Getting an Education in Times Square

This Father's Day I am commemorating my dad's role in fathering my love of New York City.

Anyone old enough to remember Times Square from the ’70s until the mid-’80s, before Bloomberg sanitized it, knows it was a seedy place that derived its character and energy from organized crime, go-go bars, peep shows, strip joints, porn shops, pimps, and prostitutes. For me, they were the good old days.

This section of the city has always been an armpit and a nuisance of some kind. But I still prefer yesteryear's colorful, unwholesome depravity to today’s antiseptic tourist trap. It has been so long since Times Square was America’s Gomorrah that I almost can’t envision yesteryear when going to the theater nowadays. But some memories persist.

I once walked with my father along Broadway on the way to and from shows. We knew it could be dangerous, but theater-loving tourists had no other choice. To a kid from Shaker Heights, Times Square was an exotic, neon wonderland. It was the most enticing place in the world, propriety be damned. 

Not exactly the target customer for those strip clubs, I nonetheless accepted a flyer from one of the hawkers and got my first glimpse of what I later learned were pasties. It took me years to understand why anyone would want to look at those and I’m still not sure I get it. 

My dad reprimanded me when I mischievously tried to enter into the dimly lit cavity of one of those strip clubs -- a luring lair of degeneracy so foreign, so mysterious, so beguilingly different from the world I knew that consisted of boys’ school, fried chicken, and our boring country club. 

In 11^th and 12^th grades, my school had an exciting midwinter break called Intersession. One of the electives was an immersion in Broadway theater escorted by a cultured English teacher, the aristocratic, unflappable Mr. Schubert. Once again, my dad was eager for me to visit New York -- specifically, Times Square.

What a sport Mr. Schubert was to take 15 unruly adolescent boys to New York. At least half of them turned out to be bitchy homosexuals. Once we got to the city by an endless Amtrak ride, we were free to do whatever we pleased during the day. We stayed at Times Square’s  Edison Hotel (now Hotel Edison).

I cannot imagine what my elders were thinking when they conspired to let us boys stay at the Edison. Billed today as “stylish” and “art deco,” this is not the New York deco of the Chrysler Building or Waldorf Astoria but a tawdry, ersatz affair. 

The “whores on 7^th Avenue” memorialized by Simon & Garfunkel would have been welcome in this particular Deco den. I am quite sure that some of these lowlifes made it into the Edison for hourly entanglements. My school was really taking private education to a new level.

A latter-day Holden Caulfield, I wandered, gaped, and marveled my way around the district. We were granted such freedom during the winter of ’78 and ’79 that we had no curfews. We fed ourselves at the Broadway McDonald’s at 1 am. I’ve had hundreds of wonderful meals in Manhattan since then, but none came with the taste of freedom I got from those early-morning Big Macs. 

I am not exaggerating when I say that Times Square was dangerous back then. The year after my 1980 graduation, boys on the same theater trip were tied up and robbed at gunpoint in their room at the Edison. That was the end of the school’s theater trip and an unfortunate coda to a short-lived, otherwise wonderful era.

I would stay at the Edison one last time, in the summer of 1986 when I was exploring a relocation from Cambridge. The novelty of patronizing this sketchy place was gone. I was now sophisticated enough not to desire Big Macs at 1 am, but not above getting into other kinds of trouble. 

The Edison is still there. One can have that experience for roughly $250 a night. On occasion, Joe and I have used the lobby as a shortcut to traverse from 47^th to 46^th Street without going outside and wrangling with pedestrian traffic. 

Today, the lobby is filled with Midwestern bumpkins eager to board double-decker tourist buses and dine at nearby Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. They would be scandalized if they only knew what once went down in those halls.

I am grateful for the nights I spent in Times Square in the ‘70s. I wouldn't have been there were it not for my dad. I wasn’t seasoned enough yet to know about all the other parts of the city, but for a kid from Shaker Heights, it was all I needed to fall in love with New York.