Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (24 page)

“These theaters would be dark unless showing motion pictures,” forewarns the old motion-picture booker.

Remembering Hubie’s

The peeps click on their neon by 11
A.M.
, to grab the lunch crowd. Peepland, at number 228 West 42nd Street, sports the blinking neon eye in front, peering through a keyhole of lights.
In God We Trust,
says the 1978 Washington quarter, a replica the size of a tractor tire. This is the most unabashed shrine to legal Peeping Tomism on the block. (Live Nude Girls are only available in parlors along the downtown side of 42nd.) Gaze up the building front and you’ll notice the old vertical neon HUBERT’S sign rusting in the shadows.

Hubert’s Museum and Flea Circus was the forerunner of bad taste, signaling to some the downfall of Times Square. At the turn of the century, the approximate location had been Murray’s Roman Gardens, an elegant restaurant that featured an “Egyptian Room” with mummies and ancient artifacts on display. Hubert’s opened in the 1920s (it moved a few doors over in 1940). Its preeminence in the pantheon of Times Square sleaze was noted by Brooks Atkinson himself:

When the culture quotient of 42nd Street began to decline during the thirties the Flea Circus was blamed. It was rated as one step lower than the burlesque houses, which, in turn, were the poor farm of the theater. ... By the time 42nd Street had become the most depraved corner of the Broadway district, patrolled day and night by male and female prostitutes, Hubert’s Museum was the ranking cultural institution. The trained fleas turned out to be the finest performers on the block.

Hubert’s was an ill-famed rumpus parlor for kids playing hooky. It had Skee-Ball, pinball, Wild West badman duels, kill-the-Japs submarine torpedoes, a shooting gallery using war-surplus .22’s on chains to knock down cornball ducks. Karoy, “the man with the i-run tongue,” lured people into sideshow exhibits. Gawking sailors could discover the “Hidden Secrets” of sex, solely consigned to Hubert’s by the “French Academy of Medicine, Paris, France.” A fat lady wedged into a tiny booth at the back of the arcade was startled out of her dreaming each time a customer approached for a fifteen-cent ticket.

Soured careers that ended up on display at Hubert’s included pitching great Grover Cleveland Alexander, old and fat; Jack Johnson, thirty years after his heavyweight championship, having sacrificed God knows how much pride. Tiny Tim played Hubert’s in 1959 as the Human Canary, up on a platform in a tux with his uke, making $50 a week.

Down the steep flight of stairs were the likes of Sealo, the boy with flippers instead of arms. Estelline, a 200-pound female who tilted her head back, opened wide her mouth and slipped four swords down her gullet (a “doubledecker sword sandwich” she called it). There was Andy Potato Chips, the Midget; Congo, the Jungle Witch Doctor; Presto, the Magician; Princess Wago and her Pet Pythons; Sailor White, the Strong Man; Lydia, the Contortionist. During each of eight daily shows, the curtains would open over individual linoleum platforms where the freaks posed, telling their stories, then gracefully turning clockwise to wave the spectators on to the next attraction.

Professor Roy Heckler, with a bald kidney-bean head and hornrimmed glasses, recited the same spiel every day for thirty years, taking his trained fleas through their turns. When Albert Goldman wrote of Lenny Bruce’s fascination with Hubert’s, he recalled the Professor during a typical visit by Lenny in 1960:

The man seems so spaced, so indifferent to whether anyone is listening, you instinctively look to see if he has a mal-functioning hearing aid. “And now here’s Napol-ee-on Bon-ee-part dragging his cannon. And here is Bru-tus pulling a chariot. Brutus and Napol-ee-on Bon-ee-part are going to do a race. Brutus is ahead. No, the winner is Napol-ee-on Bon-ee-part.”

With his chin right on the table only afoot away from the fleas, Lenny watches barely visible little mites dressed in ballerina costumes, kicking soccer balls, turning carrousels, lying in their cotton wool “flea hotel” and feeding greedily off the Professor’s arm. ... He even breaks up when the Professor cracks his one joke: “If a dog were to walk by, I’d lose my act.”

Hubert’s discontinued live attractions in 1965. The arcade closed altogether a decade later. Peepland blinked open in January 1978, its bottom level rife with freak loops of donkeys and eel sex, continuing the odd lineage of exhibitions that began here with mummies at the turn of the century.

