. Leigh died in 1999, at age ninety-two. He was like Berlin, too, in his combination of canny salesmanship, creative brio, and almost childlike access to the wellsprings of pleasure. He was a genius of the lively arts, and a demiurge of Times Square.

9.

THE POKERINO FREAK SHOW

IN HIS NOVEL GO, published in 1952, John Clellon Holmes describes a feverish visit he made to 42nd Street in company with his fellow Beats Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Herbert Huncke, in a fruitless search for marijuana. The time must have been 1945 or so, right around the moment when Alfred Eisenstaedt was capturing his frank and jolly image of Times Square. It is late at night, and the band of poets and junkies stops in at Lee’s Cafeteria—Holmes’s mild joke on the actual name, which was Grant’s—at the corner of 42nd and Broadway. “The place,” Holmes writes, “looked like some strange social club for grifters, dope passers, petty thieves, cheap, aging whores and derelicts: the whole covert population of Times Square that lived only at night and vanished as the streets went grey with dawn.” The crowd at Lee’s was a “confraternity of the lost and damned.”

It is strange to think that the demonic Times Square of the Beats was the same place as the Times Square of the bobby-soxers and Irving Berlin. And yet it was. This is why Kerouac wrote that Times Square was home both to the gentleman in the De Pinna suit and the drunk in the gutter. Times Square was always so weirdly heterogeneous that you could choose what to make of it; but never more so than in the postwar period. It is to some extent true that the Beats focused their attention on 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue, while the Times Square of the De Pinna suit was Broadway and the theater district; but it is also true that the crowds at the Paramount were celebrating Times Square as it had been, while the Beats dwelled in the Times Square that was becoming. They were the last true celebrants of the great Times Square decay; after them, the decay passed beyond the capacities of literary celebration.

For a few brief years, essentially from 1945 to 1948, Times Square played a central role in the formation of the Beat mood, culture, and even language. The very word “Beat” was coined by Herbert Huncke, a hustler, drug addict, and petty thief who hung out in Times Square and then crashed on the floor of various Beat apartments. “The new social center had been established in Times Square,” Allen Ginsberg later wrote, “a huge room lit in brilliant fashion by neon glare and filled with slot machines, open day and night. There all the apocalyptic hipsters in New York eventually stopped, fascinated by the timeless room.” They gathered at the Pokerino arcade, and Bickford’s cafeteria, and the Angle Bar, at 42nd and Eighth, where pimps and drug dealers and small-time crooks hung out. For the Beats, this tapped-out, phantasmagorical realm held the key to truths invisible to the “squares” in the upper world of success and sobriety. After describing the nightmare world of Grant’s, the narrator of
Go
observes that Hobbes, the protagonist, “somehow was not repulsed, but rather yearned to know it in its every aspect, the lives these people led, the emotions they endured, the fate into which they stumbled, perhaps not unawares.” Why, that is, would someone consciously choose so degraded a fate?

It was Beat dogma that you had to leave the suffocating world of normalcy behind, and pass through degradation, in order to find truth. Allen Ginsberg was the product of a liberal Jewish suburban home; only when he left for Columbia, in 1943, did he meet other people—Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs—who were seekers, to use one of his favorite words, as he was. Burroughs, an older man with a strange air that mingled breeding, erudition, and menace, introduced Ginsberg and Kerouac to writers who subverted the reassuring rationality of the Columbia English department: Rimbaud, Verlaine, Cocteau, and Spengler, with his apocalyptic sense of doom. Burroughs was himself a denizen of Times Square; he had first started haunting the local bars in 1944 when he was trying to fence a stolen tommy gun and some morphine, and now he went to keep himself supplied with drugs and to gaze on the mesmerizing scene. Ginsberg adopted Burroughs’s preferences in literature, his view of the world, his taste for amphetamines, and his fascination with the lowlife of Times Square.

In 1945, he and Kerouac began accompanying Burroughs and Huncke, whom they all respected as a true denizen of the lower depths, on all-night trips to Times Square. They sat for hours in Bickford’s, the giant cafeteria under the marquee of the Apollo Theatre, talking to the dead-end crowd that gathered there; Ginsberg even worked at Bickford’s briefly as a busboy. They were interviewed about their sex lives by Dr. Alfred Kinsey, who had been fascinated by Huncke’s polymorphous sexual experience. Stoked on Benzedrine, the Beats would float up and down 42nd Street with the strange human flotsam, entertaining splendid, Technicolor, end-of-the-world visions. Here was the hallucinatory landscape that matched their hallucinatory state of mind. The spectaculars held an entirely different meaning for them than they did for Douglas Leigh. The garish blues and greens and yellows of the neon lights penetrated human flesh and revealed the ghastly pallor beneath. “It was a hyperbolic spookiness all taking place in an undersea light of Pokerino freak shows of Times Square,” Ginsberg later said.

