42nd Street: At the Crossroads

(Page 2: The Subway)

IN 1898, for those living in the five boroughs, no single act more clearly defined the end of one century and the start of the next than the Charter of Incorporation and Consolidation that united them as the Greater New York, more commonly known as New York City, one of the largest, richest, and most powerful ports in the world.

Elevated New York train in the late 19th century. Robert Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views, Photography Collection, Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints & Photographs, The New York Public Library.

Despite the glorious economic promise of incorporation, the move was not particularly welcomed by the clique of wealthy farmers and successful industrialists. These were the privileged Manhattanites, the island's social elite who went into a collective morning-after malaise from the decades-old soirée they had thrown for and among themselves since the end of the Civil War. The rest of the world would remember the final years before incorporation as the Gay Nineties. To Manhattanites grown wealthy from various real estate and shipping enterprises, it was a bittersweet ending to a long, private, and prosperous affair.

The ending had not come peacefully. Organized, hostile anticonsolidation protests had turned into riots on both sides, beginning a decade before Tammany Hall finally restored peace and united the boroughs. Conceived as a private club in the years immediately following the American Revolution by the officers of George Washington's army to look after the widows of fallen patriots, by the dawn of the nineteenth century the original Lodge of Tammany, so named in honor of a friendly Delaware Indian chief who'd sacrificed his life for the new nation, was commonly referred to as Tammany Hall. By 1850 the Hall's goals had shifted from paternal benevolence to political power. Tammany became the political link between the growing elitist power base of the industrialists and a powerful electoral body of mostly Irish immigrant workers. It also became the city's collective voice of liberalism, the first organized voice of the working class, an increasingly influential power base for those disenfranchised New Yorkers without land, money, or political representation.

Into the second half of the nineteenth century, Tammany Hall was led by William Magear "Boss" Tweed. Tweed, a former chairman of the Democratic Central Committee of New York County, was the undisputed leader of the so-called Tweed Ring, which controlled all aspects of New York City's financial lifelines. More powerful than any of the eighteen Democratic mayors he helped elect, Tweed prided himself on "getting things done" by keeping an iron grip on virtually every aspect of the municipality and amply rewarding himself for it. Eventually convicted on a number of charges having to do with the theft of city funds, bribery, and other extracurricular activities, Tweed was sent to jail in 1873, and except for a brief escape to Spain, where he was captured and deported back to New York City, he never regained either freedom or power. Five years later, in 1878, he died penniless in prison.

However, the machine he left behind remained the most influential Democratic organization in the city. Although Tweed was Protestant, he had led a mostly Irish Catholic working-class constituency, which emerged for the first time during the 1880s as a dominant force in New York politics. This demographic tilt complicated the increasingly tense relations between the city's Old World Catholics and staid New World Puritans.

In 1887 Tammany produced a peace and unity candidate, Abram S. Hewitt, who won the mayoral election, thus preserving the Democratic Party's ironclad grip on the city, unbroken since before the Civil War. It was, however, a decision the party would quickly come to regret. Once in power, the wealthy Hewitt revealed himself to be more divisive than anyone suspected when he became an outspoken supporter of the city's old-line Protestant aristocracy. He detested the ever-increasing influx of Irish immigrants, and in open defiance of the Catholic contingent of his party and Tammany Hall, two months after his inauguration in a move that would eventually destroy his political career, he banned the flying of the Irish flag over City Hall on St. Patrick's Day. This so outraged the Hall that they pulled all further machine support from the new mayor. Unbowed, Hewitt supported the continuation of low wages for workers and high profits for landlords and manufacturers, and imposed heavy restrictions on those he referred to as "ethnics"—i.e., the Irish—who wanted to go into business, receive an education, or acquire property.

He also began a police crackdown against what he considered their sinful pleasures: the numerous saloons, dance halls, brothels, movie nickelodeons, gambling dens, sport halls, street-corner dice, or "craps," and two-dollar whorehouses located in the city's so-called Tenderloin district, which ran from 23rd to 39th Streets and from Fifth to Ninth Avenues, what was then the northwestern fringe of developed Manhattan.

