History
The former Longacre Square was renamed to honor The New York Times, which first established its offices and printing plant nearby in 1904.
For much of the mid and late 20th century, the area of 42nd Street near Times Square was home to activities often considered unsavory, including peep shows. A comedian once said, "They call it 42nd Street because you're not safe if you spend more than forty seconds on it."
A popular 1933 movie musical named 42nd Street, set in Depression Manhattan, colorfully described the bawdy mixture of Broadway shows and prostitution during the early 20th century. In 1980, it was turned into a successful Broadway musical, which was revived in 2001 in a theatre that was itself on 42nd Street. The following is an excerpt from the musical:
- In the heart of little old New York
you'll find a thoroughfare; - It's the part of little old New York
that runs into Times Square…
From the late 1950s until the late 1980s, 42nd Street was the cultural center of American grindhouse theatres, which spawned an entire subculture. The book Sleazoid Express, a travelogue of the 42nd Street grindhouses and the films they showed, describes in detail the unique blend of people who made up the theatre-goers, including black pimps, low-grade mafiosi, transvestites, Latino gangsters, "rough trade" homosexuals, aggressive lesbians, trench coat-clad perverts, and thrill-seeking squares. The street became the title of a film by Busby Berkeley in 1933 (42nd Street) and a stage musical based on it from 1980 (42nd Street), which experienced a revival in 2001.
Read more about this topic: 42nd Street (Manhattan)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.”
—Imre Lakatos (1922–1974)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)