42nd Street: At the Crossroads

(Page 7: After World War II)

IN 1945 WILLIAM O'DWYER was elected the next mayor of New York City. An Irish immigrant who'd arrived in America in 1910 with twenty-five dollars to his name, O'Dwyer had worked his way through Fordham Law School, become the district attorney of Brooklyn, and gained a flash of fame as the man who prosecuted the legendary mobsters of Murder Incorporated. Defeated by La Guardia in the 1941 mayoral race, O'Dwyer served overseas during the war and upon his return won the city's top office. He was easily reelected in 1949, but the next year found himself ensnared in a nasty series of City Hall scandals centered on police corruption, judges on the take, and a million dollars in illegal bookie-generated payoffs. In 1951 O'Dwyer resigned "for health reasons" and permanently relocated to Mexico City.

He was replaced by Vincent "Impy" Impellitteri, appointed interim mayor by the City Council. Impellitteri, a stylish bon vivant with a touch of the flash and glitter of James Walker, proved to be less than met the public's eye and lost the 1953 election to Manhattan Borough President Robert F. Wagner, Jr., son of one of the most respected politicians in the city.

Wagner was the city's low-profile mayor for three terms (twelve years) and helped to stabilize the city's progressive, if turbulent, economic lurch into the second half of the fifties. At the time of his inauguration a new wave of immigrants, mostly from Europe and South America, had once more radically shifted the city's general census. By then, 56 percent of New Yorkers were either immigrants or sons and daughters of foreign-born parents, and it would be on the shoulders of this new crop of willing minimum-wage day workers that New York would continue its thriving rebound.

By the end of Wagner's first year in office, 40,000 active factories and 100,000 new retail outlets contributed to a citywide gross product of more than $10 billion. After World War II, more than 40 percent of the nation's shipping passed in and out of the harbors of New York City. Postwar prosperity brought a new serenity to the city and allowed its mayor to put a low-profile functionary focus on his role as chief executive officer.

Under Wagner's watch, seventeen acres that stretched from 46th Street down to the eastern tip of 42nd Street, all of which had been donated by the Rockefeller family, developed by William Zeckendorf, and designed by Wallace Harrison (who had worked on Rockefeller Center), began full-time operation as the permanent international headquarters of the United Nations.

The site was separated from 42nd Street by a high brick cliff with inset stone steps originally intended to protect the residents (and buildings) of Tudor City from tidal waves. This stretch of land had been purchased by Zeckendorf, to develop into a futuristic combination housing and retail complex that he planned to call X-City. Unable to raise sufficient funds for the project, Zeckendorf decided to sell it instead and put a price of $8.5 million on the land.

In 1945, Trygve Lie, the first secretary-general of the United Nations, agreed to move the organization from San Francisco to either New York or Philadelphia, depending on which city could offer the best accommodations. By the end of 1946 it appeared that Philadelphia was going to get the United Nations, a situation that outraged Nelson A. Rockefeller, son of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Knowing Zeckendorf's property was for sale, Rockefeller placed a call to his father, who immediately arranged to contribute the full purchase price of the land to the United Nations. When the deal was completed, Lie announced that Manhattan was to be his organization's new home.

Its highlight was modernist master Le Corbusier's Secretariat Building, which broke ground in 1947. The cornerstone for the Plaza was laid in 1949, and construction was completed in 1954.

AT THE SAME TIME, on West 42nd, a far different kind of development was taking shape. In the years immediately following World War II, a far more explicit, rough-trade pornographic sexual subculture had surfaced west of Seventh Avenue. Much of it had sprung from two sources. The first was the American enlisted man's wartime experiences abroad. Having been exposed to a less puritanical, more aggressive sexuality in Europe and a highly ritualistic eroticism in Asia, the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who left as callow boys returned as sexually experienced men, accustomed to the easily available pleasures they found in the young girls overseas eager to give their American saviors something to savor in return.

The second was the limited options available anywhere outside of the city for its still dead-bolt-closeted gays. The two groups gradually coalesced in the early fifties in a street-savvy proliferation of straight and gay bars and male prostitution rings on West 42nd Street.

Wagner treated that situation and the entire street as the outbreak of a morally perverse epidemic and, to save the rest of the city, in effect quarantined it. His initial counterattack was to have the City Planning Commission rezone the neighborhood so he could legally shut down what would then be the illegal bars that were fronting homosexual prostitution. This move backfired when the bars were quickly replaced by storefront operations that offered a more explicit, if under-the-counter, pornography reminiscent of the "dirty magazines" (gay and straight) that soldiers had found to be so easily attainable overseas and wanted more of back home. A weary and frustrated Wagner finally wrote off West 42nd Street as a total loss, a moral leper colony for which containment within its own boundaries seemed the best solution.