To the mind and spirit of the city's capitalist Puritans who enthusiastically supported Hewitt, the working class's collective love for all things loose and leisurely was not only wasteful, tasteless, and ungodly, but, they quickly learned, unstoppable. To get rid of the daily flow of immigrants into the city, Hewitt devised a plan to ship them off every evening en masse to the raw Siberia of the outer boroughs, where he insisted they belonged and hoped they would stay.

By 1890 Manhattan already had the largest and most comprehensive mass-transit system in the world. In use for many years at the time of Hewitt's election were 94 miles of elevated railways that extended from one end of the island to the other, along with 265 miles of horse-drawn railways and 137 miles of surface omnibuses, also horse-drawn, that congested the city's main thoroughfares and left a fetid aroma in the air from the endless piles of fresh, hot dung. The main problem with Manhattan's "elevateds" was inefficiency and lack of range. Besides being unconnected to eath other, slow, outmoded, under-routed, and overcrowded, the deafening overhead rail systems that lumbered along fifty feet above the street thrust the streets below them—Second, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Avenues—into the grinding screech and dreary gray of endlessly sunless days. It was estimated at one point that citizens living beneath or adjacent to the "elevateds" put up with as much as nineteen hours of rumbling and roaring every day, seven days a week.

Still, by 1890 the rails had played a key role in helping to bring Manhattan's population farther northward, which in turn helped speculators develop raw land into livable real estate, so much so that by the end of that year, the average Manhattanite was clocking almost three hundred mass-transit trips a year. However, the lack of direct service to the outer boroughs, the relatively slow speed, and the horrid noise and chronic overcrowding left much to be desired.

What the city needed, Hewitt insisted, was an interborough underground, or subway, an interconnected rail system modeled after those in Europe, which could move great numbers of workers in and out of the city on a daily basis. In fact, just such a system might have been in place in New York much earlier, before London, Paris, Glasgow, Budapest, Boston, and even Berlin, all of which had operating underground systems by 1861, if not for three major forces of opposition. The first was John Jacob Astor II, the son of New York's great real estate baron, who feared that widespread underground excavation would physically jeopardize or financially devalue his extensive Manhattan surface land holdings, as well as create the chance for workers to move to less expensive competitive housing. The second was shipping magnate, railroad builder, and legendary robber baron Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt, owner and operator of the New York Central Railroad. Vanderbilt believed a mass transit system would cut into the profits of his own surface passenger and freight city rail lines, the last stops on his statewide transport line that connected the city's seaports to upstate and then, via the Erie Canal, to the rest of the country. The third, ironically, hit much closer to home. Hewitt's former mentor, Boss Tweed, while still alive and in power, had received considerable kickbacks from the predominant horse and carriage trade that operated out of the Great Kill barnyard on 42nd Street and Broadway, situated just above an east-west cattle and sheep path that ran from river to river. The barnyard sat on the northern end of Long Acre Square, an island twenty feet wide at one end and sixty feet wide at the other, the southern half of the so-called bow-tie islands created by the traffic-defined intersections of Broadway and Seventh Avenue.

Across from the Square was the Vanderbilt-owned American Horse Exchange of the Long Acre Farm, where people from all over the city traveled to buy everything from horses and buggys to fresh milk. Tweed had always opposed anything that might cut into this rich source of tribute, regardless of whatever benefit it might provide to the city. Although his demise removed one long-standing obstacle to Hewitt's plan, by the time he became mayor, his abandonment of Tammany left him with no political machine to help convince anyone at City Hall to invest in a new, public, interborough underground rail system.

The idea looked dead until the notorious Blizzard of '88 paralyzed the city and finally made clear the need for a new and better way than foot, horse, "el," or surface vehicle to transport the people of New York City. To Hewitt, the snowstorm was nothing less than a vote of confidence from God for underground rapid transit.

Unfortunately the Lord wasn't a reform Democrat. By the end of 1888, Hewitt, even using the blizzard as his exhibit A, not only failed to convince the city of the need to build a subway system, he lost his bid for reelection. His defeat permanently removed him from elective political power, although he did remain something of an effective backroom dealer, and he waged a three-year battle to push through the Rapid Transit Act of 1891, which, when passed, officially mapped out the routes for what was intended to be New York City's first subway system. Due in part to Hewitt's divisive politics, the plan crawled through the bureaucracy, and in 1901, with primary routes stalled in the planning stages, two new privately funded proposals for an underground subway system came before the City Council. One had its cars running off gigantic fans that would "blow" them in one direction and "suck" them back in the other. The other and far more practical design, which utilized electric power, was presented by August Belmont, a private developer motivated by the industrial profit to be made from social progress, and his was the one the city went with.

