In the 1990s, Disney responded to New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s clean-up drive and moved into the area around 42nd Street and Times Square. Madame Tussaud’s opened a branch there in 2000. And the place has become home to stores selling Big Apple-themed merchandise, mass-produced sugary snacks and global fashion brands. The shops and cinemas selling sex and porn in the 1970s and 1980s were forced out.
Maggie Hopp, who worked in the administration of Mayor John Lindsday in the late 1960s, got a new lease of life as a professional photographer. Befriended by a “deep-pocketed” mentor named Seymour Durst, who encouraged her to get her realtor’s license, Hopp photographed the area. She recalled:
“He was, of course, more interested in determining which properties to buy, assemble and hold for long-term development, but I treated this pursuit as an opportunity to make a ‘photographic documentary art project’ and made a concentrated effort to find the best light, to be thorough, and to photograph every block and therefore to show which were the sites ripe for change and development ( e.g. parking lots, taxpayers, one story warehouses, etc.), recognizing the inevitability of change and that my images were a way of preserving the city at least visually!”
She photographed porno theatres, shops selling dirty books to men in raincoats and places like The Terminal Bar, which closed in 1981, a couple years after these pictures were taken. It’s where the self-medicated, pimps, punters and day-time drinkers hung out.
