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A Local’s View of Times Square
December 31, 1983. Forty years ago, I was working at the Liberty Theater on 42nd Street. Projectionists had a strong union, so working overtime after midnight was “golden time”—double pay—right through the end of the shift at 4 am. But I wouldn’t have to work till 4 to collect a full shift’s pay; all of the Times Square theaters closed “early”, at 1 am, this one night of the year.
So at 12:57 am, as I lowered the curtain and pulled the big knife switches, I knew the walk to the subway would be interesting. By the time I locked the projection booth and climbed down the iron ladder, the second and first balconies were already empty and the lobby was almost cleared out. I stepped out the theater door into…a strangely empty scene, brilliantly lit for television. Police barricades were keeping the still-rowdy, post-midnight crowd at the ends of the block. I walked towards the glitter and noise, like a soldier in Barry Lyndon marching into a fusillade.
The Liberty opened in 1904 as a “legit house”, a theater that hosted plays. By 1983, it had long descended to the ranks of a non-stop “grind house”, recently recalled by Quentin Tarantino’s film of the same name. Like its sister theaters on “Forty Deuce”, the grand old dowagers still packed ‘em in on New Year’s Eve, when television coverage gave The Street worldwide exposure. A half century before there were multiplexes, there were a dozen single-screen theaters in one block, totaling 14,000 seats, sitting atop the junction of five major subway lines.
For decades, my uncle Tommy worked a block north of there, where he was a machinist maintaining the presses of The New York Times. “Sure, it’s a liberal paper”, he’d say at family gatherings sixty years ago, “But it’s all in there.” Times Square was quite literal; not only the newsrooms, but the delivery trucks were right there. The newsstands in the Square got the papers ahead of everyone else, so big shots used to send their assistants there at eleven pm to collect tomorrow’s edition. On Saturday night, if it wasn’t raining, they’d all have their pre-delivered sections of the Times folded and ready for the delivery of the final section of the voluminous Sunday paper.
There’s a general impression that Times Square was ruined by a Sixties flood of pornography, but that’s not exactly so; fewer Times Square theaters than you’d think showed porno. Most ran regular movies, with an emphasis on guns and girls. By the time there was actual pornography there, it was already widespread elsewhere. But there’s always been a sleazy side, and the style of the Square has always been dictated by young men: By the Thirties, that meant pinball parlors, tattoo parlors, arcade games, dubious magazine stands, bars, barber shops, and Dime-a-Dance floors.
That was the dominant Times Square audience, servicemen between train connections, people arriving at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, thrill seekers, and clumps of teenagers seeking action pictures at the cheapest price in the few remaining triple bills. Sugar Hill, Cleopatra Jones, and Coffey for $1.50; hard to beat that deal. As the Seventies progressed, an almost all-male, heavily armed, reefer-smoking audience understandably repelled the remaining family crowd. It became a vicious circle.
Some of my first days as a union projectionist, in 1974, were spent learning the trade showing Kung Fu movies in Times Square. The area had hit bottom by then, living up to the Midnight Cowboy image. Soon I moved up to somewhat classier surroundings in Greenwich Village and upper Manhattan. The women starring in the movies in the “art houses” were still topless, but they spoke what I am told is flawless French. Even so, the Street endured without me in the projection booth, as did the Square that it crossed.
I’d moved to Los Angeles by then. By the early Reagan years 42nd Street still had the best ticket prices in the city. If in the early years of the Eighties, you wanted to see three Chevy Chase comedies for $1.75, come on down. Conveniently, a mental health free clinic had also opened nearby by then, so a wish to see three consecutive early 80s Chevy Chase comedies could receive free treatment. New York City’s Ed Koch era was a now mostly forgotten, combative preview of the Giuliani years, and his friendly relationship with Ronald Reagan irritated his fellow Democrats no end. By now, Times Square was starting to recover.
It was in this still less than paradise time when I was back in New York, because it was use-it-or-lose-it time for my union card, my literal ticket of admission for film and television technical jobs. I was in town, doing a few months of well-paid Liberty “time” because even after five years in Hollywood, I didn’t want to lose the backstop of that card, and the projection booth was the fastest, most dependable way to keep it.
As the fall of 1983 turned cold and rainy, more people came to the theater just to stay dry and warm. When I brought the lights up at 3:54 am, and they had to go back out into the streets and subways, many became agitated. This is the kind of situation that even the best film school training somehow doesn’t cover. We dealt with it. The Liberty, like other Times Square theaters of that era, employed “ushers” whose sole job criteria was the ability to intimidate on sight. The kind of men who could terrify nightclub bouncers.
