Downtown: My Manhattan

by Pete Hamill

  I never again saw the hairy guy on the streets of Times Square, and soon I was off to Mexico to go to art school, and Steve Allen got his own weekly network show, competing with Ed Sullivan. That brilliant show made stars of Tom Poston, Don Knotts, Louis Nye, and a few others, doing variations on man-in-the-street interviews. I saw them much later in tributes to Allen. For a while, a variation of The Tonight Show featured the great jazz DJ Al “Jazzbo” Collins as a replacement for Allen, and he flopped, and then in came Jack Paar, who was a huge hit, and after him Johnny Carson, who stayed for more than thirty years, and finally Jay Leno. Every time I see Leno, I say to the screen: Open the back door and stick the camera out on the street. But there is no street where they do the Leno show in California, and now there is no Steve Allen either. The Hudson Theater is still there, rehabbed and clean, waiting patiently for some low-key genius to come in the front door and climb onto the stage.

  In 1961, working now at the New York Post, I was given a beat called “on the town.” Each night at eight o’clock I’d go to Lindy’s, at Fiftieth Street, and meet with the Post photographer Arty Pomerantz. We’d listen to police calls on the radio of Arty’s car or sit over coffee inside the restaurant, and when something happened, off we’d go. Sometimes there was a fire in midtown. Or a gambling raid that brought dozens of sharply dressed low-level wiseguys into the Fifty-first Street station house. Or, on a good night, with some luck, we’d have a homicide at a good address. On other nights, we covered the openings or closings of Broadway shows or followed some tip from one of the press agents who used Lindy’s as a base and fed items to the many gossip columns. There were seven daily newspapers in those days and each one, except the New York Times, had a gossip column. Those press agents were also the carriers of the old Broadway legends and most of them must have known that they were in the last days of their own time on what one columnist called Dream Street. They continued to work very hard at their craft. They worked the telephones all day, prying away at buried secrets or inventing items about their clients, and then typed out the items on small pieces of paper, each written in the style of the columnist they were servicing. Items for Ed Sullivan at the Daily News, for example, contained no verbs: “Judy Garland expecting . . .” Or “Tony Bennett a big hit at the Copa . . .” In the evening, the envelopes were left at Lindy’s, to be picked up by secretaries of the columnists and pasted into the finished columns.

  The king of the gossip columnists was, of course, Walter Winchell, who in 1962 had not been around New York in many months. The modern gossip column, with its three-dot items, was his invention, and from it flowed most of the others, along with such later variations as the supermarket tabloids, People magazine, and the Drudge Report. He perfected a whiz-bang style for the column, inventing language with great abandon (to get a divorce in the state of Nevada, for example, was to be “Renovated”). The clipped New York urgency of the style transferred perfectly to radio, where his Sunday night audiences were gigantic, as he came on to say, “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. North and South America and all the ships at sea. This is Walter Winchell with the Jergens Journal. Let’s go to press. . . .” He did not restrict himself to show business. For years, six days a week, he happily served as a conduit for President Roosevelt. After the war, he signed up with J. Edgar Hoover, his frequent booth mate at the Stork Club, and that was the beginning of his long, slow decline. During the rise of Joe McCarthy he filled the column with red-baiting items, and the tone turned punishing and nasty.

  By 1962, with his sour old Broadway turning rancid and his right-wing politics dominating the old mindless showbiz stuff, he was often in Florida or Arizona or out in Los Angeles. The column lost its sense of place and much of its urgency. Most of the time, the old Broadway energy of the column had become a snarl.

