TERROR-STRICKEN TABLOIDS
Stop the presses! Bare-breasted buskers the ballyhoo of Broadway!
The ‘Tit Squad‘
Cops Battle a Scourge of Naked Lady Parts
…with help from pious pols & Officer Jesus
by Thomas Adcock
Copyright © 2015 – Thomas Adcock
NEW YORK CITY, near America
Be warned, ye horny gents on holiday here, the Public Morals Division of the New York Police Department is watching you! Yes, you—all you drooling out-of-towners landed here to behold the promenade of semi-naked ladies in the so-called Crossroads of the World.
The forces of rectitude are shocked (shocked!) at the main event of late in Times Square—young Hispanic lasses swanning through the tourist hordes in thongs and painted bare breasts, soliciting cash tips for souvenir pics.
They are known as las desnudas.
To meet this fresh challenge to the chastity of New York, a detachment of plainclothes cops now furtively prowls a neo-naughty Times Square—with special focus on a sprawling pedestrian plaza that only six years ago was clogged with smelly, exhaust-belching vehicles, and what remained of the district’s raffish attractions.
A bit of background:
Efforts to expunge the legendarily decadent Times Square began in 1993. The goal was a safely “festive” atmosphere, with a soupçon of old timey neon funk. Step by step, the area was scoured and scrubbed: prostitutes were driven well south of iconic Forty-second Street; the homeless were given the bum’s rush; street corner drug dealers were somehow disappeared; “grind houses,” where aficionados of film pornography and transvestite hustlers lazed through their days and nights, were shut down and padlocked. Few complained that cops and their nightsticks were a bit too liberal in applying “wooden shampoos” to the despised.
Municipal tax revenues zoomed with new high-rent commerce: tourist tchochtke shops, Disney emporia, middle-brow cinemas, franchise eateries familiar to anyone from Kansas, a massive Toys ‘R Us outlet, and chrome-laden office silos. But the pièce de résistance, the pedestrian plaza, was a distant dream.
But in 2009, a determinedly upright brigade of political Pecksniffs and real estate developers—the latter constituting the most odious syndicate since Tammany Hall—accomplished what fe
w believed would ever come about: a “family friendly” beacon of walkabout wholesomeness in the tawdry heart of Gotham. The plaza cost millions upon millions of dollars for construction and traffic reengineering.
Then, in this summer past, came las desnudas—with their pechos femeninos prancing around. Something had to be done, for Heaven’s sake!
Thus was channeled the ghost of Anthony Comstock (1844-1915), the self-proclaimed “weeder in God’s garden” who founded the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice in 1873. Operating under the auspices of the United States Post Office, Mr. Comstock’s persecution victims included anyone who mailed publications advocating birth control, women’s liberation, sex of any sort—or promoted smarty-pants stage plays à la George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950). God’s weeder denounced the playwright as an “Irish smut peddler,” much to Mr. Shaw’s amusement.
Times Square police post
A certain wag of my acquaintance, gainfully employed by the N.Y.P.D., informs me that newly-created on-site Public Morals vigilance comes with a rotating patrol crew of a dozen officers instructed to keep their eagle eyes on the pedestrian plaza of Times Square. In police circles, the unit is known as the “Tit Squad.” Formation of which is on orders from city’s highest ranks, namely Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton. The two Bills—each man born in Boston, a city famously settled by sanctimonious Puritans—are quite upset about brassiere-free, painted-speckled female bosoms right out there where everybody can see them (or at least their shapes). Gadzooks! Never mind that the marauding mammaries are patriotically hued in red-white-and-blue; never mind how sweet are the personas of las desnudas in comparison to less demure lovelies—men as well as women, scant of clothing and lascivious of smile—portrayed in enormous advertising billboards that tower over the plaza.
At a recent City Hall press conference, a red-faced Mr. de Blasio declared of the spicy spectacle (excepting, of course, the heavily taxed billboards), “This is a situation I won’t accept! We will deal with it very aggressively.” At the mayor’s side was Commissioner Bratton, who added a sentiment of his own. With reference to the spoliation of the pedestrian plaza, Mr. Bratton said: “I’d prefer to just dig up the whole damn thing and put it back the way it was.”
—On hearing the commissioner’s view, the real estate syndicate no doubt began feverish imaginings of millions upon millions more dollars required to restore the smelly traffic.