Once out on the street, though, I was on my own. The NYPD shift change was at 4. In theory, the outgoing and the incoming patrol shifts were supposed to overlap, but in practice, the old shift left a few minutes early and the new one arrived a few minutes late. No big deal in the wee small hours of the morning, but all 12 of these huge theaters emptied out at exactly that dead time with no cops on the street. I was at a family dinner one weekend and happened to mention it. My uncle Jack frowned and asked a couple of questions, reflecting a police point of view. All low key, very friendly dinner talk.
The next time my night shift came up and I stepped out of the theater, there was a patrol car there, even at 3:50 in the morning. What’s more, the 4 o’clock guy was already across 42nd Street, with his window grimly rolled down to present his clipboard to the shift boss. Patrolmen in winter gear were at the corners. Generally, I’d have to say that Victory Day in Moscow’s Red Square, 1945, was probably not as well guarded.
The cops didn’t look happy, but they were getting their behinds kicked into gear for a reason: somebody told Inspector Kelly something bad, and accurate, about what Patrol Battalion Manhattan North was doing. With the bluest eyes on Times Square, I walked quickly to the subway.
As it turns out, from a vantage point of forty years later, I’d never need to work in the projection booth again. Of course, I couldn’t have known that, one full hour into the year 1984, as I stepped out of the Liberty theater.
I was born after the Orwell book was published in 1949, so for my entire life 1984 has been a symbol of foreboding, of a dystopian tomorrow, and its arrival was treated as a nervous joke. Was this the year that President Reagan would unleash World War III?
But IMHO, the best McVey family story about New Year’s Eve and Times Square belongs to one of my brothers, a pilot who at the end of the last century was part of NYPD Aviation. (We can argue about the definition of “end of the 20th century”.) On December 31, 1999, he was on duty a thousand or so feet above Manhattan, ensuring that unauthorized aircraft were intercepted before entering a restricted zone above Times Square. But there were no radar blips, no sightings, no unexpected problems on the ground.
The police helicopter could hover with great stability, even when tilted to a useful observation angle. And that was my brother’s job, monitoring the scene. He punched in the location and the angle, and was privileged to see in the New Year, and the new millennium, from a unique vantage point over the dazzling lights of Times Square.
Published in General
Times Square, New Year’s Eve 1937.
Finally! Context to that song and album I loved so much back then!
What a great story! Thanks for sharing that.
Up to the middle 90’s I use to get all of my camera and video stuff from the shops on 42nd street. (the above picture could have been one of them). I was tied into them because that is where my father use to get his cameras from his college days when he attended Manhattan College. Back then getting around the city by car was not the chore it became by the late 70’s.
I loathed trying to get thru the city for the various family gatherings in the middle 70’s head to either Long Island (maternal side) or Jersey City (paternal). By the early 80’s the squeegee guys by the Lincoln tunnel exit finally put the nail in my doing any driving in Manhattan.
The saddest bit of new I heard from my son was lasts week when he had to visit downtown Baltimore at the diocese offices, we seem to have developed a squeegee man problem in Charm City. That is something that I never experience before in Baltimore.
James Bond, Live and Let Die?
I took a shot of the sign in the early 90s!
(insert boilerplate expression of enjoyment and gratitude for any Gary piece, which ought to go without saying but still must be noted)
I was in Times Square a few weeks ago. Stayed at the Paramount, a 1928 hotel on 46th by 8th. Times Square today is a bright, blaring, skittering place, with enormous video billboards beaming one ad after the other, all silent, each over in two or three seconds – the eye jumps from one to the other in search of some sort of satisfaction, but you won’t get it. Nothing resolves except for a few static old-school-style signs or the repetitive and kinetic play of the Krispy Kreme signage. The theaters on the side streets have a quiet and august dignity, and you’ll find an ancient bar that brings back the old sodden and smoky ways. They’ll be gone in a few years.
It’s worth a trip. But it helps to know what it was, and how it once had a visual solidity now lost. The movie marquees may have had blinking bulbs chasing around in hectic schemes, but the marquees themselves – great prows of stately ships – did not change shape. The spectaculars, the big neon, may have been animated (The Wrigley fish blow bubbles, the Old Dutch maid chases dirt) but they repeated over and over for the course of the night, fixed constellations in the night. The ground floor shops were bright and busy, and there were six to a block instead of a Walgreens and a CVS. For many years the great Bond Nudes towered above the International Casino building, replaced eventually by Pepsi bottles – they were spotlit, and for all we know colored lights would play over their shapes, but the shapes themselves did not change. It was all alive, moving, engaging, and persistent. It did not remake itself in endless unrepeatable combinations.
