Here is a phrase I only just became aware of: nostalgie de la boue (“yearning for the mud”). In his chapter on the demise of Times Square in Vanishing New York: How A Great City Lost Its Soul, author and blogger Jeremiah Moss further clarifies this, via architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, as “the sentimental attachment to decrepitude and sleaze . . .a venerable urban tradition.”

Muschamp went further, in 1996: “Where have they gone, the chicken hawks and stiletto knife displays, the peep show shills, the pickpockets, coke heads, winos, pimps and tramps? We had a world class gutter here. Must we trade it in for a shopping strip of retail chain outlets?”

If Muschamp and Moss can lament, let me add my small voice to the chorus. That tawdry, tactile, magnificent mess of a neighborhood was my first home in New York City, and I too mourn its demise. The world it contained informed the adult-child I was in the early Seventies just as indelibly as had the small suburban enclave where I grew up.

Danger always flickers at the edges of any child’s universe. Disappearing fathers with their strong, reassuring arms catapult one closer to the flames, testing personal limits and capabilities of how to feel safe. Alone. All these years later, faint tracers of that trajectory still stream through my consciousness.

The last time I was on 42nd Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue and felt any vestige of that hyper-pulsating block (that I dared myself to walk down upon arrival, just to see if I came out of it alive), was in the late 1980s. I had earned my green belt in karate and needed to buy a bō, a long martial art stick, from a shop that might have been there all those years previous, tucked between peep shows and porn theaters. The irony didn’t escape me. All I was packing in 1971 was an eighteen-year-old “good girl’s” sense of daring. I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, and I knew it.

The Disney-fication starting to happen in the 1990s, and my red flags went up as the red light district went out. It all sort of sounded good, on the surface. Make things safer? Who could argue? Perversely, me.

Fear is a basic instinct—nothing else heightens the sense of feeling alive as that breath you finally exhale when you get just past it. Yet, I guess it’s all relative. For me, the all-consuming plague of corporate porn is far worse than the old-fashioned garden variety that once flourished in Times Square. I could never attempt to match Jeremiah Moss as he describes meticulously why it this is so, in Vanishing New York.

All I know is that I feel gutted when I visit my old neighborhood.

How easily I plugged into that throbbing street energy, and with it, the tactile seediness. My suburban backdrop faded into history—bland Colonial and ranch houses (reflecting even blander life prospects), slow trawls through the local hangout, McDonalds (required first stop with a newly acquired drivers license), unrequited crushes on boys (both squeaky clean jocks and the shadier rebels without a cause)—all just an out-of-town tryout for the stage set before me.

Our turf. Irish bars with wafts from steam table fare and stale beer snaking over the sidewalks, pawnshops beckoning with diamond rings and musical instruments long abandoned by desperate owners, shoeshine men stationed on high-traffic corners with stained fingers whipping the rag, over and over, and tired hookers tucked into sooty SRO doorways trying to meet nightly quotas for their pimps, who, like cockroaches, were rarely seen in the light of day. Enveloping, even nurturing—while soaring above it all—was that ever-seductive siren, the Broadway theater world: the heart of the sexy beast beating deep behind velvet curtains.

They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway
They say there’s always magic in the air.

Second Day in NYC – Mon. Sept. 6, 1971 (Labor Day)
[Letter to high school friend]
Dear D____ ,
Tessa and I were walking all over town today—I really like her. The Y is fantastic—big room (not dingy at all), good location (the theater district). Like 8th Ave. is junky, but things improve as you go east. The location is good cause it’s a 10 minute walk to Central Park, 5th Ave., & any other midtown place & subway. Yesterday we got in at 1:30, lugged all my junk up (my mom got the look-over by the elevator guy & told me to watch out for him). Tessa got in at 6 and we didn’t go out, just talked and talked. Today we found out 8th Ave. is the prostitute hang-out, & there’s a porno movie house opposite our room. But there’s also, just catty-corner from us, a Howard Johnson’s, a deli (with YOGURT!) around the corner—like everything is so convenient. So we’ll likely stay here all year. We fell in love with the city today. — Hell’s Kitchen and Couture Dreams

copyright Sharon Watts

lyrics copyright Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller