My friends and I were very familiar with this area—somewhat earlier, in the early '70s—but no less different than depicted in the series. Streetwalkers, pimps filled doorways; movie marquees brightly lite the titles of the XXX rated films, gay and straight, peep shows and porno book stores were hardly hard to find. Times Square was Sin City.
It has always been bawdy. And always attractive to crowds, whether they're there for the dropping of the ball on New Year's Eve, legitimate theaters, bars, restaurants, or just plain strolling. The Great White Way.
I was in the city Saturday night and took a train from 23rd Street to 57th Street. The train was somewhat crowded at 6:30, but virtually emptied out when we got to 42nd Street/Times Square. People of all stripes, ages and ethnicities got off. Their commonality was where that got off, and that they all were holding cell phones.
My early adult enjoyment in the district consisted of playing pool at Broadway Billiards, an immaculately clean pool hall underneath the penny arcade, run by Mr. Monaco. There were even billiard tables. There were perhaps 25 tables, and refereed, official tournaments were held, with the leading straight pool players of the day, Cisero Murphy, Machine Gun Lou Butera (he played fast), Irving Crane and Luther Lassiter.
Straight pool ruled. It was even televised on ABC sports with Chris Schenkel providing his hushed tone play-by-play. There were world championship tournaments held at the Commodore Hotel (now the Hyatt) on 42nd Street above Grand Central Terminal. The perennial world champion, Luther Lassiter, can be seen on a YouTube segment playing Cisero Murphy, winning a World Title with a score of 150-111, running out at 85 balls. There is not a Nine Ball player alive who can sink 85 balls in an inning.
In the '70s, the ball-bangers of Nine Ball had not yet been born. Broadway Billiards, Julian's on 14th Street by the Academy of Music, and McGirr's on 8th Avenue were the pool emporiums of the day. They're all gone. Our Broadway Billiards made way for the Novetel Hotel. I can never go past that spot and not look down where the entrance to the pool hall was. I don't know where you'd go to watch, or even play, straight pool. Perhaps somewhere near Gramercy Park. And certainly no tournaments.
The other destination, a few blocks north of the pool hall was the Spotlight Bar, a narrow place, with booths in the back, but no food, that basically kept the pit musicians of Local 802 from ever dying of thirst. Joe Harbor and his wife Sarah ran place, and generally the bartender was Gene, a one-time singer who once had a bit part riding on a sled in an Abbot and Costello movie, 'Hit the Ice.' Show biz. The Spotlight closed in 1972. It remains in the background I think of Al Pacino's movie 'Panic in Needle Park.'
I never heard the area referred to as The Deuce. It must have been a cop term for the area of 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, the strip—or stroll as one of the hookers refers to it as—that was filled with peep shows and XXX movie theaters. Hooker heaven. Or hell.
Into this series we get James Franco playing two parts, twin brothers Frankie and Vincent who in their own fashion contribute to the area's reputation with dance bars, peep shows, drugs, and 'massage parlors,' the code name for brothels.
Characters swirl around then. Vincent's gal pal Abby who drops out of NYU and takes up earning a degree in 'New York' as a bartender in Vincent's High Hat joint. Abby is attractive, bisexual, and eventually committed to helping the hookers earn a different living. That doesn't always work.
Vincent is sensitive; his brother Frankie is reckless. Frankie is eventually killed by a very disgruntled, and made member of the mob. Vincent gets even, but not without the underbelly of organized crime inserting itself in payoffs and skims from the joints they control. There's money there, and it's cash.
The city meanwhile is on a campaign to clear the area of the skin trade blight and get developers in who will build hotels and theaters that will push the skin trade to the entrance of the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels. And it does go there. Legal action is taken against the shell companies that own the buildings to get hem demolished and make way for the first entrant, the Marriott Hotel.
None of this is fiction. The City, under Mayor Koch worked as hard as they could to tear down the buildings the skin trace thrived in, the seedy SROs, single room occupancy hotels and the message parlors.
Getting control of the buildings where the undesired activities flourished was a tactic. And it worked. And it wasn't just Times Square where this condemn and re-build efforts were made.
When Citibank built their headquarters building between Third and Lexington Avenue at 53rd Street there was a porn bookstore on the side street, Wink's. Citibank didn't sign on for development to find itself adjacent to a porn emporium. I don't remember how long it took, but Wink's disappeared.
Even into the new century I remember being able to see the sign for Fun City from my temporary office at 1440 Broadway, where we were after after the collapse of the Towers on 9/11. Fun City was a porn bookstore, peep show still in operation. It was closer to Sixth Avenue.
To me, the funny thing about the sign Fun City was that it reminded me of how Mayor Lindsay described New York City after he emerged from a helicopter tour of the city at the start of the 1970 transit strike.
The reporter Dick Schaap heard the utterance and ran with it. In the midst of a crippling transit strike the mayor still thinks this is Fun City. It became a popular phrase to describe NYC, along with The Big Apple. Johnny Carson used it often in his monologues.
Mayor Koch is mentioned often in the third season, and much is made of what everyone knew of his being a closeted gay man. It was the '70s, not 2019, and sexual proclivities were not openly revealed, especially when you wanted votes. Since the good mayor has passed on, I guess things can be openly mentioned in a screenplay.
Ploys and legal maneuvers accomplish a bit. There is pushback. There is progress. Anyone who knows anything of the history of this area knows the night and day difference between what's there now and what was there then.
Prostitution has just about literally moved online. There's got to be an app. Porn has gone to DVDs and the Internet. It's off the street. Everything still exists, just not as visible. Times Square is still booming.
