Ghosts of 42nd Street: A History of America's Most Infamous Block [Hardcover]

Anthony Bianco (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 13, 2004

Anthony Bianco's Ghosts of 42nd Street is the dramatic and definitive story of this legendary strip, told through the people involved in its founding and its current renaissance -- from the bosses of the world's top media companies to premier property developers to the city's powerful political interests to the small-business proprietors, drug dealers, pimps, pornographers, and slumlords who have all called it home.

Larger-than-life characters such as Oscar Hammerstein I, Florenz Ziegfeld, Billy Minsky, and other show business stars bring the street's history to life. But at the heart of this fast-paced urban adventure is 42nd Street itself and its ten theaters:

• the Apollo • the Lyric • the Harris
• the New Victory • the New Amsterdam
• the Times Square • the Selwyn
• the Liberty • the Empire • the Rialto

Beginning in 1899, a burst of construction on the mid-Manhattan block of West 42nd Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue created the greatest concentration of theaters America had ever seen, giving birth to today's Broadway theater district. When the New York Times built a slender twenty-five-story tower on an odd, triangular site formed by the convergence of 42nd Street, Broadway, and Seventh Avenue, the city named the square facing the tower Times Square, which quickly became New York's gathering place for all important civic events.

In its heyday, 42nd Street was excessive, expensive, unpredictable, loud, fun, and, at times, dangerous. Forty-second Street's Golden Age of entertainment ended by 1930 and the street quickly devolved from the nation's first show business capital into its first retail porn center, becoming even more infamous for its squalor. Its denizens rechristened 42nd Street as "Forty Deuce" or simply "the Deuce." This downward trend continued into recent decades, when 42nd Street was largely demolished and rebuilt in the largest urban renewal project in New York history, creating the Times Square we know today -- still known far and wide as the "Crossroads of the World."

Part urban history, part cultural analysis, part business study, Ghosts of 42nd Street shows how this tiny, magical patch of midtown Manhattan looms large in the popular imagination as America's most culturally important thoroughfare.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Business writer Bianco (Rainmaker: The Saga of Jeff Beck, Wall Street's Mad Dog) evokes many wonderful "ghosts" in his moving and dramatic story of the block that runs between Broadway and Eighth Avenue on 42nd Street (although the book is about the entire Times Square area). He starts with impresario Oscar Hammerstein, the German immigrant who built 10 splendid theaters in Manhattan between 1888 and 1914 (and whose fame was eventually eclipsed by that of his grandson, lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II). With dry humor and an admirable lack of sentimentality, the author surveys 42nd Street/Times Square from its heyday as an entertainment center, through its long decline, to its recent revival despite greedy promoters and reluctant politicians, whom he's not loath to name. Some readers may feel Bianco goes into too much financial detail about the deals that led to Disney and others transforming the street into the family-friendly place it is today, but theater lovers will find his comprehensive account the perfect house seat to a glorious past and a promising future. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Anthony Bianco is a senior writer at Business Week. He is the author of two books, The Reichmanns: Family, Faith, Fortune and the Empire of the Olympia & York and Rainmaker: The Saga of Jeff Beck, Wall Street's Mad Dog. He lives in New York City.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow (April 13, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688170897
• ISBN-13: 978-0688170899
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #530,733 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Welcome Departure, May 12, 2004

By 

Rocco Dormarunno (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ghosts of 42nd Street: A History of America's Most Infamous Block (Hardcover)

Let me get my one complaint out of the way. This book should be titled, "Ghosts of WEST 42nd Street" because it just about completely ignores 42nd Street east of 6th Avenue.

That said, Anthony Bianco's "Ghosts of 42nd Street: A History of America's Most Infamous Block" is a welcome departure from the spate of books about 42nd Street that seem to come out at a rate of one a month. Mr. Bianco's approach is all-encompassing, not just focusing on the crime or the theater, the squalor or the glamour. There is an encyclopedic amount of information here, as he spans the decades. And yet, the book is very compressed and easy to get through. Mr. Bianco's writing is very fluid.

The cast of characters is familiar, as are many of the anecdotes. However, there are plenty of tales that will surprise the reader, even one that is very familiar with the history of this piece of midtown real estate. Pick up a copy and you will enjoy.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A sweeping survey of NY theatrical history, June 20, 2005

By 

saskatoonguy (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ghosts of 42nd Street: A History of America's Most Infamous Block (Hardcover)

Anthony Bianco describes the history of Times Square from its first theater in 1904 to the present day. He walks us through the era of vaudeville and burlesque, introduces us to memorable characters such as Diamond Jim Brady and (much later) Marty Hodas the porn entrepreneur, all the way through to the redevelopment of the 1990s.

The theme of Bianco's book is that even at its height, Times Square was seedy and disreputable. For a theater to show a Shakepearean play had always been the exception rather than the norm. The neighborhood has always been a center for prostitution of all kinds, and the theaters have always been testing the limits of what society considers decent. Any stage show was successful in proportion to the amount of skin exposed. When movies took over, the theaters of Times Square showed second-rate action movies (known as "grind theaters") while the more highbrow movies opened elsewhere in the city. In short, the Times Square of today is more respectable than it had ever been at any point in its history.

My complaint about the book is that there are no maps and only 33 period b&w photos, which are not nearly enough. Much of the book describes particular buildings in great detail without a single illustration of those buildings. The reader is expected to know that the 200 block of 42nd Street is the historic heart of the theater district and that the 300 block has always been beyond the beaten path. Detailed maps would have improved this book enormously.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE book to read about 42nd Street, August 6, 2004

By 

Steve Iaco (northern new jersey) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ghosts of 42nd Street: A History of America's Most Infamous Block (Hardcover)

42nd Street's spectacular renaissance has unleashed a torrent of recent books chronicling the thoroughfare's rise, fall and re-birth. One of these, "Down 42nd Street," was a huge disappointment, littered with factual inaccuracies and nearly incoherent in its recounting of the epic 1990s re-development saga. (See my March 30, 2002 review of this book for specifics.)

Anthony Bianco's "Ghosts of 42nd Street" suffers from no such shortcomings. Indeed, one of this book's central strengths is its detailed "insider's" account of the street's 1990s metamorphosis. Rebecca Robertson is depicted as a genuine heroine, envisioning earlier than most - certainly before anyone in the government bureaucracy - that the rehabilitation of the turn-of-the-century theaters would be the linchpin in restoring 42nd Street's luster. Robertson was prescient in foreseeing that office development would follow the theaters' revival.

42nd Street has always been filled with characters and we meet many of them. For example, there's Marty Hodas, a struggling 1960s entrepreneur who emerges as "The King of Peeps," before running afoul of federal tax laws. Then there's Seymour Durst, the obstreperous developer who waged a clever campaign to block re-development, but whose family would build the first new office tower.

There's a lot of interesting New York City history here as well. We learn, for example, that the financier August Belmont was the catalyst behind changing the name Long Acre Square to Times Square. The New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs ostensibly had nothing to do with it, though it was Ochs himself who conceived the New Year's Eve ball dropping festivities in 1906. There's also a vivid account of the demise of legendary architect, bon vivant and habitual lady's-man Sanford White at the hands of a jealous husband.

If you read only one book about 42nd Street, this is certainly the one.