  During my time “on the town,” I saw Winchell for the first time outside Lindy’s, a small, intense, Cagney-like man in a snappy gray fedora, surrounded by a praetorian guard of press agents. Suddenly, Winchell, the old vaudevillian, began a charming soft-shoe to “Once in Love with Amy,” a song made famous by Ray Bolger. The intensity vanished, and for a few minutes Walter Winchell looked happy. The press agents applauded, and Winchell went back into Lindy’s with most of them in tow. I couldn’t help thinking of J. J. Hunsecker, played by Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success, the hard, corrosively intelligent movie about the world in which Winchell was once the supreme being. The streets looked black and white, and so did Winchell. One of the lingering press agents whispered to me: “It’s so sad. He doesn’t even know he’s finished.”

  That night, it was hard to imagine the time of his prime, when the stretch of Broadway from roughly Fortieth Street to Central Park was a kind of tinhorn American Versailles and Winchell was the Sun King. Presidents and press agents wanted his applause. They feared his vendettas. His throne was pitched at table 50 in the exclusive Cub Room of the Stork Club on East Fifty-first Street. There he sometimes accepted the sugary compliments of old bootleggers while in the company of J. Edgar Hoover. Now the Stork was a semiabandoned ruin, locked in an endless union dispute, where the waiters sometimes outnumbered the customers. The Daily Mirror, the Hearst tabloid where Winchell had worked since 1929, was in desperate trouble too. In the old days, when Winchell went on vacation or took his usual Monday day off, circulation of the Mirror dropped by 200,000. Now it never seemed to matter if Winchell was in the paper or not, and the Mirror was a year away from falling into the newspaper graveyard.

  Later that night, Winchell asked if he could ride around with me and Arty Pomerantz. “Hop in,” Pomerantz said.

  Winchell alternated that night (and on a few others) between fevered monologue—“Billy LaHiff’s saloon was right over there. One night . . .”—and moody silence. He was then sixty-five, and seemed much older. Certainly the ghosts of his lost city were everywhere. At one fire in Harlem, a young cop asked him for a press card, and he seemed stunned. Didn’t this cop recognize Walter Winchell? Pomerantz started to explain, when a white-haired police lieutenant came over, smiled, and said, “You’re Walter Winchell, right?”

  “That’s what they tell me,” said the man who had been the most powerful journalist in America. He scribbled notes that never made their way into the newspaper. And before we drove back downtown, Walter Winchell pointed at a row of tenements. “You know,” he said softly, “I used to live on that block.”

  Since the Post was then an afternoon paper, I had time to do my reporting and return to the office on South Street to write my stories before the eight-in-the-morning deadline. But even during the off-hours, when my head was filled with the Beats and Hemingway and Beckett, along with the history of New York itself, I was also drawn to Broadway. It clearly was no longer the Broadway I first saw as a boy. From about Thirty-eighth Street to Fifty-fifth Street, it was descending into a grungy mess of papaya stands, pizza counters, streetwalkers, and drugs. Smelly little photo shops sold phony ID cards, mainly to underage drinkers. A few bookshops peddled magazines called Titter and Laff and others about the glories of nude sunbathing. At night, when the theaters were open on their own portion of Broadway, particularly around Shubert Alley, there was something resembling glamour. But it was swift and fleeting, the glamour of hurried arrival and even swifter departure. Some people stayed around the neighborhood for dinner after the shows, at Frankie & Johnny’s, at Downey’s. All over the area, nightclubs were closing. Good-bye, Copa. Farewell, Latin Quarter. The big stars were rare visitors to New York now. Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Nat Cole were playing Las Vegas, where the money was ten times what they had ever earned in New York, where many of the old big-shot New York gamblers were respectable at last, doing legally in Vegas what was once a crime in New York. Most of the old hoodlums were also New Yorkers, and they imposed on Las Vegas the architectural style they had absorbed when young: huge signs, much glitter, movement. That Times Square style lives on today on the Strip.

  The old pulsing energy faded as the nig
htclubs died, and the stars went elsewhere. There was no huge money to be made in jazz, and big-time rock and roll had not yet arrived in the frenzy that came with the Beatles. Times Square itself was coarse, filthy, vulgar, but Forty-second Street was seedy and slightly menacing in a way that would seem, a decade later, almost innocent. At the Post, trying to understand what I was seeing, I read the clips and sought out some histories from the library. What was this place all about?

