Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
A Times Square marquee was more likely to heraldDeep ThroatthanThe Pajama Game.
Meanwhile, the surrounding neighborhood is mired in homelessness, shuttered businesses, and marauding Elmos.
When was there an idyllic Times Square, exactly?
The neighborhood they toil in is rowdy and often tough.
Did Times Square make a comeback after that?
As television caught on in the 1950s, the erosion continued.
By the early 1960s, a typical Broadway season would field on average 60 or so shows.
Even decades before the pandemic, that number had fallen into the 30s.
Granted, girly pix were not hardcore, but still.
Not that the ostensibly placid 1950s that preceded the anarchic 60s were nirvana in New Yorks Theater District.
Thats what I came to understand in my 13 or so seasons as theTimes drama critic.
I arrived at the job thinking I knew a lot about the theater.
But it depended on how you define theater.
There is the theater made by playwrights and actors and directors.
They are the most enduring and powerful force in the modern American theater, period.
Their reign began early in the 20th century and has survived unabated into the 21st.
In a real sense, you could say the Shuberts and theTimesinvented Times Square.
The two institutions histories were conjoined from the get-go.
They were in conflict almost from the start.
The Shuberts were interested in profits.
TheTimesliked profits too, but that meant sometimes publishing reviews and news stories that threatened the Shuberts bottom line.
(He praised its cast, but no good deed goes unpunished in theater reviewing.)
After a year, the Shuberts decided theTimes advertising was worth more than the cold war.
Sam was the canny Shubert, the vaguely artistic Shubert, the thought-to-be-maybe-gay Shubert.
The brothers he left behind, Lee and J.J., forged ahead.
Lee Shuberts urban masterstroke proved as permanent as any real-estate coup can be in New York.
Nothing else was brilliant about the sphinxlike Mr. Lee, as he was known.
He spent undue hours in daily sunlamp treatments that made others liken him to a Jewish cigar-store Indian.
Instead, they glowered at each other from palatial suites across the gulf of 44th Street.
He was moved there on his brothers initiative in an attempt to isolate and marginalize him.
As the century moved on, theTimesbecame a totem of middle-class culture and propriety.
This was hardly the case with the Shubert empire.
Lee died in 1953, his brother J.J. a decade later.
In keeping with the family tradition, the final Shubert scion had also produced nothing of consequence.
His funeral was held on the stage of the Majestic, where the set ofCamelotwas draped in black velours.
He bequeathed her the bulk of his estate.
The usurping Shuberts, named Gerald Schoenfeld and Bernard Jacobs, occupied Lees sumptuous quarters above the Shubert Theatre.
Ludicrously enough, the president of Columbia University sat on its board alongside John Shuberts alcoholic chorus-girl widow.
The new Shuberts were simply Gerry and Bernie.
Their faces could pass for the masks of comedy and tragedy in repose.
Before joining Shubert, Bernie had been a lawyer in New Yorks Diamond District.
She filed a suit to challenge the will that had left her husbands estate to the exchorus-girl wife.
The 54th Street Theatre was literally a block west of John Shuberts 54th Street home with Widow No.
2 claimed that he had obtained a Mexican divorce from Widow No.
1 and then married her.
1 claimed that a second will benefiting Widow No.
2 was a forgery.
The battle spilled into Surrogates Court.
When the dispute was abruptly resolved with an out-of-court settlement at the last moment, Widow No.
It was the previously obscure young Shubert lawyer Gerald Schoenfeld who brokered the deal for Widow No.
With her support, his and Jacobss ascent to the throne had begun.
Not for nothing didRolling Stonedeclare 42nd Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue the sleaziest block in America.
There was a crude justice to that verdict.
The gaping wound persists to this day.
(Neither of those demolished theaters were Shubert properties.)
Heres spring and summer.
Here pain is bearable.
One afternoon, I took my young sons to the intersection of 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue.
I wanted them to witness an inflection point in New York history.
Now, it was a ghost town, unlit and sepia-hued, frozen in time.
I had shown them neon-flooded vintage photos of what 42nd Street used to look like.
Change was on its way.
Sure enough, Disney came to Times Square, and change came with it.
Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism.
