It's a book soon to be a documentary film that depicts the classic Times Square before pricks like Rudy turned it into disneyland.

it's excellent and just recently reprinted

I read this book over the summer (I think I found out about it here on XPT). It is a very interesting book. Boy, the porno houses in Times Square during the 70s were about as bad as it can get. Today, they couldn't get away with the "box lunch" specials they were offering back then.

Classic? Hardly. Times Square in the 70s was blighted and home to addicts, pimps, and the most low rent hookers to ever grace the earth.No respectable person would venture there Today its a tourist mecca and home to businesses like Skadden Aarps and Conde Naste. And if you ever get get to the Conde Naste caffeteria you might conclude the hookers are still there.

The resurection of times sq produced tons of construction jobs, tourism and revenue. Kind of hard to fund those programs the liberal types love without something to tax.Sorry,but you couldn't be more wrong.

Moxie, change to a better brand of tampon. Maybe it will make you not so bitchy.

Yeah, there are plenty of people in Manhattan who disagree with that opinion--all of the trash just got swept over into Hell's Kitchen, or whatever they're trying to call it now. I'm sure they are just real happy about that.

Josh Alan Friedman is a good pop culture writer. I've read this one, he gets mixed into the old vaudeville houses that turned into live peep shows. One of the stories he told was about porno director Phil Prince, who also used to do a live sex show at the Avon 7 with his wife; if Phil was in a bad mood, he'd often aim his money shot at someone in the audience. There were some stories about Long Jeanne Silver, Velvet Summers and Vanessa del Rio, too.

Some other good books on Times Square and its evolution:

"The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square" by James Traub. It starts with the early days of Times Square at the turn of the century, its transformation into a burlesque capital, then into a porn sewer.

"Times Square Red, Times Square Blue" by Samuel Delany. Although he plays for both teams, his autobiographical account of the place is pretty interesting.

I've never read "Sleazoid Express" by Bill Landis, but it got good reviews. And if you're really into the early history of the NYC neighborhoods, try "The Gangs of New York" by Herbert Asbury; it chronicles the rise of Tamany Hall, the Five Points, The Bowery, all the places in Manhattan where the gentrified Dutch got pushed out.