The Horror--and the Glory : As Times Square Tries to Clean Up Its Act, Trading Peep Shows for Office Towers, Some Mourn the Loss of Colorful People and Places

Jimmy Glenn has two businesses in Times Square, one for love, the other for money.

Tonight he’s taking care of money, paying bills at Jimmy’s Corner, his bar on West 44th Street. But in the late evening, after the commuters and the pre-theater crowd clear Broadway, Glenn leaves the money for his real love--the Times Square Gym, a boxer’s haven overlooking 42nd Street where big shots come to spar when they’re in town.

Like thousands of street kids to whom he has taught self-respect with leather gloves, Glenn has spent a lifetime walking 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues, one of the roughest blocks in the city.

“If they can walk through it all, then a tough kid can become a boxer,” he says.

And walking that one block is no small accomplishment.

For years, it was so dense with drug dealers, hustlers, hookers, sex shops and pickpockets that it took 16 officers to police it. Today, however, it is ghostlike, with almost every store and theater shuttered by a massive redevelopment effort.

Yet over the years Glenn has seen it all in Times Square, the horror and the glory.

He remembers coming from Harlem as a kid for a movie and dinner for $2. He witnessed police sweeps against prostitutes and still wonders why they don’t legalize “the girls” and give them shots. He watched the demonstrations, the end of the World War II, the marches after Kennedy’s death, the Vietnam scuffles.

Now, he is wearily watching the latest changes--the new hotels replacing old theaters and burlesque houses, the millions of square feet of new offices rising incongruously above neon super-signs, yuppie bars competing with ethnic pubs.

Glenn was supposed to be a victim of the biggest change--a $2.5-billion redevelopment plan to bulldoze and rebuild The Deuce, as 42nd Street is known. His gym is in a grungy building that until last summer was slated to come down for a 56-story office tower. But the office tower is the one that fell victim, to the real estate glut, and for now Jimmy Glenn is saved.

“Oh, we’ll have to move eventually,” he says with resignation. “But I’ll never leave Times Square, no matter what they do to it. It’s still the place to be.”

It still is.

On New Year’s Eve, at least 200,000 horn-blowing, bussing people will squeeze into Times Square to watch a white globe drop at midnight, while 200 million more worldwide watch the craziness on television. The New Year’s event began in 1905 to celebrate the opening of One Times Square as the tallest building in the world. This year, there will be a light show and more confetti and balloons, but beyond that not much will be different from the turn-of-the-century fete.

Year-round, more neon than ever cascades light into the square, blaring commercialism from Coca-Cola to Canon to Jockey--although Joe the Camel no longer belches smoke rings. The theater district is ever-frenetic, attracting more people annually than the Knicks, Yankees, Mets and Giants put together.

And the tumblers and the porn stars and the preachers still tap-tap down Broadway, making Times Square the greatest metaphor for New York itself.

Even so, the look and feel have changed dramatically from a decade ago, and the transformation has brought relief, hope and disappointment:

- Relief that sleaze doesn’t dominate quite the way it did.

- Hope that in the 21st Century, it will survive as holy ground for high life and lowlife alike and not be blanded over.

- Disappointment that more than a dozen mammoth skyscrapers and hotels have stamped out twice as many human-scale buildings, splashes of sunshine and a lot of oooooooomph that makes Times Square unique.

The Crossroads of the World is, indeed, at its own crossroads, and in every conversation over its future, in every neon-flooded corner, exists this tension over what was and what might be.

“The dream is to continue to build on the reputation of Times Square as the entertainment capital of the United States but at the same time keep it clean, lit and safe. . . ,” says Gretchen Dykstra, head of a new Business Improvement District that is working to create cohesion among the disparate forces in the area.

Periodically, moral crusaders have tried to scotch the honky-tonk night life, but equally powerful forces have made it flourish--and the area has gone from bad to worse since the 1940s. Particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, cheap food and cheap entertainment were often sullied by the drug and porn trades.

The latest twist on “reform” came in the 1980s--and not from the preachers and politicians. With the city and state clearing obstacles, developers used bulldozers to excise the slime--and, of course, to make money.

Six million square feet of office space went up in the northern part of the square, as well as 4,200 hotel rooms. The Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza replaced a Pussycat Cinema that had the largest sex marquee in the city. The Embassy Suites pushed aside its longest topless bar.

