Times Square was considered a sordid mess of misery and depravity long before 42nd Street defined the 1970s grindhouse era and long before Rudy Giuliani sought to Disney-fy it.
Columnist Louis Sobol wrote about 1920s Broadway in his book Broadway is My Beat. He said the neighborhood was flooded with loose women hoping to be recruited for the Ziegfeld Follies:
“I began to encounter the pathetic young girls I referred to as Creep Janes. Little girls with wistful eyes, brazen eyes, disillusioned eyes. They had barged in on New York to taste the sweets of Broadway. They lived two, three and even four in squalid little rooms in dinky hotels. Very few of them ever reached the dizzy pinnacle they sought, but they rarely gave up trying. Some remained on, ashamed to go home [and] took to the streets.”
Newspaperman Stanley Walker leveled a complaint about midtown Manhattan in his 1933 book The Night Club Era:
“The faces of the people themselves seem unreal, like freaks come to life from a dreadful nightmare. Sit some noon in the hunting room restaurant of the Astor, by the window, and look down at the faces and figures. There will pass the most astounding aggregation – cauliflower ears, beggars, sleazy crones, skinny girls who would be out of place in even the cheapest dance hall, twisted old men, sleek youths with pale faces, the blind and the maimed. They have reached Broadway, where the hopeful young from a thousand towns long to be. Cheap dances, lewd burlesque, filthy pictures are hallmarks of the New Broadway.”
Newspapermen Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer described Times Square in their 1948 book New York Confidential:
“It is a shabby, dismal block. Its 200 yards are lined almost unbrokenly by cheap hotels and rooming houses sheltering all manner of strange characters: retired vaudevillians, down-and-out horse-players, dope fiends, grifters and grafters, pickpockets, derelicts, drunks, strange widows, miserly recluses, tars and their tarts, crap-game steerers and bottom-dealers. On fine days you see them on sidewalks. Old women with grotesque young get-ups and peroxided hair, parading their cooches; bewhiskered, unkempt men on the church steps, passionately studying racing scratch sheets; apoplectic dipsomaniacs airing out cheap jags; actors whose world has gone by, talking of starring roles of the past – and next season. Here is the deserted stage door of the once fabulous Palace, mecca for all vaudevillians … gone to seed, a grind movie house, its stage door, once an attraction for autograph hounds, celebrity seekers, Johns, and the plain curious, is used now only for trade. At this writing the For Rent sign is up … a backwash of stagnant water in a busy, bustling stream.”
Trade paper Variety concurred in 1954:
“The seedy set is in evidence on nearly all side streets in the Forties and low Fifties from Sixth to Eighth Avenues. Alcoholics, derelicts, panhandlers, punks and loiterers of varying descriptions in recent months have appeared increasing in number. They’re a disreputable element that has added shabbiness to the entire Broadway sector. First full-scale effort to put the creeps on the run was launched by the cops week before last.”
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