Tell All the Gang on 42nd Street

She's an ugly cow, but she gives a lot of milk.

--Real estate broker describing New York's 42nd Street

THE cynical businessman was explaining why 42nd Street is difficult to clean up, much as it needs sanitizing. The analogy is apt for a cowpath that became one of the world's most famous streets. Forty-second was once the grandest lady of the theater. Florenz Ziegfeld produced his Follies at the New Amsterdam Theater. Gertrude Lawrence, Bea Lillie and Will Rogers were stars of the street, and at the Liberty Theater there was music by George Gershwin, danced to and sung by Fred Astaire. Now it is a center for pornography, perversion and prostitution.

The thoroughfare is alive virtually round the clock. Some moviehouses close their doors only four hours out of 24. Many of the sidewalk food stands never shut up shop, and the blocks on either side of Times Square offer a pungent cosmopolitan tour of cheap cookery--hot dogs, pizzas, pastrami, chow mein, hamburgers, tacos. Garish neon lights stare down on cameras, transistor radios and the other gadgetry that will soon be bought by gullible visitors or grace the lockers of soldiers and sailors who have been on leave in New York. Record stores blare their wares onto the street while teen-agers flip through album after album. Prostitutes, panhandlers, winos and pickpockets dot the sidewalks. One of New York's most intensive police patrols prods them from one end of Times Square to the other and back again. It is the street where every item is marked discount or clearance.

The worst bargain on the street represents a pillar of the neighborhood's economy: pornographic magazines--20 to 35 pages of sexually explicit pictures for $3 and up--and high-priced peep shows, strip joints and "adult" movies. Fed by a clientele that includes hustlers, briefcase-carrying businessmen and tourists, the street is riding a sex boom strong enough to pay the rent on some of the city's most expensive real estate. As restrictions have relaxed, the pornography market has become more explicit and more selective. The owner of one of the street's nameless bookstores (titles and literary allusions are for Greenwich Village) observes that two years ago customers paid little attention to the aesthetic quality of models. Now a Playmate standard has begun to assert itself in exotic literature. Most of the customers are men, with the big rush arriving just after business hours when homeward-bound commuters and tourists beginning a night on the town descend on the area. Those women who do come in are easily placed in one of two categories by the proprietors: European women peruse the shelves with little self-consciousness; American women giggle and laugh.

Live entertainment is flourishing along with printed pornography. Awkward strippers and graceless dancers abound, and even the peep shows have their live counterpart. One club features a many-sided room with 25-c--a-peep slots where men stand for a few minutes viewing a nude model sprawled on a mechanically driven Lazy Susan. This year, simulated sex shows came to New York. Imported from the West Coast, performances in New York are presented in the guise of an educational experience. Patrons, so the signs say, do not come to see a sex show; they come to find out how one is filmed. The M.C. circles a fake movie set with a home movie camera, occasionally stopping to bark directions. A young couple named Bunny and Claude are the new stars of the old theatrical district. Claude, 23, and Bunny, 19, perform eight shows a day at each of two "clubs." Their routine concerns a career girl who returns to her apartment to find a burglar. The masked robber forces her, at gunpoint, to strip, dance and finally make love to him. In mild observance of current laws--and the limits of Claude's endurance--the couple is prevented from actual copulation. Instead, they produce moans and vigorous motions.

"We consider this a legitimate form of contemporary burlesque," Claude says. "This thing is just a sexually influenced variety act that happens to be more permissive than a few years ago." Bunny says that their act "is good for the people and good for us. They're voyeurs and we're exhibitionists. It's symbiotic."

As Broadway has its off-Broadway, so 42nd Street has its more daring offshoot. On 24th Street, the Club Orgy presents a live show that includes sexual intercourse. Club Orgy has been raided 14 times during its 14-week life, but manages to reopen quickly, often within an hour, simply by temporarily removing the offending "playlet" from its line-up of four short sexual dramas.

Laws against obscene or pornographic books and shows are not as explicit as the materials they are meant to control. The porno entrepreneurs operate in a shadowland of complicated and slow judicial review that follows quick seizure and arrest by the police. A relaxation or--as the President's Commission on Pornography recommended--a complete abolition of laws restricting adult access to any pornographic materials, might well change 42nd Street dramatically. And the present proprietors are not sure that the change would be in their financial interests. As obvious and available as the smut is now, to make it even more accessible would drive down prices. More important, it would deprive customers of the sense of novelty and naughtiness that now spices the experience of browsing on 42nd Street.

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