But development, like chemotherapy, wiped out good cells along with the bad.

And so change has come down to this:

It is true that you can no longer stand in Shubert Alley between 44th and 45th Streets and see Alvin Ailey dancers practicing their plies and arabesques in a second-story rehearsal studio. The studio is gone, and the dancers now practice downtown.

It is also true that if you stand in that same spot, you can feel relatively safe. That’s new. It’s not as likely that anyone will offer you a vial of crack. The streets aren’t aswirl with garbage.

And so, that’s the trade-off . . . a romantic view for an economic boost.

Locals like Bill Daly, who has directed the city’s Office of Midtown Enforcement since 1984, were thrilled to see the sex business go: “I’m a New Yorker by birth and wouldn’t want to see Times Square look like Dallas or Los Angeles. But I would trade a big, ugly hotel any day for the violence that some of these sex places attracted.”

But Jack Goldstein, head of Save the Theaters, a group that fought to contain new development, says a lot more could have been done to preserve the show-business ecosystem.

“This wasn’t a bunch of sentimental actors standing in the way of progress to protect ghosts,” he says of the effort to save three theaters that came down to make room for the Marriott. “These were well-tuned instruments that professionals thought were important.”

Save the Theaters and the Municipal Arts Society, another group, did manage to get some things: Zoning regulations required architects to emulate Times Square’s dazzle--though few followed the law; 22 of 37 remaining theaters were declared landmarks; every new high-rise was required to have neon billboards on its front and to devote 5% of its space to “entertainment-related uses.” (The landlords resisted the 5%, however; more often, the space is used as theaters for screenings rather than as offices for craftsmen repairing saxophones or ballet slippers.)

“The truth is, the landlords didn’t want dancers in leotards entering the same building as law firm clients,” charges Goldstein.

Still, at the moment, a lot of those landlords can’t afford to be too inhospitable to potential tenants. The real estate boom has gone bust in New York City, rents have declined and many new offices are empty.

The south end of Times Square also was on its way to booting out the ballerinas and bringing in the bankers when the real estate bust occurred.

Begun in 1981, the 42nd Street Redevelopment Project would have created 4.1 million more square feet of office space in four towers of 30 to 56 stories each. But after fighting back 44 lawsuits and community opposition, the project took title in 1990 to only 13 acres along 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth.

More than 280 businesses were condemned and relocated, and tenants like TV’s Joe Franklin and Richard Falk, the octogenarian press agent known as the “Mayor of 42nd Street,” became media cause celebres by complaining bitterly. Architecture critics and sunshine lovers alike groused that the towers would turn Times Square into a dark office canyon like Wall Street.

No sooner had the last business been relocated--Jimmy Glenn’s Times Square Gym is a rare holdout--than plans were again put on hold by the recession. The developer announced last August that it will be at least 10 years before those four office towers--disparagingly dubbed “the elephant legs”--will be built.

There was, in many quarters of Times Square, a collective sigh of relief.

It is a cool fall evening, and Brother Joseph Bosco and Sister Brenda Allen are preaching on the corner of 43nd Street and Broadway in front of a shuttered Nathan’s Hot Dog emporium. Swarms of commuters rush for the subway as the electronic “zipper” wrapped around the much-photographed Times Tower flashes news below a giant Sony TV screen showing scenes from Woody Allen’s “Husbands and Wives.”

Why has Sister Brenda preached every day for 10 years amid this frenzy and flash?

“You go where the sinners are,” she says, smiling at Brother Joseph, a former alcoholic and drug addict whom she “saved” here on Columbus Day, 1987.

When Sister Brenda notices Cleo, a chic drag queen wearing Versace, waiting for the light on the corner, she immediately begins screaming in Cleo’s direction: “People who condone homosexuality and homosexual marriages are sick. . . .”

The evangelists say that they have their work cut out for them for another 10 years and that no amount of urban renewal will change that.

“I’ve been here all my life, and I love it,” says Brother Joseph. “But only belief in Jesus will get rid of this degree of sin.”

Perhaps--but not for lack of the police trying, too.

Since the mid-1970s, when the area was probably at its raunchiest, the cops have been trying harder than ever to clean it up.