It was a decision that, while the complete opposite of La Guardia's hands-on one-man war, was just as damaging to the street. By 1960 the Wagner administration's policy of isolated toleration was seen as an opportunity by the organized crime families of New York to plant their beachhead flags on West 42nd. The Gambinos, especially, would develop a hugely profitable market for the production and sale of totally explicit, industrial-strength pornography, the ultimate come-on that helped turn the street into the sleaze capital of the world. Left alone by a timid mayor, the mob expanded into all of porn's peripherals, including male and female prostitution rings, the deliverance of child runaways to middle-aged male pedophiles, and the distribution of yet one more favorite of World War II veterans: heroin (derived during the war from battlefield morphine), which induced extreme-and extremely addictive-euphoria. Pure white heroin quickly became the drug of choice among the hard-core set that congregated on 42nd Street at Eighth Avenue, where it was always cheap and plentiful.

IN THE EARLY SIXTIES, Wagner's quietly efficient administration began to break down, weakened by a series of internal scandals that smacked of old nineteenth-century Tammany-style bossism. In early 1964 construction of the mayor's and Robert Moses' world's fair in Flushing Meadows was hampered by the revelation of widespread payoffs and accusations of racial discrimination against union leaders. Months later, during one of those hot New York July days when it seems the heat escapes from a hole directly connected to hell, the city degenerated into a four-day race riot that signaled the onset of "white flight" and coalesced the city's minority leaders into a powerful political force.

In one final attempt to contain the festering race issue, Wagner sought to buy a quick-fix social cure by increasing his annual operating budget and earmarking the majority of the new money for construction that included a large number of previously unavailable jobs for minority workers. His plan received a boost when Nelson Rockefeller, who had by then become the governor of New York State, endorsed legislation allowing the mayor to personally reapportion the city's finances. The mayor spent as much as he had and more, running up a massive debt to fortify the impression that the city's minorities were doing as well as he wanted them and everyone to believe.

This round of buy now, pay later economics set the stage for the emergence of an obscure Manhattan Republican congressman, Charlton Heston-look-alike John Lindsay, whose chief asset was the essential one Wagner lacked: youthful charisma in a manner and style reminiscent of John F. Kennedy. Lindsay became the minority party's New Frontier alternative to the city's reigning and increasingly tedious Eisenhower-like mayor. He won the November 1965 election by promising to "turn things around" in a city that, despite Wagner's checkbook politics, was torn by racial strife and an increasingly unstable economy.

Unfortunately for the new mayor, his progressive spin didn't last very long.

Within days of his election, the city, along with much of the Northeast, suffered a massive blackout. New York remained in the dark for fifteen hours (except for the 1963 Kennedy assassination and periods during World War II, the only time the lights had gone out on Broadway and Times Square for that much time), and even before Lindsay's inauguration, the press seized on the notion of a city groping in the dark.

Less than two months later, Lindsay was struck by yet another major blow when he failed to prevent a subway strike by the Transport Workers Union. The strike, led by the union's colorful, longtime leader Mike Quill, lasted twelve days and cost the city $800 million in business revenues and $25 million in wage earnings. The walkout was caused by budget problems, as the subway system, after a series of horrendous accidents and decades of financial losses, was taken over by the city in the fifties and put under the control of the newly created New York City Transit Authority, with a mandate to operate without a deficit.

However, to the citizens of New York, the absurd reality of the eventual settlement was that the average pay of the subway rider was now less than that of the subway worker, whose union had won its members a substantial pay raise based on a new twenty-cent fare. After being held at a nickel from 1904 until 1948, in eighteen years it had now quadrupled.* The blame was put at the new mayor's door, the buck-stop for the city's failure to withstand the force of Quill's bullying. And Lindsay felt the weight on his broad, if sagging, shoulders, a bold example, as one observer put it, of how to run a city so that "the rich get richer and the poor get dumber." By 1969 the city's operating budget had tripled to an unprecedented $7 billion.

That same year, the city's spirit temporarily up-ticked when, in January, Joe Namath's Jets pulled off a major upset in the Super Bowl. Unfortunately for Lindsay, the city then made that magic leap from the miraculously sublime to the blindingly ridiculous when a snowstorm a month later paralyzed the outer boroughs. Although the streets of Manhattan were immediately plowed, the blanket of ice and snow was left untouched in the outer boroughs in some neighborhoods for as long as a week. The fallout was the lasting impression that the Mayor only cared about Manhattan-one city tabloid said it took Lindsay so long to do something about the storm because he couldn't find Queens, another New York daily wrote that the mayor had "more trouble with Queens than Henry VIII"-and had sold out the real estate interests of the outer-borough residents by granting sizable cooperative residential tax breaks for Manhattan's elite while shoving public housing down the throats of the other boroughs' middle classes.

