Books: The Great Washed Way

The Devil's Playground traces Times Square's journey from naughty to nasty to squeaky clean

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But the delicate social ecology couldn't last. Broadway declined. Hard drugs arose. Damon Runyon's Times Square became Ratso Rizzo's. In the 1970s, 42nd Street was overrun with porn shops, junkies and bus-station hustlers. Traub adroitly explains how a combination of municipal power and rising real estate values succeeded in driving out the rot. In a new world of tall towers and chain stores, the Disney company played both beauty and the beast--corporate pioneer in the once skanky wilderness but also chief symbol of the bland mass marketplace that the Square is today. It's not just the squalid 42nd Street of the '70s that has been wiped away. It's the rich, wild tangle of the prewar years. Traub is of two minds about "the stupendous contrivance" that Times Square has become. So are a lot of people. Nobody misses the junkies and peep shows. But can't we bring back some of that naughty bawdy, gaudy, sporty 42nd Street?

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