Justin Davidson, a level-headed columnist for New York Magazine, published a rejoinder to the Bills: “[E]radicating a pedestrian plaza because you don’t like who’s walking there is like blasting away a beach because you object to bikinis, or paving a park because you hate squirrels.”
Far be it from me to presume greater knowledge of police strategy than the Bostonians, or to question their moral convictions. But my advice to the Bills would be to gear down their zealous desire to save us from what they deem horrifying. In the recent past, New Yorkers have weathered much worse than the sight of painted breasts. And another thing: expunging two-bit vice can prove expensive.
Beware of what you may prefer, Mr. Bratton. Let me take you on a stroll down Memory Lane, so that you may fully understand the “way it was.”
Since 1985, I have resided where I was once forbidden to go—Hell’s Kitchen, the historically Irish and German immigrant district of midtown Manhattan’s west side, between the Hudson River and Times Square.
During a portion of my youth, in the 1950s, I lived in the northernmost uptown reaches of Manhattan in care of my Uncle Fred, a U.S. Navy veteran of World War II who certainly knew what he was talking about in warning impressionable laddy-bucks such as myself about the perils of downtown sin—specifically the sin of Hell’s Kitchen and the “Devil’s Playground,” as he called Times Square. He forbade me to set foot in either place, though I was mightily moved to satisfy my curiosity about why these neighborhoods inspired low whisperings among my elders.
In Fred’s postwar day, weary soldiers happy to be home at last in the good old U.S.A. disembarked from troop transport ships pulled up to the river. Quick as they could, they legged it over to Times Square, necessarily passing through the street where I now live in gentility; a street back in 1945 that was lined with tattoo parlors and hi’ya sailor dumps, both of which were waylay stations for more than a few of Fred’s comrades.
Soon enough, those Navy swabbies and Army grunts who survived the gauntlet of Hell’s Kitchen found themselves awestruck in the roaring gut of Times Square; the Great White Way it was called then, on account of electric lighting that turned midnight to mazda day. Swabbies like Fred, boys-returned-as-men, were togged out in crisp bell-bottom trousers and shiny black shoes and starched white caps.
They were boisterous back-slappers, these freshly-minted vets with money in their pockets ready to blow on pleasures dreamt about at sea—hoochy-koochy girls at the Melody Burlesque, taxi dancers at the Satin Ballroom and the Tango Palace; chop suey joints and jazz clubs; pool parlors; the Hawaii Kai club, guarded by Pee-Wee, an autocratic midget in a military-style uniform complete with epaulets; bar room baby-dolls nuzzling for drinky-poos; and Hubert’s Flea Circus—featuring the stars Sealo the flipper boy and Lydia the contortionist, and lectures about the “hidden secrets of sex,” delivered by a professor with Brilliantined hair and a pencil moustache from the “Paris France Academy of Medicine.”
For the luckily concupiscent, commercial trysts were available in all three genres: male, female, and door number three. (Nota bene: Beware the perpetual danger of catching “the crabs.”) For the unlucky who dared climb the stairs to their pleasure choices, a bop on the head with a braided sap was all they remembered before the lights went out—and their money, too.
Still, there was a ribald innocence to Times Square of the late 1940s and ‘50s. Criminal acts were relatively few, and victims generally deserved what they had coming.
Enter the 1960s: rebellions for better and for worse against sexual mores and traditional authority; an existential threat of nuclear Armageddon by way of proxy wars between the U.S. and Soviet Union; the slaughter of tens of thousands in Vietnam, for the dubious “domino theory” purpose of preventing worldwide communist domination; the widespread use of psychotropic drugs as a deceptive balm to carry us through the dark.
All of it was breathlessly reported in big, bright headlines beamed from the colloquially-known “news zipper,” high atop 1475 Broadway—known today as One Times Square; originally as Times Tower, built in 1904 as headquarters for the New York Times—which began the December 31 tradition of sliding a giant lighted ball from tower roof to the street, as countdown to New Year’s Day in this part of the world.
For merely ten years, the Times occupied what was once a graceful tower, a structure of Italianate style, before moving on to a succession of two nearby buildings. In 1963, the Allied Chemical Company bought the tower and immediately set about destroying its graceful presence by slapping up exterior gobs of smoked glass, dull gray marble, and billboards. The ball still drops, and the whole world still watches; and we have, over time, grown accustomed to the sheer ugliness of a cold, corporate box.