New Yorkers, citizens of the so-called Fun City, a term first used by sportswriter Dick Schaap, which became the calling card of the Lindsay administration, had their spirits lifted once more when another "miracle" took place that fall: The quixotic Queens-based Mets, New York's "other" baseball team and longest-running joke, somehow defeated the windmill and beat the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series.

However, for all the glory of New York's 1969 Cinderella sports victories, the euphoria in so-called "Fun City" as the Lindsay Administration optimistically dubbed it, lasted less than a year. The glass slipper once more shattered in the spring of 1970 when Detective Frank Serpico accused his fellow police officers of looking the other way when it came to the public's safety on 42nd Street and elsewhere and was among the first to suggest that there was a mob connection between pornography and drugs, the former being the lure for the latter, and that the police knew it and looked the other way while taking a piece of the action for themselves. Serpico's revelations pushed the mayor to create an independent investigative committee. The controversial findings of the Knapp Commission resulted in Lindsay's being labeled soft on crime, and plunged the city's residents still further into an urban landscape of fear and despair.

Nevertheless, for all his problems governing, Lindsay loved the glamour and sizzle of Broadway as no mayor had since the heyday of Jimmy Walker. Unlike so many before him, he never gave up on Times Square. He hoped to save the theater district by tweaking the city's Planning Commission's longstanding zoning restrictions on new construction in Midtown West. Unfortunately, his vision of a revitalized Great White Way was decades ahead of its time, and his courtship of out-of-town developers caused many to wonder if he was selling out New York to a bunch of fat-cat rubes and ultimately cost him more votes than it won. Still, Lindsay might have been able to pull this audacious plan off had it not been for the early seventies national recession that devalued real estate, plunged the city ever closer to bankruptcy, and killed any chance he might have had to star in the real-life saga of his own political salvation.

BY THE END OF LINDSAY'S administration, New York had had enough of so-called Republican-Liberalism and elected a mayor whose style of Democratic politics was firmly rooted in the legacy, if not the halls, of Tammany.

Former comptroller Abraham Beame took office in January 1974 and inherited a city that seemed once again on the brink of disaster. As if to underscore the dire situation, one month before the new mayor took office a major span of the West Side Highway, one of New York's two major surface arteries, this one connecting Manhattan to the Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, the George Washington Bridge, upstate New York, and Connecticut, collapsed in a dusty, lifeless heap.

Unlike his suave, Wasp predecessor, Beame, a first-generation Jewish American whose parents had emigrated from Poland to New York City at the end of the nineteenth century, was a short, stocky man with a shock of neatly trimmed white hair, the face of a bulldog, and the heart of one too. His political consciousness came from a youth spent in the 1930s socialist whirl of New York's Lower East Side. After flirting with that decade's lurch toward radicalism, Beame shifted his political aim toward the center and began working for the Brooklyn Democratic machine. By the early sixties he was the city's comptroller, a springboard from which, in 1965, he ran unsuccessfully for mayor, losing to Lindsay in the general election.

Eight years and two Lindsay administrations later, Beame cannily took his cue from the pages of the La Guardia handbook, and when his administration ran into fiscal problems, he determined to salvage it by rescuing 42nd Street from the sinkhole of filth, prostitution, and drugs into which it had fallen. However, despite his efforts, West 42nd Street continued to flourish in filth, with no fewer than twenty-five XXX movie theaters, a dozen topless dance stables, unchecked street prostitution and corner drug dealing, and a seemingly endless supply of anything-goes, readily available hard-core storefront porn shops openly operating twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year.

In 1977 Beame failed to win his bid for a second term. Instead, the voters turned to the city's newest political hero, the dark horse defender of Forest Hills and one of the frontline warriors in the successful mid-seventies battle to save 42nd Street's Grand Central Terminal from demolition. As it had with so many of his predecessors, midtown's moral redemption became the foundation plank of Koch's successful campaign for mayor. Like Elmer Gantry in pinstripes, Koch vowed to cure all the city's economic and social ills, via the salvation of 42nd Street.

And as the city was about to discover, in the great tradition of politics, New York style, Ed Koch could politically holy-roll with the best of them.

Copyright © 2001 by Rebel Road, Inc. All rights reserved. Posted with permission of http://www.twbookmark.com.