August Belmont was the son of German Jewish immigrant August Schönberg, who had journeyed to the New World to find his fortune. Born in 1816 in the Rhineland-Palatinate, Schönberg at the age of thirteen got a job sweeping floors for the Rothschilds, the leading Jewish banking family in Europe at the time. In 1837 he was sent by them to represent their sugar holdings in Cuba. En route, his ship docked in New York City and Schönberg decided to do some sight-seeing. So charmed was he by Manhattan, he never returned to the ship.

Eager to make a name in finance, he rejected any opportunity to join the so-called segregated, or parallel, aristocracy of the prominent Jewish families of New York, which included the Seligmans, the Kuhns, the Loebs, and the Guggenheims, all of whom had banded together to protect their interests from the midcentury spiraling of virulent anti-Semitism that had spread through the then still Protestant-dominated city. Schönberg did not want to be associated with the Jewish fringe, no matter how well made the cloth. He believed the opportunities for success remained too narrow. A young, aggressive man with heady dreams, he reinvented his name, his heritage, and his past as a way to gain entry into what he perceived as a highly restricted island of opportunity and wealth. In 1849, shortly before his thirty-third birthday, Schöberg changed his last name to Belmont and his religion to Episcopalian, wooed and married the daughter of the great and celebrated Commodore Matthew Perry (who in 1854 would go on to "open" Japan to the West), and entered a new phase of his career.

The marriage produced a son, also named August Belmont, who grew up in a world of enormous American privilege. He attended both Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard, after which he entered the family's banking empire. He quickly developed close personal and business relationships with many of the most prominent names in New York City, including J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and William C. Whitney. Belmont, an avid athlete all his life, by 1902 was chairman of the Jockey Club and had built what was considered at the time the most luxurious horse racing facility in the country, New York's Belmont Park racetrack.

For all his wealth and success, the younger Belmont remained an extremely unpopular figure in New York's social life. Short, fat, arrogant, and mean-spirited, he felt haunted by the Jewish ancestry he shunned and was forever sensitive to the point of paranoia about anyone who treated him with less than the respect he believed a successful Protestant of his standing deserved. In his late forties he began to consider what, besides a racetrack, his lasting legacy to the city might be and began to search for a project that would embellish his reputation with a fitting benevolence. He found it in Hewitt's dream of a citywide underground mass transit.

42nd Street, showing entrance to Grand Central Station, circa 1903. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

In 1904 Belmont broke ground on the first leg of the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT). He planned a dig through twenty-three square miles of Manhattan's subterranean geology, which proved far more difficult than he imagined due to the uneven rock formations just below the borough's surface. To help solve the problem, Belmont chose William Barclay Parsons, a young man of like privilege with political connections to Abram Hewitt. Parsons developed a plan of shallow excavation he called "cut and cover" that allowed progressive sections the length of a city block to be completed and filled in, the surface of one section repaved before ground was broken on the next.

After two years of continuous digging that saw the city's streets uprooted in wormlike eruptions and that caused dozens of worker deaths, the IRT finally opened to the public with great fanfare. Thousands turned out on October 27, 1904, for its inaugural run. The new mayor, George B. McClellan, Jr., grandly took the controls of an eight-car train for the inaugural nine-mile, twenty-six-minute trip below Manhattan. This ride brought out huge crowds, who stood at the street-level subway stops and cheered when they heard the rumble of the train. Thousands gathered at the only place to see it aboveground, at the viaduct over Manhattan Valley, from 100th to 110th Streets. That same day, more than 100,000 people bought tickets to ride the subway. Two days later the number reached 350,000, and a New York institution had arrived.

Its instant success provided Belmont his legacy and turned the mayor into a New York City folk hero.

McClellan, a liberal with a clean record, the son of a Civil War general and a veteran of Tammany Hall politics, had run on a platform of anti-Tammany reform. His overwhelming popularity was primarily due to his support for the right of all adult working citizens to drink freely (his puritanical opponent had sought more prohibitive nighttime and weekend restrictions on the consumption of alcohol).

