Customer Reviews

Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Aside from the covertly racist remarks, Tales of Times Square is a fun chronicle of the recent history of the classic red-light district that was as part of Americana as mom and apple pie. With stark detail, down to the exact addresses of various brothels, porn houses and other wild joints; it feels as if a walk down the old Forty Deuce and Eighth Avenue is taking place as the pages go by. A natural born writer, Friedman's eye for detail is amazing and he delivers the goods.

During its height of splendid glory it was a neighborhood that fostered more orgasms than any other making it somewhat depressing that this cultural relic known as Times Square has now been hijacked by Disney, the big developers and large corporations. Friedman does a quality job in touching on the underlying politico-economic realities responsible for the destruction of one of the last places that refused to be gentrified.

With a keen eye for the hilariously absurd and the interesting denizens populating the Square from roughly the mid 60s to the mid 80s, Friedman offers up funny and enthralling stories involving strippers, johns, swing clubbers, prostitutes, shoeshines, religious folks, kiosk workers, pornstars and others. One startling fact broached is that in the 1970s during a typical summer night it wasn't unusual to see a thousand old school style hookers plying their trade along Eighth Avenue. Today it's scarcely possible to imagine given the plethora of cops occupying America's cities.

Certainly the most indelible section of Tales of Times Square has to be the description of the famous -- or infamous depending on a person's predilections -- east coast swing club Plato's Retreat. The wild shenanigans documented are simply unbelievable. These chapters are worth the price of the book alone, although some may feel a shower's in order after reading some of this stuff.

The last bastion of a truly honky-tonk atmosphere is over. As Friedman points out it's time to make way for Mickey and Minnie Mouse. In an age of sterile corporate strip malls, Tales of Times Square is a reminder that in at least one neighborhood things used to be quite different.

When you watch a film like Taxi Driver, there's a certain scumminess and grit to New York that really doesn't exist anymore. Nowadays the place is a giant tourist wonderland and Times Square is full of theaters and chain restaurants. This is really about a time before New York was safe. This is Times Square when it was full of porn theaters and peep shows, and when subway cars were covered with graffiti. It's a lot less safe, and a lot less clean. And this isn't really just about the Square itself, but really the people behind the scum. Overall a good read.

The book was nice. It lightly covered the era, places & times. I think the expanded area about Al Goldstein was really to negative. Just my 2 Cents.
But if your courious You should reed the book & More. It's only a limited partial view. Of a history & culture heard about & being lost.
But very important to generations that only heard about it or might hear about it in years to come.
Lenny Waller former operator Hell Fire Club NYC

This may very well be the best book on Times Square,so far ( compared to Samuel Delany's "Times Square Red, Times Square Blue" and Bill Landis & Michelle Clifford's "Sleazoid Express").Josh Alan Friedman reads like a cross between Damon Runyan, and Studs Terkel, with a big dose of Jimmy Breslin vocabulary. He definitely tells it like it was, from the early history of vaudeville, to burlesque, to porno grinders, Plato's Retreat, and live sex shows. And, he heralds its demise, even in the early 80's. His character sketches are priceless! It's funny, erotic, dirty, and, at times, downright repugnant, a veritable Dantesque tour of sleaze. Welcome to the Forty Duece,suckers!

There will never be another place on earth like Times Square during the heighth of its sleaze days. Friedman captures it perfectly and in this wonderful book. It seems incredible that anyone would ever want to revel in nostolgia for the old "Forty Deuce" (West 42nd Street), but now that the XXX theaters, massage parlors, pimps and hookers have been driven out, their absence can be strongly felt, leaving a gap filled today only by a Disney-dominated corporate sanitation job. If you remember the "Times Scare" of yesteryear, and maybe even miss it little bit, then this book is a must.

This is the best document ever written about pre-AIDs pre crack Times Square. Koch era New York was the golden age of Times Square and no book captures it with less judgement than this.

I found this work to be a very good description ot the old Times Square...that is prior to 1983. I was familiar with many of the establishments described and some of the people. Friedman's use of imagery is outstanding. He helped me to understand for the first time things that I had seen thousands of times. The author's tone is perfect. He is without moral condemnation and without excuse for the charaters in the book. His tone is one of amused...and amusing disgust. Future historians may doubt that such a place ever existed, but Freidman's description is so very true.

Thank heavens that Josh Alan Friedman has chronicled his stories of 42nd Street sleaze in this book and Tales of Times Square.Someday these books will be treasured along with Herbert Asbury's.

That's the question I asked myself after a recent trip to NYC last fall. My wife and I walked up and down Times Square, from 34th up to Central Park and all around, and felt like we were in any U.S. city--there was no sense of being distinctly in Times Square.

The sidewalks were packed with vacuous tourists going in and out of chain stores and chain restaurants--the kind you can find in any shopping mall from coast to coast.

This book is a snapshot of such a different place and time, it almost reads like fiction today. It's an important document, going beneath the surface to magnify the locations and people that populated Times Square when it was a seedy, often dangerous area filled with porn, pimps, pross, police, runaways and run-down theaters--you would know exactly where you were back then.

This book is also incredibly funny, and written in an understated style that allows the absurd details to shine on their own. The best example of this is the laugh-out-loud chapter "Pecker Full of Miracles"--about Larry Levenson's attempt to settle a ridiculous wager inside his Plato's Retreat. It's worth reading twice--or 15 times, in the spirit of his "bet."

I found this book to a slightly entertaining view of the 42nd street that I was very much a part of in the early 80's. What I found distrubing was his overt racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and all around demeaning view of the people he writes about. He choses adjectives to describe the people that haunt the streets that really show his distaste of his subjects. I find this very unsettling coming from someone who supposedly wrote for Screw magazine, one of the first widely "accepted" sex newspapers. In his book every African American is reduced to panhandler or scammer, every homosexual is a predatory faggot and all the Jews are scheming to make a buck or get laid. Kinda sad.