As much as AIDS was a scourge, it was also a cleanser. The health crisis that was declared because of AIDS, spread by sexual contact and dirty needles, gave the city and its lawyers power to take actions in the "interest of public health." Joints were closed; buildings were padlocked. the path was cleared.
Take any time span of a few decades and note what the beginning of it looks like. Any endeavor. Compare it to the end product at he end of the decades. Nothing is the same.
And as Vincent strolls through his old haunt, now in 2019, all he can see is the new environment, and ghosts of the people who inhabited his world umpteen years ago. It is as effective a closing scene as I've ever seen, if only because I could be Vincent, but with my own set of buddies.
His stroll reminds me of a documentary I saw a long, long time ago about the last days of Life magazine, that great newsweekly with the fantastic pictures that was made redundant and out-of-step when TV became more dominant. You couldn't go anywhere and not see Life magazine. It was on the coffee table at home; in every waiting room I ever sat in; front and center at any newsstand..
Part of the documentary was several minutes of a home movie the staff took of themselves as they finished their final days in their offices. They waved, shrugged and mugged for the camera. I remember a reviewer of the documentary commenting that it was sad, and you almost, or did cry when the images went by of people who worked for the magazine probably before, and certainly right after WW II who were going to be without a place they surely felt was home It was sad.
We know music has become a great part of the way these series are presented. And 'The Deuce' is no exception. Blondie's song 'Dreaming' has been opening the show for the last two seasons, driving beat to flashing images of The Deuce as it was. So it only seems appropriate that she should end it. But with what?
'Sidewalks of New York' probably predates the birth of everyone alive today. Composed in 1894 by Charles B. Lawlor and James W. Blake it served as Al Smith's campaign song when he was running for president in 1928. That is admittedly a long time ago, and might not register now with people.
It might also not register that the song was played during the post parade before the Belmont Stakes. Now anyone who bothers to listen gets to hear a recording of Frank Sinatra belting out 'New York, New York.'
Not bad, but so soul. No history. The New York Racing Association (NYRA) has supposedly given to playing 'Sidewalks of New York' before a Belmont Day undercard race, The Manhattan Handicap, a turf race. After my own tradition of going every year since 1968, it's been 20 years since I've gone to the Belmont, so I'll have to take someone's word for it. For now, the Sinatra version reigns.
The melody of 'The Sidewalks of New York' is a two-step waltz, with simple nostalgic lyrics. It can be played light-heartedly, or otherwise. And otherwise is now how Blondie (Deborah Harry) renders the song.
The last episode of The Deuce is pretty much an almost typical last episode. The characters are moving on. But the story line ends with nearly 10 minutes to go. The year 2019 presents itself, and Vince is back in town, back from where doesn't matter. He's in town for the wedding of a nephew. The nephew's third wedding it turns out.
Vincent hits a hotel bar and gets a very measured pour of Hennesey straight up. Of course the bartender is youthful, and can't remember anything Vincent is telling him about: The High Hat bar...the news that a porn queen, Eileen has died who used to be someone Vincent knew. The pour of Hennesey is metered, unlike free pours at the High Hat. Corporate bartending.
Vince is tired, and maybe a little drunk, but he takes the stroll between 7th and 8th, passing doorways and places where his past his held. He sees the two mob guys, Rudy and Tommy who got the envelopes filled with cash; he sees the guy he killed in revenge for killing his brother; he sees the hookers being loaded in a Paddy wagon, he sees Lori Madison, the one-time prostitute who becomes a cocaine-addled porn star and then a prostitute again, who has taken the trade up again, only to blow her brains out in a dingy hotel room after her last trick.
All the while we get the street sounds, and the people greeting Vincent, and Blondie singing 'The Sidewalks of New York.' like you've never heard it. It's a dirge. It doesn't even sound like Blondie. My first guess it was Marianne Faithful, the voice is so coarse and deep.
Vincent passes Paul, the gay bartender and his partner, who ran the gay bar and the bathhouse. Paul's partner died a sickening death from AIDS.
We get Vince's brother-in-law's greeting from Bobby, who ran one of the parlors who says it's great to see him, but he himself is dead.
C.C., one of the pimps nods a greeting; Thunder says hello, the thick legged black hooker who was thrown out of a window and died, only to have some spaced-out passerby look at the lump on the sidewalk and mutter, "if she wanted to get downstairs so fast, she should have taken the stairs." Life is cheap.
Eilleen Merrell as Candy, the independent hooker who works without a pimp trades dialogue with Vincent about what he just learned by leafing through The New York Post in the hotel bar. Eileen has died, but not before making perhaps 80 "fuck films" acting in and directing, and that one movie has now become an art-house cult feature. "Go figure, I took the fucking out. Nobody saw it."
Abby safely crosses diagonally through an intersection since they've taken the cars out of Times Square, dressed professionally, as briefcase carrying lawyer, talking into a cell phone with a colleague plotting strategy (creating a billable hour, no doubt). We know now she finished law school after breaking up with Vincent. It was inevitable.
And of course twin bother Frankie, smoking, and looking no older than he was on the day he was shot several times and died in his Vincent's arms. Frankie looks good. Vincent "looks like shit," as Frankie is not afraid to tell him.
Anyone who dies through an act of violence, or some disease early in life, never ages of course. I've accumulated a few memories of those who have left us through both means. I still see them. And sometimes, if I go by the freight entrance door on 41st Street of 1440 Broadway (the edge of The Deuce) where two of my co-workers were murdered by our vice president (who immediately then committed suicide), were carried out by the morgue attendants and the police after being killed on the job, I have my memories of 17 years ago.
We all have memories of something. The Sidewalks of New York.
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