Among McClellan's many achievements during his six-year term were reorganization of the city's traffic grids to adjust for the arrival of automobiles and the removal of horsecars, a general clean-sweeping of the police, health, and street-cleaning departments, expansion of the park and playground systems, completion of the Queensboro and Manhattan Bridges, expansion of the Croton reservoir system into the Catskill Mountains, significant harbor improvements, and supervision of the enormous influx of millions of European immigrants (by far the greatest numbers being Russian Jews), which by the end of his tenure had seen the city's population rise to an unprecedented 41 percent foreign-born. The mayor's achievements in controlling the outbreak of violence caused by the resentment of native New Yorkers for the immigrants, in particular the still surging anti-Semitism, led the social reformer Jacob Riis to call McClellan "the best organization mayor" New York ever had. Indeed, McClellan ruled the city during one of its most challenging and exciting times and guided it headlong into the twentieth century.

Everything he accomplished, however, took a backseat among the citizens of the city to his being the mayor who "gave" them a subway.

The IRT quickly redefined not just the physical movement but the social direction of its riders, integrating the ethnic working class and thus helping to spiritually liberate it. By providing literal and symbolic deliverance from the isolation and limitation of the city's various ethnic ghettos, the subway became the public's essential link to education, recreation, housing, and commercial opportunity.

It also created the city's first twentieth-century social and cultural center. The opening of the IRT stop at 42nd Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue coincided with the New York Times's breaking ground on construction of its highly anticipated skyscraper headquarters. The two events combined to reconfigure Manhattan's midtown boulevard into a crossroads of recreation and commerce the likes of which had never before been seen in America. High-ticket entertainment, fabulous restaurants, luxury hotels such as the Knickerbocker on Broadway and 42nd Street, which both opera great Enrico Caruso and the reigning theatrical "superstar" of his day, James O'Neill, called their New York City home, modern underground transportation, and the newest northern border of the notorious Tenderloin with its well-equipped houses of prostitution—all shared space on the streets that immediately surrounded the Times's new headquarters.

The planned convergence of the great newspaper with the grand subway seemed far too much a coincidence to competing news publisher William Randolph Hearst, who was resolutely against either and who had the money and power to try to stop both. For all of Belmont's newfound status, the success of his subway and his "hidden" past created convenient targets for Hearst's tainted "yellow" journalism practices. When in his recently acquired New York Journal the publisher headlined stories of a "Jewish conspiracy" between the subway builder and Times publisher Adolph Ochs, the accusation touched Belmont in the most haunted recesses of his lifelong insecurities.

Hearst had discovered that the surest way to boost circulation in his newspapers was by headlining sex, crime, and scandal. His main competition for circulation in New York City at the time was Joseph Pulitzer's ravamped New York World, a once-prestigious newspaper that, in an attempt to increase circulation in the city's increasingly crowded field of thirty-five daily newspapers, was turned by its owner into the same type of scurrilous gossip—and scandalmongering rag as the Journal.

Hearst's notions of a conspiracy were based on what he considered the underhanded dealings of two prominent Manhattan Jews. The first was Belmont, whose Jewish background and Schöberg family name Hearst "revealed" in his paper. The second was Ochs, the publisher of the New York Times, who happened to be Hearst's newest and potentially most formidable competitor. The son of a Talmudic scholar and successful diamond dealer, Ochs had gone into publishing and first established offices for his newly purchased journal on the ground floor of Printing House Square, the center of what was then the city's unofficial newspaper publishing district, Park Row, opposite City Hall. Although occupying quarters that bumped up against Hearst's, the New York Times stood apart from the Journal and all the other newspapers of the day precisely because of its marked lack of sensationalism. So much so that by the time Ochs decided to buy the financially failing paper, it was considered the dullard of the daily pack (a situation not helped by its inability to print clear photographs).

In July 1902 Ochs, realizing his newspaper had physically outgrown its downtown address, began to search for a new location. His first choice was a site a few doors up the street, but when the offered rents were suddenly and, to him, suspiciously jacked up, he made a bold and, to some, incomprehensibly risky decision to move uptown to Long Acre Square, what was then the northern end of the city's business district.