In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court eased obscenity laws, ushering in a swamp of pornography that plagued Times Square through the 1970s, the ‘80s, and a chunk of the ‘90s. Low-level Mafiosi, men like Michael “Big Mickey” Zaffarano, took the opportunity to make something of themselves in the nascent industry of mass-market dirty movies. True to his moniker, Mr. Zaffarano was the biggest dirty movie mogul of them all, though disrespected among his peers and the legitimate showmen of the Broadway theatre. After he collapsed of a fatal heart attack in 1980, on the sidewalk outside his flagship Pussycat Cinema, not one of Times Square’s nearly two hundred porno houses dimmed their lights in his honor.
Porn brought increasing waves of ancillary scuzz, which was bad for legitimate stage business in the streets fanned off Broadway west to Eighth Avenue. There were respectable people who wanted to kill Big Mickey, but he became instead that rarity of the underworld—a man who died of natural causes. Nowadays, Broadway is booming.
Of the scuzz period, I recall trekking to a Wednesday matinée performance in 1971 and in the space of fifteen minutes encountering a Puerto Rican transsexual hooker stabbing his john in the eye with her fingernail, a crazed evangelist raving about perdition, and a pair of skells picking a wallet from the back pocket of a mark, then racing madly down into the protective gloom of a Stygian subway station.
The Hawaii Kai was still in business in ’71, and Pee-Wee was still on guard. By that time, he was a bit hobbled. He needed the steel cane he’d begun carrying for his basic mobility. But he knew how to use the cane for alternate purpose—and often did, though he tried manfully to be a worthy Christian at most times, turning the other cheek to physical threat.
The night after that matinée, Pee-Wee was singing while on duty, as he often did:
When your body
Suffer pain
And your heart you can’t regain
Take your troubles to the Lord
And leave it there
If by “the way it was” the police commissioner means to reference those decades from the postwar decades forward, the last three of which are well within the memory of many New Yorkers, my guess is that most of us would tell him, “No thanks, Mr. Bratton. We’ll take the current Times Square instead, even if it’s become so tame it should probably be rechristened Square Times.”
—Personally, I appreciate Square Times for reducing smelly traffic and serving New York as a magnet and corral for gawking tourists. In the same way, I appreciate those in real estate syndicate who tout high-priced “gated communities.” People who think they need to live in such places should be locked up behind gates and away from the rest of us.
The pedestrian plaza of Times Square is an open-air workspace for buskers and beggars who have a right to their various pursuits of happiness in accordance with free speech guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution—so long as they don’t get too pushy about their business. Along with las desnudas, charmed and not-so-charmed tourists are fair game for jugglers, magicians, stilt-walkers, tap dancers, panhandlers in soiled cartoon character suits, jolly dipsomaniacs seeking funds for “wine research”—and 45-year-old Robert John Burck, the celebrated “Naked Cowboy.” The buff and topless Mr. Burck wears a Stetson hat, patent-leather boots, tighty-whitey briefs, and a guitar. Insofar as Mr. Burck is concerned, the mayor and police commissioner have not voiced offense sufficient to summon a Public Morals team to dog him.
The Tit Squad is another question. Mr. Bratton and Mayor de Blasio see these snoops as a thin blue line between the near-antiseptic locus of midtown Manhattan and all hell breaking loose—so far as hell breaks loose anymore in New York; according crime statistics compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, New York is the safest big city in America.
Last September 3rd was a business-as-usual Thursday evening in the nation’s safest big city. The following incidents constitute the entire crime blotter of that date:
- Around 9 o’clock, one Mark Walters, a Bank of America executive visiting from North Carolina, posed for a quickie snapshot with a young bare-breasted lass. Soon thereafter, uniformed cops noticed Mr. Walters brawling on the sidewalk with her. He claimed that she had lifted his wallet; she denied any such thing, contending that Mr. Walters yanked her hair and pulled her down to the street for no reason, whereupon a bare-breasted colleague came to her defense, only to be allegedly punched in the face by Mr. Walters. The bank exec awaits trial for on two counts of assault while free on bail in the amount of $1,500 (€1,327.61).
- Meanwhile, a pair of Tit Squaders encountered 20-year-old desnuda Destiny Romero of the Bronx, and her 22-year-old boyfriend Jason Perez, also from the Bronx. The officers said the pair proffered cocaine and methylenedioxy-methamphetamine pills. Shortly before midnight, all four rendezvoused at a cut-rate hotel in the vicinity, whereupon the men of the Tit Squad said they bought the drugs for $20 (€17.71). Further, Ms. Romero is alleged to have volunteered an act of conjugation at a discounted rate.