  The clips told me what was obvious: The subway was crucial to the existence of Times Square. The year of the square’s true foundation was 1904, when the long-delayed subway first moved up the East Side from City Hall to Grand Central, turned west at Forty-second Street, where it stopped at what became known that year as Times Square, and then drove north up the West Side all the way to 145th Street. That first subway line would become the primary symbol of New York velocity.

  Until 1904, the open space where Broadway formed a crossroads with Seventh Avenue at Forty-fourth Street had been called Longacre Square. The area was full of stables and carriage makers, and some of the side streets were dotted with brownstones. The new Astor Hotel was almost completed on the west side of Longacre Square, and a German immigrant named Oscar Hammerstein had already built a few theaters, starting with the Olympia in 1895. But the subway and the New York Times would become joint agents of immense change.

  Few could have predicted any of this drastic change in 1896, when a man named Adolph S. Ochs began his New York career. He was then thirty-eight, the son of a German Jewish immigrant who had served in both the Mexican War and the Civil War and had settled in Louisville, Kentucky. Adolph dropped out of school at fourteen and then lived his own Horatio Alger story: office boy at the Knoxville Chronicle, then printer’s devil, then, step by rapid step, all the way to the job of publisher—aged twenty—of the Chattanooga Times. He built that fragile four-page sheet into one of the best papers in the South. But on a trip to New York, another opportunity presented itself, and Ochs seized the day. In 1896, using borrowed money, he bought the virtually bankrupt New York Times for $75,000 and began to transform it into a newspaper of solid reputation. The circulation of the Times when Ochs bought it was 9,000 a day. Within a year, it had climbed to 70,000.

  As noted, the new publisher’s reputation was established when, in the buildup to the war with Spain, Ochs refused to swim with the rushing jingoistic tide. The coverage was straight, with no rhetorical flourishes, even if the Times was somewhat dull compared to the shouting dailies of Hearst and Pulitzer. This decision was not entirely idealistic. Ochs’s tight budget made it impossible for him to flood the Times with war coverage from Cuba. He ended up looking judicious, restrained, adult. As he proved that there was an audience for his sober news package, and as he turned away advertising from quacks and charlatans, he began to earn a modest profit.

  By the turn of the new century, Ochs was convinced that he must move his newspaper away from Park Row. The combination of increasing traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge and congestion from the ferociously ugly post office at the foot of City Hall Park made it harder and harder to move newspapers from the presses to the customers. Ochs began looking uptown.

  Ochs was not the first newspaperman to look uptown and see the future. His vision was tempered by his intelligence. He looked around first. After deciding against other sites for the New York Times, he settled on Longacre Square.

  This was an act of faith that many (including his competitors) believed was sheer folly. Not only was the location too far from Park Row and lower Broadway, they said, it was dangerous. Ochs understood the risks. He knew that the square was a few minutes’ walk from the Tenderloin, the wicked district from Fifth Avenue to Seventh Avenue, from Twenty-fourth Street to Fortieth Street. In certain ways, the Tenderloin made the old Five Points look like Mayfair. Starting in the mid-1880s (when the Five Points was losing its traditional character to reform), the Tenderloin was the most notorious district in Manhattan, packed with saloons, brothels, gambling joints, and dance halls, the whole saturnalia held together by Tammany protection and police corruption. The name itself came from a police captain named Alexander “Clubber” Williams, who is supposed to have said, when taking command of the precinct, “I’ve had nothing but chuck steak for a long time, and now I’m going to get a little of the tenderloin.”