The Pokerino was a 42nd Street pinball arcade filled with speed freaks who, as Kerouac’s biographer writes, “were concentrating on the pinball machines with amphetamine intensity, gripping the tables, willing the ball to stay in play, while the crash and zap of the machine noises and the intense bright light made their heads spin.” Here, Ginsberg concluded, at the heart of 42nd Street, at the heart of Times Square, at the heart of New York and thus of the world, the end of the American dream was being enacted and prefigured. In Kerouac’s
The Town and the City,
Leon Levinsky, the Ginsberg stand-in, points into the heart of the Nickel-O— the Pokerino stand-in—and descries there “the children of the sad American paradise” reduced to zombies in the sickly light, “milling around uncertainly among the ruins of bourgeois civilization.” Jumping up and down with excitement, Levinsky goes on to describe the inmates of the Nickel-O as geeks—and he means not just the speed freaks in the Nickel-O but himself, too, and others, all unclean and diseased and riddled with guilt. The mad monologue has that inspired lunacy the Beats prized as oracular wisdom. Reaching his wild peroration, Levinsky declares that this geekishness is, in fact, an “atomic disease,” a modern form of plague. “Everybody,” he declares, “is going to fall apart, disintegrate, all character-structures based on tradition and uprightness and so-called morality will slowly rot away, people will get the hives right on their hearts, great crabs will cling to their brains. . . .”

The apocalyptic hipsters soon moved to other visionary geographies—to the West, to Mexico, to Paris, to Morocco. But in their work, and in their lives, they had added another layer to the great archaeological site that was Times Square. Just as the Depression-era journalists like Liebling and Mitchell and Myron Berger had fashioned a Times Square of eloquent freaks and fading vaudevillians, so the Beats left behind them a Dostoyevskian underworld whose very degradation posed a challenge to pleasure-loving bourgeois culture. There was a peculiar form of romanticization in the way the Beats idealized, even lionized, figures like Huncke; perhaps it was the Runyonesque impulse of Times Square in a decadent key. But before long there would be nothing left to romanticize.

TIMES SQUARE DIDN’T get appreciably worse over the course of the next decade, but what had been largely subterranean became increasingly visible, and what had been the subject for surrealist evocation became, increasingly, a Problem. In March 1960,
The New York Times
ran a long front-page story under the headline “Life on W. 42d St. A Study in Decay.” The reporter, Milton Bracken, noted that “it is frequently asserted” that 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues “is the ‘worst’ in town.” As evidence, Bracken adduced the ten “grinder” theaters on the block showing racy or violent films from eight A.M. to four A.M., and the “male perverts” who “misbehave” during the shows; the homosexuals and transvestites who gathered on the sidewalks; the arcades in the subway stations at either end of the block, whose pinball games and shooting galleries attracted drifters and runaways; the con artists bilking soldiers and unwary tourists, and the bookstores peddling “second-hand magazines featuring pictures of women stripped to the waist.”

In the light of retrospection, of course, the dreadful depths of 42nd Street circa 1960 sound fairly innocuous. And in fact Bracken was at pains to distinguish between the street’s increasingly noxious reputation and its daily reality. The youthful “deviates,” he writes, may have been material for the psychiatrist, but not for the policeman. The drifters in the arcades could be counted on to comply when the officer on the beat shooed them away. The knives on display in the stores were for show rather than for battle. The jukebox in the IRT arcade was wholly devoted to opera. The police made relatively few arrests on an average night. Forty-second Street was an “enigma” in an otherwise healthy city; indeed, Bracken observed, “places that attract deviates and persons looking for trouble are interspersed with places of high standards of food, drink and service.” And yet precisely because New Yorkers were accustomed to clean and orderly streets, 42nd Street’s anarchy was shocking. “Respectable elements,” Bracken noted, were “deeply offended and, in some cases, outraged.”

