Giuliani Times Square

How a young mayor cleaned up an “eternal heap of slime”
By: Eddie Vega

At 15, I made my first solo foray into Times Square. It was the first of many.

After exiting the subway stop at 42nd Street & Broadway, I hurried past the military recruiting station that was bombed and rebuilt and bombed and rebuilt, then past porno film houses with variations of X, XX and XXX on their sooty marquees, some with the additional letters L-I-V-E S-H-O-W; then past a man with a furry hat, two-tone jazz brogues and a three-piece suit, sitting with an open photo album set atop a fold-out table that contained photos of young women and any interested man could pick the one he wanted and his assistant, a boy my age, would take him to her nearby apartment; past sidewalk women in long open coats and fishnet stockings, and nothing else, calling men baby and sugar in appeals to go upstairs but calling them tricks when talking among themselves; then past the 25¢ peep booths with a view of a round rotating platform of pillows, blonds, brunettes and paper wipes, and across the turning platform, through slots with timed shutters, open for only a minute, a feverish exchange of dollar bills and hands. That was street level. On upper floors,velvet-draped windows showcased wigged women in bikinis with warm smiles and come-to-me eyes waving men up.

I was dragged through there by a powerful need that could be satisfied by only one thing: a visit to guitar row on 48th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues. Manny’s and Sam Ash, which had several stores there, Rudy’s Music Stop, which sold and repaired guitars, and Alex Musical Instruments, the mother of repair shops that could fix intricate 100-year-old accordions. It was an orgy of guitars and more guitars and drums, cymbals, trumpets and flutes and of those who play them. I was there for the guitar picks, strings, capos and tuning whistles needed to perform in the folk group that played the Sunday night youth Mass at a Brooklyn church.

So the trips to Times Square, what the Redemptorist priest at my parish called an eternal heap of slime, had special importance for a church boy. It offered the vision of a human mess in need of cleansing and redemption, which are what the Mass and the other sacraments offer. The area suffered more than spiritual malaise, though. It was defined by open and unchecked brutality, unprovoked knife attacks by psychotics released en masse from overpopulated psychiatric detention centers—the blood and detritus quickly washed away by firefighters with powerful hoses or by store keepers with buckets; overdosing heroin addicts and the syringes they left in alleys and bathroom stalls; public beatings of women for holding back on their pimps or badmouthing them or not being sufficiently grateful or effusive in their praise of their daddy. And there were the girls and boys my age and younger with the look of death in their eyes that turned to living fear when a pimp approached, or worse, perhaps, when that look was not of fear but of familial love.

I saw it all and feared it would never end.

But if there is one person who can take credit for taking eternal out of the Redemptorist’s Times Square epithet, it is former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Although the now-infamous term Giuliani Time first made its appearance in news stories about rogue police officers who sexually abused a detainee, suggesting erroneously that the mayor’s strong support of police had given them license to act in that way, it means for me bold leadership.

It is not the kind of leadership practiced by those who profess the tenets of liberal democracy where before every action there needs to be an impact study. It is a loud get-it-done now leadership unhindered by self-doubt or any concern for anyone but the hardworking taxpayers of New York City who show up to vote.

In 1995, two years into his mayorship, Giuliani pushed new zoning laws through the City Council that barred sex-oriented businesses, theaters, bookstores, massage parlors and nude dance clubs and topless bars from operating near private residences, houses of worship, schools or each other. Every prior effort at cleaning up Times Square had failed to pass First Amendment challenges. But however late he came into the game, he used these new laws to quarterback an end-run around those legal defenses.

As the smut shops left, Disney, MTV, ESPN and other media companies moved in. And the cleaning up of Times Square, what no one thought remotely possible, not only became possible, it became a continuing reality.

Since then, his reputation has suffered what may be irreparable damage for his legal work on behalf of the sitting President of the United States Donald J. Trump. His conduct is being investigated by federal prosecutors in the same city he once led, according to media reports.

But whatever one may think of this recent history—is it damning? Or is it merely zealous legal representation of a client and friend?—by cleaning up Times Square in the 1990s, Rudy Giuliani saved lives, he saved families, he saved souls.