According to Daly, 121 sex businesses in the square in 1975 ran the gamut from massage parlors to topless bars to hooker hotels. A few years ago, Daly’s team of lawyers and investigators for the Mayor’s Office of Midtown Enforcement had whittled that number to 38. Now, it’s up again to 43.

Still, crime in general has fallen in the area’s 30 square blocks over the last decade, dipping yet another 12% last year.

But it’s no Disneyland. In 1991, there were eight reported homicides, 27 rapes, 467 felonious assaults, 2,236 robberies and 5,428 incidents of grand larceny.

The latest dip in crime is also partly the result of Mayor David Dinkins’ community policing campaign, which has nearly 500 extra cops walking beats in Midtown. The Business Improvement District added its own security force as well as a round-the-clock sanitation crew made up of the homeless.

But, Daly points out, the “loyal opposition”--particularly the porn purveyors--always tries something new to keep police busy.

The 1990s brought a rash of triple-X videocassette outlets, and the newest wrinkle in live sex acts is “lap dancing,” where nude women writhe in customers’ laps.

“Listen,” says Daly, “if you don’t keep the pressure on, these establishments go back to prostitution.”

With the cops closely watching, most of the sex shops that have survived are relatively sanitized. They feature porn films, multichannel video peep shows, live peep shows and one-on-one encounter booths.

On a recent afternoon at Playland, a new triple-X “adult entertainment center” across 43rd Street from the New York Times building, dozens of men in suits streamed in and out of the “live sex theater” in the back. Some slipped into a tight “peeper” booth before leaving.

Inside, after the customer puts a $1 token in a slot, a screen rises to reveal naked black, Latina and Anglo women--one of the more absurd versions of New York’s “great mosaic.” For a tip, the women let the peepers feel their nude bodies. The booths are arranged in a semicircle so peepers can see the hands of other groping men. After a couple of minutes, the screen comes down unless more tokens are popped in.

“The owners know if they go too far, we’ll bust them,” says Daly. “But that doesn’t stop them from trying.”

The delay in building the “elephant legs” complex on 42nd Sreet has reignited the debate over whether Times Square should be preserved with a Damon Runyon flavor or allowed to grow even more like Wall Street. (Is it a coincidence that just as a new round of discussions has opened up about the area, “Guys and Dolls” is the biggest hit on Broadway?)

While the architects and planners try to come up with an interim plan, there seems a consensus that Times Square shouldn’t be reserved for the elite who can afford $65 Broadway tickets--but at the same time, it shouldn’t be turned into yet another American mall with chain stores and food courts.

For now, the focus has shifted to nine turn-of-the-century theaters condemned on 42nd Street. Most were running kung-fu and women-in-prison films before the state stepped in.

Still, some devotees remain in mourning. Cora Cahan, head of “42nd Street NOW!,” a nonprofit group expected to reveal plans in January for two of the theaters, says there remains a way to appease people who love slasher movies without scaring away everybody else.

“We know that the cluster of theaters on 42nd Street is not Lincoln Center, and we won’t try to make it that,” she says. “We know it has to be affordable, compelling and something to resonate with life day and night.”

New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp warns that planners shouldn’t try to make 42nd Street too orderly and decorous. He wrote recently, “The play’s the thing on Broadway--and the movie, the dance troupe, the stand-up comic--and the best thing architecture can do to stage its own revival is to remember who’s the star.”

What kind of magic will it take to ultimately erase the blight?

Police Officer Adam Damico is giving a tour of what has been his beat for 20 years. He muses, “Hey, it can’t be worse than what it was.”

Damico marvels that it was only last week that 42nd Street’s infamous Peepland, distinguished by a two-story keyhole framing a giant neon eye, was finally shut. “I can’t tell you how many bottle fights I broke up in front of that place,” he says.

There are still plenty of crackheads and hookers to keep him busy, but Damico and other cops are expending more effort these days on “quality-of-life crimes”--three-card monte dealers, peddlers selling fake Rolexes, theater-ticket scalpers who entrap tourists.

As he strolls Broadway pointing out “good” blocks and “bad” ones, a flock of pigeons flies in formation in front of the spectacular $1-million Coca-Cola sign just as its bottle cap comes off and a straw shoots up.

“There’s still excitement in those lights,” he says, sounding as if he’d miss it if there weren’t.

So what will it be like if he spends another 20 years on this beat?

“My guess is that it will be the same--but better.”