While to many it might have seemed an odd place to want to relocate, to Ochs and Belmont it looked like a bargain. With every neighborhood in Manhattan changing so rapidly—the brothels and the businessmen having already squeezed the first-generation middle-class residents out of the streets to the west of Long Acre Square—the entire city had become a paradise for real estate speculators. Throughout the lower part of the island, the undeveloped hills and valleys along the riverbanks that had been temporary dwellings for the homeless were quickly converted to high-end brownstones, and just as quickly collapsed back into slum dwellings, as working New Yorkers moved in league-boot jumps to find suitable housing close enough to where they could commute by trolley, elevated train, or rapid transit, yet far enough away, usually in the outer boroughs, to feel as if they lived in what was then considered the distanced safety of the sleepy suburbs.

In 1904, the year midtown subway service began and Ochs moved the Times to its new location, Long Acre had in just the last decade already economically yo-yoed twice, with prices for property in the area now low enough for Ochs to be able to buy. The initial cost was no problem. It was the building of his tower that almost ruined him.

The construction budget was $250,000, which was considered at the time enough to build a twenty-five-story, 363-foot-tall structure. Ochs intended his to be the tallest building in the city, an ornate reach-for-the-sky tower, with the first three floors made of Indiana limestone surmounted by sixteen stories of white brick, elaborate ornamental Gothic-styled balconies and cornices cast from terra-cotta, topped off by a six-story tower.

The actual cost at completion of his new headquarters ballooned to an astonishing $1.7 million in turn-of-the-century dollars. Ochs had hoped that his primary outside tenant, the Equitable Life Assurance Society—which had already loaned him $150,000 to use as seed money against a security interest of 51 percent of the newspaper's stock—would make up the difference. Equitable, however, turned him down at the last minute over a dispute involving access to exterior advertising signage (it wanted more than Ochs was willing to give), approval rights regarding other tenants, and, for safety reasons, elimination of the six-story tower (due to foundation problems). The tower proved the breaking point for Equitable when Ochs refused to eliminate it from his building plan. Uncertainty remains as to where his completion money finally came from, although there is some evidence to suggest that mining magnate Daniel Guggenheim may have loaned Ochs an additional quarter of a million dollars (the original estimate of the entire cost of construction) he now so desperately needed.

With his new financing at last in place, Ochs scheduled the ceremonial cornerstone inset for 3 p.m. on January 18, 1904. It was a quiet event on an unusually cold day, and limited to a one-sentence speech by Ochs's daughter, curly-haired eleven-year-old Iphigene Bertha Ochs, who spoke softly into a megaphone, to "declare this stone to be laid plumb, level and square." The crowd then quickly dispersed.

Despite Adolph Ochs's best efforts, at its completion his magnificent building, which was visible on a clear day from as far as twelve miles away—all the way up in the Bronx, and in Queens, Brooklyn, and New Jersey as well—was considered by many to be only the second tallest in the city. He had wanted his tower to surpass his competitor's Pulitzer office building on Park Row, home to the New York World (which, at its completion in 1892, had replaced Wall Street's 284-foot Trinity Church spire, erected in 1846, as New York's tallest structure). Ochs nevertheless insisted for years that, when measured from its lowest subbasement to the tip of the tower, his building was, in fact, taller than Pulitzer's.

What had finally prevented Ochs from soaring well past the World and straight into the heavens, was not being able to dig deep enough to support the heights to which he aspired. As it turned out, much of the subterranean rights directly under and surrounding his new tower belonged to August Belmont, whose new IRT subway ran too close to the building's center of gravity to safely allow any further excavation. The deepest the Times could go was fifty-five feet, which, in addition to limiting the height of the tower, made for an incredibly crowded and ultimately inadequate operating space for the paper's presses.

Why, then, Hearst inquired in print, would Ochs acquire such an impractical site? The answer also came from Hearst, whose two New York Park Row organs, the morning American and evening Journal, published the same front-page story two days before the Times cornerstone was laid, "revealing new evidence of the Jewish conspiracy" afoot to make 42nd Street the "Jewish" cultural center of the city.

Hearst's "scoop," published during the height of a particularly hot anti-Semitic backlash resulting from the immigration explosion, gained new life when, on April 8, 1904, just three months after the cornerstone ceremony, the New York City Board of Aldermen renamed Long Acre "Times Square," a moniker that just so happened to have been suggested to them by none other than August Belmont. The move infuriated not only Hearst and Pulitzer, but also James Gordon Bennett, Jr., another powerful city publisher whose highly respected New York Herald, located eight blocks to the south of the new Times Tower, continued to refer to the square in his papers as Long Acre (Herald Square, another Broadway criss-cross, had been so named with much fanfare just a few years earlier to honor the relocation of Bennett's newspaper to the triangular plot of land on 34th Street across from Macy's department store).

