Remembering the Cheap, Tawdry, Downright Immoral Times Square
When you walk shoulder to shoulder through Times Square—where it looks like the sun is out at any hour of the day—it is difficult to imagine that this modern, Disneyfied tourist convergence was once a gritty, run-down hub for pornography and crime.
In this 1961 speech given to the West Side Association of Commerce, Monsignor Joseph A. McCaffrey, the Reverend at the nearby Church of the Holy Cross, laments the immorality of Times Square as "the greatest retail market of pornography in America”.
McCaffrey does not blame the "ever alert" police department, but rather the judicial system for enabling the proliferation of these establishments and calls on the city to revoke the licenses of such businesses. He concludes by associating the rise of sex crimes to juvenile delinquents:
We all deplore juvenile delinquency, and while we do not maintain that pornographic material is a basic cause of juvenile delinquency, still we maintain that it is a contributory cause, and certainly it is a cause for the alarming increase of sex crimes in our city and in our country. And so it is our hope tonight that the West Side Association of Commerce, despite all discouragement, will continue in their efforts to bring back to Times Square a semblance of public decency.
The recording begins with Judge Owen McGivern, Chief Justice of the New York Supreme Court, who presents an award to Monsignor Joseph A. McCaffrey for his "great struggle to cleanse and uplift the west side area particularly Times Square, for his unending battle against the cheap, the tawdry, the downright immoral." McGivern was presumably an important ally against lower court judges who, in McCaffrey's eyes, showed immoral leniency to Times Square criminals. According to McGivern,"...we are told that some nights the man in the moon blushes for shame when he sails over Times Square west of 42nd street."
In a 1968 New York Times article, on the occasion of McCaffrey's retirement, "...he was forced to acknowledge that the Great White Way was 'worse than ever.' He admitted discouragement and added that he was leaving the challenge to younger men." It took four decades to transform the seedy Times Square into today's LED monument to commercialization. With cooperation from city government and private investment in the 1980s, reputable businesses began to move back in, "legitimate" theaters were renovated on Broadway, and the pornographers were ushered out.
Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.
WNYC archives id: 150464
Municipal archives id: LT9437
WNYC is funded by sponsors and member donations