That very night, other precincts of the city experienced their usual run of high crimes and misdemeanors. For example:
- After a hard day’s work of fleecing people, the frisky wolves of Wall Street relaxed at a posh downtown brothel. The establishment shall remain nameless here, save to say that it is equidistant from City Hall and N.Y.P.D. Headquarters.
- East of Times Square, advertising agency executives prepared new business presentations for the next morning. They sustained themselves for “dawn patrol,” as the manic overnight duty is known in Madison Avenue, by huffing cocaine.
- An unknown number of attacks upon persons of unglamorous races, carried out by brutes with guns and badges, went unrecorded. So, too, the usual incidents of lawyers pilfering their clients’ escrow accounts.
The Public Morals Division would do well to establish a “Swindle Squad” and a “Mad Men Squad” and a “Wrong Number Squad” and a “Shyster Squad.” All units would provide leverage in the crusade to protect New York City from impurity.
Women walking around in public sans bodice and bra may be wacky or witty or provocative or prurient, but they are not lawbreakers.
In the 1992 matter of People v. Ramona Santorelli & Mary Lou Schloss, the New York State Court of Appeals voided the trial convictions of the appellants for violating Penal Law § 245.01 whilst picnicking in a city park, to wit: they exposed “that portion of the female breast which is below the top of the areola.” The high court ruled that § 245.01 ran counter to the Constitution’s equal protection clause, in that “it betrays an underlying legislative assumption that the sight of a female’s uncovered breast in a public place is offensive to the average person in a way that the sight of a male’s uncovered breast is not.”
However, the ruling failed to immediately soothe the delicate sensibilities of New York police officers:
- In 2005, one Jill Feely was arrested while strolling topless down a Manhattan avenue. Feeling fouled, Ms. Feely filed a lawsuit against the city predicated on the Santorelli-Schloss decision. She won settlement of $29,000 (€25,644.43).
- In 2011 and ’12, performance artist Holly Van Voast was arrested a total of ten times—for being topless aboard a Staten Island ferry, dining topless at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station, loitering while topless in front of a school, riding topless on a train, and attempting to enter a Hooters boîte while topless. (Ironically, Hooters is a national restaurant chain that venerates buxom females by way of its eponymous raillery and employment prerequisites.)
At her initial court appearance, Ms. Van Voast forthwith stripped off her blouse. The judge dismissed all ten charges. Still pending in federal court is her lawsuit against the city and police department, which seeks an ample monetary award for punitive damages.
In February 2013, Mr. Bratton’s budget-minded predecessor at the N.Y.P.D. was Ray Kelly. The ex-commissioner ordered precinct captains throughout the city to warn line officers against “arresting or issuing citations to a woman or women on grounds of public lewdness, indecent exposure, or any other section of relevant penal law for simply exposing their breasts in public.” The warnings continue to this day, delivered in station house muster rooms at the start of each day’s shift of officers.
The order was and is appropriate, though unnecessary during the city’s frigid months when topless women are seldom seen in public—nor topless men; long before the first snowfall, the Naked Cowboy heads for the South. This is beside the fact that precious few New Yorkers have emulated the likes of Ms. Van Voast, Ms. Feely, Ms. Santorelli, or Ms. Schloss—four women in a city of eight million plus. In the past several weeks, moreover, days have gone by when las desnudas are nowhere to be found. An earnest young woman who declined to give me her name—the seated woman in the picture at left—takes credit for this. “I have been praying for those nasty bare nakeds,” she told me. I asked if she’d spoken to any of them. “No, and I ain’t about to start with any of that. Those bad girls, they keep away from me—but I seen them peeping at my sign sometimes. I believe in my heart that Jesus scares them off.”
Listening to this, I was put in mind of the “Irish smut peddler” and what he had to say about the likes of the lady with the sign and her soulmate of an earlier epoch, Anthony Comstock.
“Comstockery is the world’s standing joke at the expense of the United States,” wrote George Bernard Shaw. “Europe likes to hear of such things. It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place, a second-rate country-town civilization after all.”
- Thomas Adcock is the America correspondent for CulturMag
tadcocknyc@gmail.com
Fotos (c) Thomas Adcock
