My Times Square

Bill Clinton was 18 in 1964, a freshman at Georgetown University, when he first visited Times Square in New York City.  Times Square, for those of you not familiar with the City, is located in the area of Broadway and 7th Avenues, between 42nd and 47th Streets.  He remembers having a steak at Tad's Steak House, overhearing an argument between a man and his partner over a gift gone wrong, and watching a hooker approach a man in a grey flannel suit. The experiences he had as an impressionable Arkansas teenager in the  center of what made New York "New York" obviously had a big effect on him, because he still remembers that day in perfect detail, forty seven years later!

I also visited Times Square as a youngster, but I first began walking its streets and avenues at a much earlier age than Bill, when I was perhaps nine or ten years old, back when Dwight Eisenhower was still the President.  I used to love to come into the City to go to work with my father, at his jewelry manufacturing plant in the garment district, and it was always a huge treat when he agreed to take me with him, on a Saturday when he felt he had to go into work.

We'd catch the Long Island Railroad from Long Beach, where we lived, to Jamaica Station, where we'd change trains to the one that went to Penn Station.  From Penn Station, we'd take the free subway shuttle to Grand Central Station.  The whole process, even with the two train changes, took only about an hour to get there, just enough time to munch on a bagel or a bialy, smothered in butter and cream cheese, that we'd pick up at the newsstand on the way.

We'd then walk through Grand Central's gorgeous glass-vaulted lobby, filled with hundreds, if not thousands of commuters scurrying to catch their trains, and emerge from the revolving doors into a New York City morning, at about 5th Avenue and 48th Street.  We'd walk to the West Side, crossing The Avenue of the Americas, to Seventh Avenue, and then downtown, from 48th Street down to the low 40's, where my father's showroom and manufacturing  plant were, between 8th and 9th Avenues.

That means we'd walk together right through Times Square, and I could always tell we were getting close because that's when Pop would grab my hand and hold it tightly as we walked.  To this wide-eyed youth, it was like entering a much more exotic parallel universe, one that had different sights, sounds and smells from the rest of the City, where different rules and laws applied...I saw and heard things there, despite being pulled along at a quickened pace by my dad, that were only to be seen and heard there, in Times Square.

We were always greeted first by a smell, in fact... Coming out of Tad's Time Square location was a heady scent born of grilled steak, garlic and butter, so powerful it could knock you over, as well as make you salivate, even though it was still way too early for lunch.  A steak, garlic bread, and a huge baked potato, all for $1.99 - how could you go wrong, as my dad used to say!

But the smells of the world's first and only fast-food steak joint were far from the only experiences awaiting this eager boy... Times Square at that time was filled with people of color, not only African Americans, but also immigrants from far-away countries with strange sounding names, in contrast to the mostly white Europeans who were walking its streets.

And the businesses!  Absolutely astonishing, at least to me at the time...There were sex shops of every description, ranging from movie theaters showing relatively chaste Russ Meyer movies featuring impossibly big-breasted women who solved crimes or saved the world, to peep show parlors and "dirty" book stores that were fully x-rated, to live strip and burlesque shows.  There were fortune tellers, skee-ball parlors, pickpockets,  Greek and Italian places to grab a quick bite, and of course, plenty of streetwalkers plying their trade while their pimps leaned on their Cadillacs parked at the curbs.

There was also, just below the surface sights and sounds, an air of danger, a feeling that you could easily get robbed, beaten up, or worse if you made a bad decision on the streets of Time Square...not at all like the Disneyland that Bill Clinton makes reference to in talking about the current sanitized and cleaned-up version of this area.  No, back then,  the exotic, the unknown, and the dangerous were all mixed in with the garlic and steak smell of Tad's, to produce an intoxicating visual and sensual experience.

For this sheltered boy from the Island, visiting Times Square, even if he was walking hand-in-hand with his dad, it was the first glimpse of another world out there, one just waiting to be explored.

If you'd like to read the CNN news story about Bill Clinton's recent visit to Times Square that inspired this post, here's the link: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/13/clinton-remembers-old-times-square-crime-hookers/?iref=allsearch