In 1984, the Longacre Building at Broadway and 42nd still lists Hubert’s Museum, Inc., Room 725. Firms’ names are lettered over clouded glass doors, private-eye style, as the Longacre remains unchanged through time, even its directory. But a peek through the mail slot reveals Hubert’s executive offices now to be a custodial closet, with mops, pails, and cleaning supplies.

The New Amsterdam, at 214 West 42nd, was the first land-marked theater on the block. A turbaned dude sells incense under its marquee this afternoon. The Astaires danced here; Ziegfeld
Follies
ran from 1913 to 1927. A kung-fu house in recent years, it was boarded shut in the 1980s, and is the most likely theater in Times Square to be haunted. A handyman claimed to see Olive Thomas, a statuesque Ziegfeld showgirl, float down a staircase onstage waiting for the curtain to rise. Buried inside are the original marble fireplaces, allegorical Shakespearean paintings, and Art Nou-veau pillars that made it the most opulent theater ever built in New York. Ol’ Brooks draws us back to the Depression, when the theater “began to look seedy and the florid uniforms of the ushers, tarnished and worn.” Its last legit production was Walter Huston’s dispirited
Othello,
in 1937, after which it became a grind house. “The elegant façade was disfigured with a bulbous-shaped excrescence; the expensive wood paneling inside was neglected, and the New Amsterdam became a slum,” remembers Brooks.

The Harem, 249 West, is actually the only porno grinder on 42nd that operates twenty-four hours. A double bill of second-run porn is currently showing:
Never Enough
and
Titillation.
Two long, narrow rows of seats are occupied by black transvestites, pre-op transsexuals, subway toilet queens, and confused Japanese tourists. Night or day, they
live
here for five bucks. Not one empty seat. Ghastly, open-mouthed faces lie unconscious, others are smoking, wheezing, spitting, festering in the warmth of each other’s disease. Thank God Brooks never saw it. The sleaziest theater in America.

(If you run low on cash during your quest for sexual fulfillment, you might recoup your quarters at the storefront between Dating Room and G&A Books. This is a winos’ blood bank at 251 West 42nd. The counterman, a dead ringer for Igor, pays six dollars a pint [sans orange juice].)

Twenty-Four Hours On the Square (Part Two)

CHOP SUEY
signs were once prevalent in Times Square, the neon catch-phrase for Cantonese cuisine. (“Chop suey” literally translates as “leftovers,” making the meal an age-old inside joke among Chinese waiters.) The last CHOP SUEY sign to go was at 259 West 42nd, second floor, replaced by the Soul City restaurant and topless bar in 1983.

“We got some
Soul City
women upstairs,” says the barker on 42nd Street, with ethnic pride. It’s now 5
P.M.
Two pool tables are filled, their players quietly engaged, while one topless dancer on a makeshift stage wriggles to a loud juke.

“You shoulda been here yesterday,” says the bartender, leaning toward the barstool. “This
beautiful
woman walks in, say she lookin’ for a job. I sent her in the back to get in her costume. Best-lookin’ woman you ever seen comes out. Gets up onstage, has a
cock
this big.” The barkeep holds his hands a foot apart. “I say, ‘What you got under them panties—you havin’ your period?’ She say, ‘What’s the difference, it’s only topless here,’ then she hike up her skirt to show me. I say, ‘You can’t work here with that, get out!’”

Hell’s Shoeshine Stands

Twenty-four-hour shines are available across from Port Authority on Eighth and 42nd. Each shoeshine man has himself a
job
—a small seat of business, which in turn spawns a cottage infestation of several winos, junkies, or lowlife con men at each stand who leech off the shoeshine action. Sometimes they all interchange shifts at the stand. A white customer who sits upon the lopsided cushion and props each shoe onto a podium will indulge in the most nervefraying dollar-fifty shine this side of hell. Even during the evening rush hour.

As the shoeshine uncle goes to work, first attacking the shoes with an alcohol rag, a scar-faced boogeyman comes alive from the edge of the stand. “Hey, how much dem shoes cos’?” A second skell joins in, admiring the black Zodiac sneakers.

“About fifty bucks,” says the customer.

“Yeah, fifty?” say both lowlifes, incredulously. Both want to know where they can purchase such a pair, they’ve been looking all over. Neither can pronounce words, however, doing gross injustice to black English. Many of the skells here, who intermingle like roaches in a garbage spill, talk in such broken, junked-out voices—often jabbering simultaneously in each other’s faces—that there is a total lack of communication.