  The legendary Clubber departed nine years later with a small fortune. The Tenderloin lived on without him. Most of the dives and “concert saloons” with their ever-available “waiter ladies” were in the shadows of the Sixth Avenue El, whose smoke-belching ugliness added to the surrounding squalor. The patrons ranged from hard-bitten Tammany pols to respectable folk engaged in slumming, foreign and domestic businessmen to true bad guys. They were catered to by professionals of the city’s pleasure business, men who had learned their tough trade on the Bowery or Fourteenth Street, and the often desperate women who worked for them. The religious reformers called it Satan’s Circus and, as usual in New York, they saved few souls within its rough borders.

  The Tenderloin was not the only place whose existence Ochs had to consider. To the west of Longacre Square was Hell’s Kitchen, stretching from Eighth Avenue to the river, Thirtieth Street to Fifty-ninth Street. The area was physically ugly, covered with slaughterhouses, railroad yards, the North River piers that handled the luxury liners, warehouses, and tenements. Many of the people were decent, most of them Irish, along with some Scots, Italians, and Africans, who worked on the piers or in the factories. But there were criminal gangs too, including the Gophers, the Parlor Mob, and the Gorillas, who methodically stole goods from the railroads and piers or operated the lowest saloons and brothels. It was a very rough part of town. A generation or two later, sentimentalists would promote the notion of the lost golden age of Times Square. They always left out the neighbors: the Tenderloin and Hell’s Kitchen.

  Ochs, of course, was not a sentimentalist. He must have sensed the potential dangers from the adjoining neighborhoods. Theoretically, they could be controlled by honest police or tamed with good schools and honest work. But Ochs must have understood something else: This would be the last major plaza on the island of Manhattan.

  Across the centuries, a commercialized Broadway had moved remorselessly north from Bowling Green to Union Square to Madison Square and most recently to Herald Square. Each square, during its moment, was walled by commercial buildings or theaters, by hotels and restaurants, by places where time was turned into money, or time was erased by laughter or tears presented on a stage. At each square there was a pause, a widening of the Main Stem. In its time, each square thickened with rallies, assemblies, ceremonies, with rowdy Saturday nights and exhausted Sunday mornings. Each square teemed with Knickerbockers and other luminaries, with the sons and daughters of Cork or Palermo or Minsk, and with jugglers too, and flute players and drummers and fiddlers, with dogs who could dance and snakes who could march, with barkers, policemen, anarchists, and defrocked preachers, with union men and union women, with those in search of cures for all human ailments, cures for hunger, cures for fever, cures for the pox, cures for the ache of loneliness; while peddlers passed over their counters and carts tons of oysters and clams and lobsters, roasted corn and fried potatoes, and finally hot dogs and hamburgers and shaved ice and ice cream. The squares were the great human forges of the city, drawing every kind of citizen to the common ground, to the place where the alloy was made. These squares were almost always triumphantly secular, welcoming no Torquemada, no Savonarola, reserving their adulation for home run hitters and infantrymen and heavyweight champions of the world.

  Ochs understood one other large thing: After Times Square, there was nowhere else to go, no space for still another public square to the north of what was rising just above Forty-second Street. The reason was simple: The 843-acre reality of Central Park began at Fifty-ninth Street, and the terms of its creation in 1853 insisted that it be kept forever safe from commercial exploitation. When the park opened to the public in 1859
, it was cherished by the citizenry and drew huge crowds, but it did not find itself within a wall of commercial businesses. Almost certainly, what was still called Longacre Square would be the last of the great squares on the island.

  Ochs decided the gamble would be worth the risks. After all, he saw signs of the future already rising around Longacre Square: those early theaters, several hotels, many restaurants. The new restaurants, Rector’s, Shanley’s, Churchill’s, were “lobster palaces” that catered to the theater crowds. Electricity was already converting Broadway in the thirties into the Great White Way. Much of the area between Forty-second Street and Central Park remained undeveloped, but Ochs was not alone in understanding what was coming. He was helped in his decision by his knowledge of the routes for the new subway and by the encouragement of his Tammany Hall friends on the board of aldermen.