It was interesting to live and work in Manhattan, near Times Square, back in the late 1970's and the 1980's. My uncle was telling me the stories of what it was like -- and boy it was an adventure....
He used to work at a building on 8th Avenue, near 45th Street, that was a hot-spot (and I don't mean wi-fi!) day and night. Now remember, this was before the Internet or cell phones became so common. So that if you got into trouble, and needed to call someone, you needed coins to call someone from a public phone.
Now my uncle was telling me that at lunch time he liked to go and eat at one the local diners or little restaurants on the avenue, or just walk down to Times Square. The only problem was that as you walked down the block, from one corner to the other---you had to run through a gauntlet of pimps, drug dealers, prostitutes, bums, and all sorts of crazies and wackos, some of them zonked-out on drugs.
So the simple task of getting lunch became a game of survival: get to the place, buy lunch, and make it back to the office in one piece. He said that, naturally, as he walked down the block, the assorted characters he met, would hand him little business card, directing him to this or that place--where he could have "fun" and other activities to make him "happy". He just nodded, took the cards, and kept walking.
One day, while he was inside this fish and chips place, he hears a big commotion outside, so he --like everybody else--runs outside to see this two women fighting and calling each other every name on the book. From what he could piece together from their screaming, one was the mistress of the other's husband, and each was calling the other filthy names.
My uncle said that the best part of all this was that the pimps and prostitutes were egging the women on and shouting at them -- that the winner could work for them -- as they were there on the ground tearing each others clothes off, pulling hair, and scratching face.
Finally-- he had enough and went to the public phone on the corner and called the police. Believe or not, when the police came, people actually started booing them for stopping this great spectacle! And--as if by some sort of magic, suddenly the pimps, the prostitutes and the drug dealers--just vanished from the street. My uncle said that he looked around and was, like--what? where did everyone go? Not wanting to be questioned by the police as to what had happened, he like the others, just kept walking and headed back to the office.
He tells me that when he visits Times Square now, and sees how clean and sanitized it has become, he sometimes thinks back to the bad old days, and tells me that nope--he certainly doesn't miss it!
