Free The Battle for Gotham by Roberta Brandes Gratz Page B

Stadium was in construction.
    Suburban malls had not yet made an impact. All the department stores were in their rightful places along Fifth Avenue—Bonwit-Teller, Bergdorf-Goodman, Saks, Lord & Taylor, Best & Co. Fifth Avenue was “the Avenue,” and Thirty-fourth Street was still the preeminent “pedestrian” shopping street. B. Altman’s was at the Fifth Avenue end of Thirty-fourth, Macy’s and Gimbels at the Sixth Avenue end. Ohrbach’s was in between, along with dozens of small shops, both chains and locals. Soon, malls would vacuum the heart out of many American Main Streets. But while malls killed much of downtown America, they only partially injured New York City. The density of this city guaranteed a less dramatic impact than the shell shocks that crippled so many other cities.
    On Forty-second Street, stores sold foreign newspapers, hats, costumes, and a great variety of entertainment-related goods. The sparkling marquees of great first-run movie houses were lined up one after another along that still quintessential street. A mix of low-end entertainment outlets, holdovers from the 1920s, gave the street its seedy feel. A few grind houses could be visited. Hubert’s Museum, a Coney Island-style sideshow, had a flea circus, snake charmer, belly dancer, and wild man of Borneo. The pornography was soft core with hard core soon to come in the late 1960s. As newspaper exposés revealed, disreputable property owners welcomed the degenerate uses as tenants to strengthen their push for a publicly funded city renewal scheme and generous bailouts that would handsomely enrich them. Contrived or accelerated deterioration has long been a property owner’s excuse for seeking financial concessions from the city. This pattern was common elsewhere in the city but most glaringly at the time on Forty-second Street.
    Beneath its glittering gaudiness, the Times Square district overflowed with great original musicals ( Fiddler on the Roof , Funny Girl , Cabaret , Hello, Dolly ) and dramas ( Golden Boy , Tiny Alice , The Subject Was Roses ). The regal Astor Hotel had not yet been replaced by a die-stamped, glass-walled office tower. The Astor replacement was the first of many similarly banal ones that followed.
    Until the bulldozer of urban renewal and misguided city-planning policies took their toll, the city’s neighborhoods often had their own thriving entertainment centers with at least one movie house, local restaurants, and neighborhood retail to keep many residents happy. Times Square, Broadway theater, and Manhattan nightspots were for the Big Nights on the town and first-run films. By the 1970s, little of that was left, and the days were numbered for what remained. Times Square was New York’s epicenter, and even that was in decline, and not an entirely natural decline at that.
    The Upper West Side was like the set for the long-running musical West Side Story (opened in 1957), and years away from becoming chic. 4 Run-down brownstones, their high quality intact, lined the side streets. Neglected but elegant apartment towers dominated Central Park West. I loved my first one-bedroom apartment in that small building overlooking Central Park, but walking the side streets was something one did quite cautiously. Nighttime crime in the park was a constant.
    The Upper East Side was then the enclave of the rich and the famous. And Brooklyn was another world. Visits to Coney Island and relatives were about the limit of my Brooklyn experience until then. When we lived in the Village, my grandfather occasionally came from Brooklyn for Sunday breakfast, bringing pickled herring, white fish, lox, and bagels from Brooklyn’s Avenue J. When I returned to New York as an adult, he would meet me at the Horn & Hardart on Forty-second Street for a Sunday meal. He was intimidated by Manhattan and knew only the one subway stop at Forty-second Street from Brooklyn. The Bronx was out of my consciousness—except for the zoo and Botanical