Down 42nd Street: Sex, Money, Culture, and Politics at the Crossroads of the World - Softcover

Eliot, Marc

3.62

32 ratings by Goodreads

9780446679930: Down 42nd Street: Sex, Money, Culture, and Politics at the Crossroads of the World

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0446679933 ISBN 13: 9780446679930

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2002

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For years, it loomed as the universal symbol for forbidden sex, theatrical glamour, mob muscle, and political influence. Today, thanks to an astonishing metamorphosis, it has emerged as the new century's favorite American family fantasyland. Naughty, bawdy, and wondrously revealing, this is the life story of the planet's most extraordinary thoroughfare. Parading some of New York City's most unforgettable characters -- including Ed Koch, Donald Trump, Jackie Onassis, Gerald Schoenfeld, and Rudy Giuliani -- bestselling author Marc Eliot portrays as never before the battle between the brothels and the theaters for control of the world's crossroads, the Syndicate's exploitation of pornography to set up a massive Times Square drug operation, and the chance in-flight encounter between the media heiress and the studio boss that planted the seed for "The Deuce's" sweeping Disneyfication. DOWN 42nd STREET is at once colorful social history, spectacular boardroom drama, and grand and suspenseful narrative spectacle. Book jacket.

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Review:

In Down 42nd Street, Marc Eliot offers a fascinating and pugnacious history of what may be the most famous street in the United States--or at least the most famously decadent one. "By 1980, [New York's] fabled Manhattan crossroads had become ground zero for the manufacture, exhibition, and distribution of pornography, drug dealing, pedophilia, prostitution, and violent street crime," he writes. Eliot describes 42nd Street's development over time, and he's not afraid to go after a few sacred cows. Here's what he says about the "greatest generation" right after the Second World War: "GIs returning to the U.S. via New York City's harbors and ports were point men in the postwar sex and drug revolution." Today, of course, 42nd Street is a very different place, thanks to a conscious cleanup effort that has brought in Disney and other corporations. Eliot views this trend with a distaste that other may not feel: by the end of the 20th century, he notes with irritation, "42nd Street had become a horizontal Statue of Liberty, a place native New Yorkers avoided like Yellow Fever." All in all, Down 42nd Street is an excellent piece of opinionated urban history told with verve. --John Miller

About the Author:

Marc Eliot is a bestselling biographer whose successful titles include To The Limit: The Untold Story of The Eagles. When it was published in 1993, Eliot's Rocknomics: The Money Behind the Music was widely hailed as one of the best treatments of the economics of popular music. Marc Eliot is a native New Yorker who divides his time between Los Angeles and upstate New York.

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