Bring Back the Whores

Many moons ago I worked in Times Square and it was great. A luscious sleazepit bordered to the east by uber-corporate towers and to the west by Hell's Kitchen, which was where the real people lived. Porno theatres were in there next to "Lawrence of Arabia," and there were also steady kung fu and Japanese monster movie shows.

Nowadays Times Square is another minimall. As The G says, "America's Gift Shop." The scale is still different, there's some partying going on over $10 drinks in the new hotel bars, but overall it's been paved over. Now we have Starbucks, next to the Disney Store, next to KFC. Could be almost anywhere. It's been going on for 30 years and the Associated Press is finally taking notice.

If you're anything like me you wake up in the middle of the night screaming, "bring back the whores!" Do you think Times Square is better now than it was back then? Well, it isn't. It was better in the old days. Now they order up the whores from room service. It sucks. And if you like it better now, you suck too.

It would be great if the people who bought those overpriced condos in Hell's Kitchen as an "investment," because they thought "the neighborhood was getting better," woke up one day and saw that the neighborhood had reverted back to 1970. Swarming with whores and drugs. And great hair.

Why doesn't anything good happen anymore!?!

CBGB, the birthplace of punk rock, is gone. No longer can visitors to Coney Island plunk down a few coins to play the unsettling attraction called "Shoot the Freak." And seedy, edgy, anything-might-happen Times Square? These days, it's all but childproof.

It continues: That diner on the corner for decades — closed. The beer garden down the street — now a Starbucks. The block once home to clusters of independent businesses — thriving as a big-box store.

And last month, another piece of the old New York slipped away with the demise of the city's Off-Track Betting parlors. It's enough to make old-school New Yorkers bristle.

Around countless corners, the weird, unexpected, edgy, grimy New York — the town that so many looked to for so long as a relief from cookie-cutter America — has evolved into something else entirely: tamed, prepackaged, even predictable.

"What draws people to New York is its uniqueness. So when something goes, people feel sad about it," says Suzanne Wasserman, director of the Gotham Center for New York City History at the City University of New York.

"I think that's also part of the New York character," she says, "that 'Things were better when ...'"

[Associated Press]