“Where you live at?” the first boogeyman asks the customer, who names a Manhattan vicinity. “Lotta rich people up there,” says the skell, continuing to size up the prey. The shoeshine man smears on a dab of Kiwi polish from the tin. The skell leans up toward the customer’s face. “You smoke?”

“Naw,” goes the customer, “people are watching me, they’d find it in my piss.”

“
Urinalysis
,” the skell says, with sudden Shakespearean clarity. He leans up against the customer, quieter: “My man got seven 19-inch TV’s, five 12-inch TV’s, a carton of Sony cassette-radios and stereos, in that truck behind you in the parking lot.”

“What kind of TV’s?”

“Zenith. He’s with the company.”

The customer is amused. How enterprising of those rascals at Zenith and Sony to establish authorized dealerships at this 42nd Street shoeshine stand. “How much?” he wonders. The skell says wait, he’ll be right back. Standing at the parking entrance, sure enough, is a short, serious fellow in a raincoat with a toothpick in the side of his mouth, whom he consults with.

“Seventy-five for the 19-inch, fifty for the 12-inch. They brand new from the warehouse.”

“Lemme get a cab and pick one up in the parking lot,” offers the shoeshine customer.

“Naw, man,” says the skell. “We
deliver
to your home.”

“Oh,” says the customer, laughing now at this punch line. “You’ll
deliver,
just like the
Seven Santini Brothers.
I don’t have the money now, I gotta come back.”

“Well, what you got?” asks the con man. “You can gimme a
down
payment to show you mean it.” And then the raincoat guy with hands in his pockets struts over, on this sunny afternoon. The shoeshine is through, and lousy to boot; the shine jockey makes room for his entourage to work. “Buy me a beer to show you’ll be back,” says the first skell.

“Oh, I’ll be back in an hour,” says the customer.

“No guarantee we have any TV’s lef’,” warns the TV salesman in a raincoat. “But if you a
man,
you’ll be back like you say!”

“Save me one of them TV’s—I’ll be back,” says the recipient of a second-rate shine, never to return.

Theater tourists who spill onto the Eighth Avenue sidewalk are safe, so long as they keep a steady pace. Stagger from a few intermission drinks and you’re fodder for lowlife scramblers keenly interested in reaping the Broadway audience’s wallets, watches, and earrings. The more professional takeoff artists were no strangers to McGirrs, the last poolroom to close in the Square. Its unassuming doorway on Eighth Avenue led downstairs to a cavernous, smoky den, clubhouse to the old pool hustlers of Broadway.

The next shrine we come to on Eighth is Show World, at 42nd. One of its wackier incidents occurred when some old duke became over-aroused by a loop and dropped dead of a heart attack. Personnel and customers stood around and laughed. The emporium racked up 279 arrest convictions for disorderly conduct and obscenity in its first six years, before the courts eased up on obscenity raps. The Show World towers—originally the Corn Exchange Bank Trust—is structurally sound, foiling attempts by the city to close it for building violations.

Fewer than a dozen sex parlors remain along Eighth Avenue, and they draw mostly gays. Though only one of four little theaters dotting 44th Street shows fag movies, all are cruising grounds for hustlers, old queens, business suits, pickpockets, drug addicts. Re-creating the ambience of subway toilets is what Times Square’s dozen gay joints are after. Eighth Avenue’s first-run Adonis theater and Show Palace burlesque are the slight exceptions.

Liz Dumps Dick
for Mort Fineshriber

Your Name in Headlines, at 200 West 48th, is Times Square in its purest state. “By and large,” says the owner, “the American public likes a gag.” For four bucks, he’ll set your name or nearly anything you desire into a hot-press headline on the cover of
The Daily Tribune
—a realistic-looking make-believe newspaper. The cover stories underneath have remained the same for twenty-five years. “The beauty of this is to watch it being done in front of you,” says the owner, as his counterman works the flatbed press.

“And I make damn good copy,” says the counter guy, “much cleaner than the crap you’ll get from souvenir sellers around the block. This is all we do here.” The counter guy has a political science degree from Fordham, and is now working his way through law school. On the wall is a Supreme Court ruling about freedom of the press, with a footnote scrawled in by the owner about reserving the right to refuse anything “obscene.”