Word: 42nd
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...tourism services for the Times Square Business Improvement District: "One summer, when I was about to give birth to my first child, I came down to have lunch with my husband, who worked on 43rd and Sixth. I took the E train, so I had to walk down 42nd. Here I was, eight months pregnant, and I was offered everything from sex to cocaine. Eight months pregnant, and they wouldn't leave me alone." She is referring, of course, not to Martin and Lewis but to the pimps, hustlers and drug dealers who by the 1970s had replaced sailors...
...clip than in the rest of the city. The area is bustling with new hotels, new office buildings--not to mention new chain stores and corny theme restaurants that would be at home in any suburban mall. Not that Times Square (which technically refers only to the triangle above 42nd Street where Broadway and Seventh Avenue meet but casually takes in the entire neighborhood) doesn't still retain some of its seedy, pre-Gap allure. Indeed, sailors still flock here during Fleet Week, but last year they were reportedly heard complaining that prostitutes had grown scarce...
...Amsterdam--and more to the point, Disney's corporate presence and the vote of confidence it represents--is the anchor for an ambitious city and state plan to make over 42nd Street, long the area's most notorious thoroughfare. As the sleaziest strip in the sleaziest part of town, the stretch of 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues was from the late '60s until just a few years ago the ninth circle of Times Square. "You could buy anything you wanted, whether it was drugs or girls or boys or green cards or telephone cards. You really felt like...
Once the home of John Barrymore, Eddie Cantor and Fanny Brice, 42nd Street began to decline with the Crash of 1929, which bankrupted a number of the theater owners, turning legitimate stages into burlesque houses and movie theaters. Even in Giuliani's youth questionable entertainments were a staple (the future mayor could have paid to see a man eat live mice at Hubert's Museum and Flea Circus). The postwar exodus of the city's middle class continued the block's slow skid into porndom...
...ballpark seems to feel personally diminished by living in a minor league city. We do not consider ourselves fundamentally so different from Duluthites or Sioux Fallsians or Fargo-Moorheaders. We all eat the same brand of corn flakes, and one size sock fits all. However, in Minneapolis, the 42nd largest American city, there are people who imagine it to be the Manhattan of the Midwest, the Paris of the Prairie. This is embarrassing to us St. Paulites, like knowing a small man with a bad toupee who thinks he is Tom Cruise. What can you say to him, other than...