The day of the renaming, Hearst signed yet another angry editorial that appeared in both the American and the Journal aimed at the so-called Jewish conspiracy. Headlined "Mr. August Belmont and His Tame Ochs," the piece suggested that Ochs was financially indebted to and therefore controlled by Belmont and so viciously attacked the physical features of both with such blatant language it brought an immediate libel suit from Ochs. Hearst's description of the publisher of the New York Times included such terminology as "uneducated...oily...[with] obsequiously curved shoulders," imagery that became the paradigm for the new century's anti-Semite caricature of the American Jew.

Buried somewhere beneath the avalanche of Hearst's racist attacks lay the untold truth behind what was, in fact, the less-than-coincidental relationship between Ochs and Belmont. Not known at the time to Hearst, whose hatemongering had lockstepped his own journalists' investigative abilities into a campaign of racist propaganda, Belmont was in fact a major stockholder in the New York Times and had disguised his holdings by what appeared to be but in fact was not a blind trust managed by one E. Mora Davison, a politically influential business associate. Belmont was also on Equitable's board of directors, and although Equitable did not become a tenant and refused to put any more money toward construction of the top of the Times Tower, it still held a controlling interest of stock in the Times against its initial $150,000 investment. Later on, Equitable was rumored but never proved to be the grantor of an additional million-dollar mortgage to Ochs, against even more stock, and also (and also never proved) the source of an early $75,000 loan young Adolph had used to originally purchase the Times in 1896, just one day before the paper was to land in bankruptcy.

Belmont's Subway Realty Corporation, the company he had created to build the IRT, also happened to have brokered the sale to Ochs of the raw land upon which he built his tower. As soon as the deal had been finalized and even before the cornerstone had been laid or plans for the new 42nd Street subway stop made public, Belmont and Davison quietly began lobbying the Board of Aldermen to rename Long Acre "Times Square."

If any reason were needed as to why Ochs and Belmont wanted to keep these dealings private, if not secret, Hearst's ongoing and brutal anti-Semitic attacks on every motive, interest, dealing, and the integrity of both men provided excellent ones. Hearst's loud and angry insistence of the extent of the veiled relationship between Ochs and Belmont (although apparently he did not know all the details) and his running accusations of a Jewish conspiracy sufficiently intimidated Ochs, who downplayed the occasion of the renamed square in his own New York Times. Rather than splashing it on the front page, which in those days carried dozens of stories, he placed it several pages inside the newspaper.

Nor did Ochs ever fully acknowledge the facts of the many and complex connections he had with Belmont and Equitable directly linked to the new subway station being built at his corporate front door, which, while it hindered the operations of the Times's presses, in a relatively short period increased the real estate value of both the station and the Times's headquarters nearly tenfold.

When the new station opened, it soon transformed the cultural map of 42nd Street and the neighborhoods that surrounded it. Shortly after the IRT began making its regular Times Square stop, middle to high-end residential housing became available from 44th and Broadway up to 47th Street and all the way to the Hudson River, a plot of land on which the Astors quickly built two hundred additional town houses and several hotels, including the family's newest crown jewel, the Astor Hotel, on the west side of Broadway at 44th Street. Because of it, 43rd Street, the single block between the new commercial center of Times Square and the neighborhood's burgeoning upscale residents to the north, became an unintentional buffer zone that filled with the increasingly crowded Tenderloin's pretty young prostitutes.

As for West 42nd Street itself, the subway station effected a tidal change. Hewitt's original mass transit plan to keep the working-class people out of Manhattan, had delivered precisely the opposite. Midtown was now accessible twenty-four hours a day to anyone in the city who could spare a nickel to ride the subway. Ironically it was this surge of endlessly coming-and-going visitors that helped transform the all-but-deserted-after-dark stretch of sex and crime into a round-the-clock commercial boulevard of naughty gentility where every type of family entertainment conducted business alongside the hottest and most infamous brothels this side of Paris.

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