A Local’s View of Times Square

December 31, 1983. Forty years ago, I was working at the Liberty Theater on 42^nd Street, adjacent to Times Square. Projectionists had a strong union, so working overtime after midnight was “golden time”—double pay—right through the end of the shift at 4 am. But I wouldn’t have to work till 4 to collect it; all of the Times Square theaters closed “early”, at 1 am, this one night of the year.

So at 12:57 am, as I lowered the curtain and pulled the big knife switches, I knew the walk to the subway would be interesting. By the time I locked the projection booth and climbed down the iron ladder, the second and first balconies were already empty and the lobby was almost cleared out. I stepped out the theater door into…a strangely empty scene, brilliantly lit for television. Police barricades were keeping the still-rowdy, post-midnight crowd at the ends of the block. I walked towards the glitter and noise, like a soldier in Barry Lyndon marching into a fusillade.

The Liberty opened in 1904 as a “legit house”, a theater that hosted plays. By 1983, it had long descended to the ranks of a non-stop “grind house”, recently recalled by Quentin Tarantino’s film of the same name. Like its sister theaters on “Forty Deuce”, the grand old dowagers still packed ‘em in on New Year’s Eve, when television coverage gave The Street worldwide exposure. A half century before there were multiplexes, there were a dozen single-screen theaters in one block, totaling 14,000 seats, sitting atop the junction of five major subway lines.

For decades, my uncle Tommy worked a block north of there, where he was a machinist maintaining the presses of The New York Times. “Sure, it’s a liberal paper”, he’d say at family gatherings sixty years ago, “But it’s all in there.” Times Square was quite literal; not only the newsrooms, but the delivery trucks were right there. The newsstands in the Square got the papers ahead of everyone else, so big shots used to send their assistants there at eleven pm to collect tomorrow’s edition. On Saturday night, if it wasn’t raining, they’d all have their pre-delivered sections of the Times folded and ready for the delivery of the final section of the voluminous Sunday paper.

There’s a general impression that Times Square was ruined by a Sixties flood of pornography, but that’s not exactly so; fewer Times Square theaters than you’d think showed porno. Most ran regular movies, with an emphasis on guns and girls. By the time there was actual pornography there, it was already widespread elsewhere. But there’s always been a sleazy side, and the style of the Square has always been dictated by young men: By the Thirties, that meant pinball parlors, tattoo parlors, arcade games, dubious magazine stands, bars, barber shops, and Dime-a-Dance floors.

That was the dominant Times Square audience, servicemen between train connections, people arriving at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, thrill seekers, and clumps of teenagers seeking action pictures at the cheapest price in the few remaining triple bills. Sugar Hill, Cleopatra Jones, and Coffey for $1.50; hard to beat that deal. As the Seventies progressed, an almost all-male, heavily armed, reefer-smoking audience understandably repelled the remaining family crowd. It became a vicious circle.

Some of my first days as a union projectionist, in 1974, were spent learning the trade showing Kung Fu movies in Times Square. The area had hit bottom by then, living up to the Midnight Cowboy image. Soon I moved up to somewhat classier surroundings in Greenwich Village and upper Manhattan. The women starring in the movies in the “art houses” were still topless, but they spoke what I am told is flawless French. Even so, the Street endured without me in the projection booth, as did the Square that it crossed.

I’d moved to Los Angeles by then. By the early Reagan years 42^nd Street still had the best ticket prices in the city. If in the early years of the Eighties, you wanted to see three Chevy Chase comedies for $1.75, come on down. Conveniently, a mental health free clinic had also opened nearby by then, so a wish to see three consecutive early 80s Chevy Chase comedies could receive free treatment. New York City’s Ed Koch era was a now mostly forgotten, combative preview of the Giuliani years, and his friendly relationship with Ronald Reagan irritated his fellow Democrats no end. By now, Times Square was starting to recover.

It was in this still less than paradise time when I was back in New York, because it was use-it-or-lose-it time for my union card, my literal ticket of admission for film and television technical jobs. I was in town, doing a few months of well-paid Liberty “time” because even after five years in Hollywood, I didn’t want to lose the backstop of that card, and the projection booth was the fastest, most dependable way to keep it.

As the fall of 1983 turned cold and rainy, more people came to the theater just to stay dry and warm. When I brought the lights up at 3:54 am, and they had to go back out into the streets and subways, many became agitated. This is the kind of situation that even the best film school training somehow doesn’t cover. We dealt with it. The Liberty, like other Times Square theaters of that era, employed “ushers” whose sole job criteria was the ability to intimidate on sight. The kind of men who could terrify nightclub bouncers.

Once out on the street, though, I was on my own. The NYPD shift change was at 4. In theory, the outgoing and the incoming patrol shifts were supposed to overlap, but in practice, the old shift left a few minutes early and the new one arrived a few minutes late. No big deal in the wee small hours of the morning, but all 12 of these huge theaters emptied out at exactly that dead time with no cops on the street. I was at a family dinner one weekend and happened to mention it. My uncle Jack frowned and asked a couple of questions, reflecting a police point of view. All low key, very friendly dinner talk.

The next time my night shift came up and I stepped out of the theater, there was a patrol car there, even at 3:50 in the morning. What’s more, the 4 o’clock guy was already across 42^nd Street, with his window grimly rolled down to present his clipboard to the shift boss. Patrolmen in winter gear were at the corners. Generally, I’d have to say that Victory Day in Moscow’s Red Square, 1945, was probably not as well guarded.

The cops didn’t look happy, but they were getting their behinds kicked into gear for a reason: somebody told Inspector Kelly something bad, and accurate, about what Patrol Battalion Manhattan North was doing. With the bluest eyes on Times Square, I walked quickly to the subway.

As it turns out, from a vantage point of forty years later, I’d never need to work in the projection booth again. Of course, I couldn’t have known that, one full hour into the year 1984, as I stepped out of the Liberty theater.

I was born after the Orwell book was published in 1949, so for my entire life 1984 has been a symbol of foreboding, of a dystopian tomorrow, and its arrival was treated as a nervous joke. Was this the year that President Reagan would unleash World War III?

But IMHO, the best McVey family story about New Year’s Eve and Times Square belongs to one of my brothers, a pilot who at the end of the last century was one of the principal members of NYPD Aviation. (We can argue about the definition of “end of the 20^th century”.) On December 31, 1999, he was on duty a thousand or so feet above Manhattan, ensuring that unauthorized aircraft were intercepted before entering a restricted zone above Times Square. But there were no radar blips, no sightings, no unexpected problems on the ground.

The police helicopter could hover with great stability, even when tilted to a useful observation angle. And that was my brother’s job, monitoring the scene. He punched in the location and the angle, and was privileged to see in the New Year, and the new millennium, from a unique vantage point over the dazzling lights of Times Square.