The Times Square that the Beats had frequented, which is to say, 42nd Street as well as Eighth Avenue from the upper Thirties to the lower Fifties, had grown more scrofulous in recent years. The dirty bookstores had begun to proliferate in the 1950s. The merchandise, which in the past had run to joke books, war stories, westerns, and horoscopes, increasingly shifted to such standards of soft-core erotica as the “French deck”—playing cards with pictures of naked girls—calendars, paperbacks like
Sex Life
of a Cop,
and those secondhand magazines. Prostitutes had patrolled the area since the late nineteenth century, but the opening of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, at the southeast corner of 42nd and Eighth, in late 1950, had vastly increased the numbers of both teenage boys and girls available to be conscripted into the trade, and probably increased the supply of customers as well. And by the early sixties, Times Square had become New York’s capital of male prostitution, known as hustling.

The Times Square area had long been congenial to homosexuals, thanks both to its general air of laissez-faire and to the relatively high concentration of gay men in theater and the theater’s ancillary professions, like costume and set design. Places like the bar of the Astor Hotel—or at least one designated side of the bar—were well-known gay hangouts as early as the 1910s, and then increasingly so with the influx of servicemen during World War II. Tourists often poked their heads into 42nd Street coffee shops like Bickford’s, where they were likely to spot the flamboyant “fairies” who had made the street such an exotic slice of American life. Timothy Gilfoyle, the leading scholar of this subject, cites a tabloid in the early thirties to the effect that “The latest gag about 2 A.M. is to have your picture taken with one or two pansies on Times Square.”

With the onset of the Depression, the hustling scene, according to Gilfoyle, became less theatrical and more grimly commercial. Forty-second Street became the center of “rough trade,” forcing overtly effeminate gay men to Bryant Park, one block to the east. The unnamed main character of John Rechy’s
City of Night,
published in 1963, arrives in New York determined to make a living with his body, and is immediately directed by a wiser hand to Times Square—“always good for a score.” And indeed it is. Standing at the corner of 42nd and Broadway, he says, “I can see the young masculine men milling idly. Sometimes they walk up to older men and stand talking in soft tones—going off together or, if not, moving to talk to someone else.” The signals are all terribly discreet, but nonetheless unmistakable, at least to the initiate. After taking in two “sexy foreign movies” at the Apollo, Rechy’s narrator stands under the marquee until a middle-aged man approaches him and says, “I’ll give you ten, and I don’t give a damn for you.” And so he is inducted into the life of 42nd Street.

This moment in the early 1960s marks a middle point in the downward spiral of 42nd Street. The street is not nearly as violent or degraded as it is soon to become; on the other hand, it has lost the gift for evoking a euphoric sense of liberation from social convention—the Baudelairean sense—that it had borne for the Beats. It is a place of melancholy epiphanies.
City of Night
opens with the line, “Later I would think of America as one vast City of Night stretching from Times Square to Hollywood Boulevard. . . . One-night stands and cigarette smoke and rooms squashed in loneliness.” The operative word is “squashed,” for Rechy’s 42nd Street is a furtive, joyless world.

Much the same feeling of failure and constriction arises from the other important hustling novel of the era,
Midnight Cowboy,
written by James Leo Herlihy and published in 1965. Herlihy’s knight-errant, Joe Buck, heads straight for the Times Square Palace Hotel when he arrives in New York from El Paso. The first thing he sees from his room is “an incredibly sloppy old woman sitting on the sidewalk under a movie marquee across the street” who “poured something from a bottle on to her filthy, naked feet, and rubbed them with her free hand.” Here is a form of degradation he never saw, or even imagined, in Texas. Joe’s tenure in New York is an unsentimental education. Despite his unsinkable enthusiasm, he suffers a string of mortifying failures: arriving in triumph as a stud, he is soon reduced to the status of hustler, and an unsuccessful one at that. He sleeps in the all-night theaters and dines on baked beans at the Automat. In the end, he leaves for Florida, as he must; the only permanent citizens of Times Square are grotesques like his sidekick, Ratso Rizzo, who dies before he reaches the southern promised land.

Just as Joe was climbing aboard that Greyhound, Times Square was taking another turn down the spiral of decay. Times Square had been a refuge for self-expression and self-gratification at a time when social conventions kept most Americans toeing the line of propriety; this was as true in 1950 as it had been in 1910. But in the sixties, when those conventions lost their moral force, and ordinary citizens began to live by the motto “If it feels good, do it,” Times Square sank from impudent naïveté to genuine debasement. In 1966, a vending machine operator, Martin Hodas, purchased thirteen old film machines, outfitted them with stag films showing the kind of frontal nudity then commercially unavailable in New York, and distributed them to the Times Square bookshops that specialized in risqué material. At first the owners resisted, since this kind of thing had been a provocation to police action from the days of burlesque; but they soon found that the “video peeps” were the most popular items they carried.