I wish I’d known it back in the days before the decline.
(My collection of TS images and other bits of detritus can be found here.)
Any nod from JL in MN is worth its weight in gold, thanks! The statue of the woman in the Bond Clothes sign, like the startlingly naked Amazon sculpture inside Radio City Music Hall that awed and delighted generations of boys on school trips, are examples of how nuanced, or two-faced, attitudes about near nudity were, back then. You could push the limits a little if there was some flimsy artistic justification for it.
As James notes, the spectacular outdoor signage associated with Times Square goes back more than a century, from simple words spelled out in ordinary light bulbs, sometimes blinking (“EAT AT JOE’S”). The new city light that really wowed ’em was neon (and argon, xenon, krypton, you name the color).
Berlin still has stretches of the Kurfurstendamm with quaint Twenties neon in bright colors. On a snowy night, you could look at the view and fantasize, for just a moment, that the Thirties and Forties never happened.
Gah! A link to another magnificent Lileks time-suck. Now I’ll have to plow through the whole thing.
It gave G. K. Chesterton the heebie-jeebies, or perhaps the fantods. He did grouse about it. It was a good read though. Of course it was; it was Chesterton.
I have to remember to type out the stuff in my head. The above was in reference to Chesterton’s collection of essays entitled What I Saw in America. American friends were eager to show him Times Square at night to see what he thought. ” How beautiful it would be for some one who could not read,” he said.
The guy who got me interested in trying to make a career out of film was a Catholic brother, a monk. Like all high school teachers, he seemed remotely old, but he was really only ten years older than us, the kids who showed up for his screenings of old movies like The Red Shoes and Double Indemnity. Brother Thomas Allen later wrote for the Village Voice and taught at Columbia University.
But he got his start as a film critic and a film scholar at the turn of the Sixties by selling his blood on Times Square. The Brothers of the Sacred Heart took a vow of poverty, and seeing a half dozen movies every Saturday wasn’t in the budget, so he hit the blood banks on the Square and spent the $5 on a couple of afternoon double or triple-bills at the Selwyn, the Times Square, or the Ascot. He wrote out details of every film on index cards, and if he wrote about them for publication he checked credits and details at the (then new) Vivian Beaumont Library at Lincoln Center. This is what I’d call working class critic-ing.
Probably the only one selling ‘unleaded’.
Other than wartime precautions against an unlikely German air raid, Times Square never really went dark. But there was definitely a pause. The delirious prosperity of the postwar years reinforced the flood of exciting and novel signs in the street, but that too faded.
Readers of a certain (ahem) age will recall when retail signage of old fashioned neon was replaced by florescent tube lights behind sheets of frosted plastic, eminently practical for a strip mall. Lileks undoubtedly has the real goods on the progression, but Times Square was hurt by a lack of money and imagination. When interest in cleaning up Times Square and getting back to big signage began to really get going at the end of the Eighties, note that many of the first companies back in were foreign: Suntory, Sony, Mercedes, Seiko. The billboard video tech of the day was Diamondvision, pioneered in stadiums, and it was the first (literal) sign that Blade Runner was coming true.
The Nineties, the Giuliani years, brought big money back to a better Times Square. Now video display technologies had really advanced and the signs competed to be more intricate.
Footnote: New York City mayoral terms end at midnight on Dec 31, so Bill DeBlasio’s came to an ignominious end on television in Times Square as he turned over the reins of City Hall to Eric Adams two years ago amid the jeers and boos of the crowd.
Not my picture (I think @amyschley came up with it) but this is an accurate, if rather dark view of the projection booth work environment. It was noisy, and smelled of ozone, machine oil, and a suspicious twinge of carbon dust, carried off by ventilators that were also large and noisy. All of those yellow-colored knobs on the back of the projector had a purpose, and a half century later I could set up the machine today, even with a blindfold on.
The projectors had no bulbs. The intense light, as unviewable as direct light of the Arc of the Covenant, came from the controlled high-current burning of copper-coated carbon rods, fed towards each other by small electric motors. Too fast, and they collided and blew out the circuitry; too slow, and the light dimmed and went out. If you get that speed in balance, there’s also placement. Think of a prism. If the optically “perfect” white light of the arc lamp were physically shifted a few millimeters to one side, the picture got redder. To the other side, it got bluer. You needed it to be in the right spot. It took human intervention.
The union (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Machine Operators of the United States and Canada, Local 306) was not all that unpopular with the bosses. The pay rates were stiff but not wildly unreasonable, considering the profits being made.
Souvenirs of the Old Days.
