A Modest Proposal to Return Unemployed Sex Workers to the Deuce

Photo of 42nd Street in l985 by JG Klein

If everyone gets mentally healthy and poverty is eradicated where will the prostitutes come from? The world’s oldest profession will come to a halt. What will politicians like Eliot Spitzer do when they need to destroy their careers? But the problem is even more profound. Sexual trafficking is being attacked by writers like New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and someday it may even be eradicated and then what will happen? Will the whole world become like 42^nd Street. Once the Deuce, as it was called in its bawdy heyday, was a magnet for human degradation. Flesh was cheap and perverts had their pick of cathouses and XXX peep shows. The human cost was tremendous, but is what replaced it any better? Is there a latter day Damon Runyon who will record the sites and sounds of what has become essentially a New Jersey mall situated in the middle of what was once the most cosmopolitan city in the world? Midnight Cowboy recorded the squalor of 42^nd Street in its prime as did Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. But malls in New Jersey are now open season for carjackers and snipers and let’s just hope that the price for the suppression of one form of human misery isn’t something even worse. Once prostitution is finally eliminated, let’s employ all the unemployed streetwalkers to simply prowl the neighborhood and protect it from terrorists.

Unmiraculous 34th Street

There are no miracles on 34^th Street anymore. 34^th Street is the paradigm of all that is wrong with an American street or a street anywhere for that matter. 34^th Street in Manhattan lies in the shadow of the nearby Penn Station, which is virtually imploding, but that’s a case of urban blight that’s actually a sui generis expression of the failure of the human spirit. In terms of 34^th Street Penn Station is important only since it has catalyzed 34^th street’s fall into a place not only devoid of miracles but exemplary of urban despair. A mall is usually composed of chain stores and fast food outlets. 34^th Street has all the characteristics of a run down mall without the relief of the kind of communal space you find say on the Deuce, which recently completed gender reassignment surgery and is now  a bona fide New Jersey mall. But 34^th Street is not only made by the shops, its particular lack of character is also result of the kind of people who go there. No street attracts more wimps, penny-ante hustlers and bottom feeders than 34th.  The middle verging on lo-brow Macy’s may help in creating the unique feeling of hopelessness that characterizes the demographic. Capping the mood, is the presence of the DMV License X-Press office between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. Here women with averted  eyes and leering men wait for their numbers B112, B113, B114 so that they can get learners permits and license renewals. Moving to the East along 34th we have the grand old Empire State, which King Kong once hiked up with Fay Wray in hand and a disgruntled office worker recently went on a shooting rampage (“2 dead, 9 wounded in Empire State Building shootings, police say,” CNN, 8/25/12) The space occupied by the grand old Longchamps Showboat is now the Heartland Brewery, where other disgruntled office workers drown their sorrows and the once grand B. Altman, across the way, offers a ray of light, having been turned into a CUNY’s Graduate Center--though school is school.