Early in the war, the U-boat commanders were using shore lighting to backlight freighters. A combination of improvements and rapid extensions of the Intracoastal Waterway and ever-increasing presence of Navy assets deprived the Germans of easy hunting. Blackout conditions had led to an increase in traffic accidents, so they were relaxed somewhat.
Were they hooting out the old, or booing in the new? The ascension of Brandon Johnson in place of Lori Lightfoot underlines that just because the last one was an idiot doesn’t mean the next one won’t be too.
Adams has been an eccentric disappointment, but DeBlasio was a four-alarm disaster. Adams has no trouble getting into the face of a president from his own party, and it’s been entertaining.
Of course, New Year’s Eve wasn’t the only occasion when New Yorkers would head to the Square. V-E and V-J Day celebrations were televised.
Part of the problem for NYC, is they are operating under a federal court order that they have to provide food and shelter to all refugees. And that NYC has to prioritize them higher than any other services. This includes U.S. citizens that are homeless.
Adams is attempting to use this to say that the federal government is obliged to provide funding for them.
But a federal court still can’t tell Congress how to appropriate money (some state constitutions seem to allow state courts to tell their legislators how to vote).
If memory serves, the court order was imposed when DeBlasio took office, and wouldn’t you know it, he never appealed the order.
To this day, this court order has never gone through the appeals process.
Howard Johnson’s…OMG. Forgotten all about that until reading your comment, @Claviu
Weird note: My grandmother, deciding that her grandchildren needed a taste of urban culture, hosted my mother and the three of us for a weekend at the Watergate Hotel. (At the time, Mom was in her back to the land/gentleman farmer phase, and Dad was in Vietnam for a three-month gig). We called the Watergate the “Milk Bottle Factory” because of the mod crenellations that distinguished its otherwise undistinguished architecture.
There was a concert of some kind at the Kennedy Center, and I assume there was a hotel pool, along with the Smithsonian… And we surely ate at least one meal at HoJo, though my grandmother probably took us to whatever the Fancy Hotel Restaurant was for dinner. I vaguely remember walking across the hotel’s center plaza in my very-new Mary Janes and passing a woman sporting an upswept coiffure, mod evening gown and big jewelry: Peak glamor.
Naturally, since there were five of us, my grandmother had splurged for one of the two…wait-for-it….presidential suites! The other being occupied by the DNC. And yes, you guessed it: That was the very weekend of the Watergate break-in. We were there.
We used to joke, for years, about how crestfallen the burglars (the Plumbers? Can’t remember) would’ve been had they mistakenly broken into our suite and found wet children’s bathing suits and Tintin books instead of juicy, weaponizable political intel?
After the turn of the Millenium, my own kids and I happened to be near Times Square, and we walked into the NYPD precinct to say hi, and see if anyone wanted to trade patches. As the widow/orphans of a fallen officer, we knew we’d be greeted with delight, and so it proved. We were given a tour of the premises, including a temporary holding cell from which bleary-eyed drunk-and-disorderlies stared in dismay at the four children regarding them with a mixture of fascination and pity.
I congratulated our tourguide (a very friendly sergeant) on the splendid management of the Times Square celebrations. A good time was had by all and there were no serious incidents or injuries. He was gratified to know that there were at least a few people who recognized this as a triumph of good policing, and evidence of all that the NYPD (and @GaryMcVey’s brother!) had accomplished, even so early in that hardwon and downright miraculous improvement in public safety.
Hey Gary,
What film formats did you handle there? And what sound formats?
At the Liberty, only 35mm with an optical sound track. That had to have been a rare time of physical stability in media. You could take a reel of sound film from 1930 through 2010 and play it anywhere in the world. Art houses like the Bleeker Street Cinema, the Carnegie Hall Cinema, the Elgin or the Thalia also had 16mm projectors. Some old films and nearly all underground films were 16mm optical sound. I worked very few 70mm jobs; I didn’t have the seniority to “bid” them.
Double-system was rarest of all, a film projector in sync with a reel of magnetically coated 35mm film on a separate device. That’s how you showed films still in progress. I did a lot of that at NYU. In Manhattan, Los Angeles, and Chicago, ad agencies and film production companies screened incomplete commercials and partly edited scenes for themselves. Theater projection is like being an airline pilot: you do the same thing all the time and make it so smooth no one even knows you’re there. Being a projectionist at Saatchi and Saatchi, or Sony Pictures, means you have to fast and adaptable, more of a fighter pilot.
A film festival often uses all of them, from 16 through 70. At the L.A. film festival, we’d even run double system (in the UK, ‘sep mag’) for exclusive peeks at films still in the works.
A wonderful story, much appreciated!