Black Cracker Presents: Tales of...Season 1
Tales of Times Square: The Tapes
This podcast presents voices of strippers, old fighters, burly-q men, peep show girls, hustlers, cops and the priest who tried to save them.
By Josh Alan Friedman
Season 1: Tales of…Times Square: The Tapes
An audio record of Times Square in the 1970s and '80s, drawn from Josh Alan Friedman's original cassette interviews.
Between 1977 and 1986, Friedman reported from 42nd Street for Screw, The Soho Weekly News, High Times and New York magazine, and the tapes he made became the book Tales of Times Square (Delacorte Press, 1986), still considered the definitive account of the strip before Disney and the Times Square redevelopment cleared it. Nothing in this season is reenacted or narrated from memory. These are the voices themselves, restored from deteriorating cassettes.
Episodes include Pee Wee Marquette, the caustic emcee of the jazz club Birdland through the '40s and '50s; Izzy Grove, one of the last surviving Guys and Dolls characters; and Bob Anthony, Frank Sinatra's boyhood friend and first bodyguard, who ended up running the back office of the Melody Burlesk.
Start anywhere. Each episode stands alone.
PEE WEE MARQUETTE WAS THE CAUSTIC M.C. AT HISTORIC JAZZ CLUB, BIRDLAND, DURING THE ’40S AND ’50S. The short-tempered midget spent the last 25 years of his life as doorman-greeter for Hawaii Kai, a schlock tourist restaurant next door to the Winter Garden Theatre in Times Square. Come bend your ear to another voice of…
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TO HEAR IZZY GROVE IS TO UNDERSTAND DAMON RUNYON. UNNERSTAND? One of the last Guys & Dolls characters to survive into the porn era, Grove was a welterweight fighter known as The Ghetto Avenger in the 1920s. In 1983, he is being thrown out of his office. Hustling in Times Square for 60 years, he…
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WELCOME TO THE BACK OFFICE OF THE MELODY BURLESK. Frank Sinatra’s boyhood pal and first bodyguard, Bob Anthony, also became a big band singer. Tougher than Frank, but devoid of hit records, he went on to found the Melody Burlesk in Times Square. Like the Heimlich maneuver, you might assume a lap dance occurred somewhere…
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FROM HELLS ANGELS TO BURLESQUE. A Columbia Presbyterian nurse, then a drug counselor in the California prison system, Raven de la Croix busted loose as a burlesque star at the age of 32. She’d also spent eight years with the Hells Angels and starred in several Russ Meyer films. Here in the headliner’s dressing room…
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WELCOME TO THE BOWELS OF 42ND STREET. It’s 1983. Charles Rubinstein has run the penny arcade at 8th Avenue and 42nd Street since 1939. “This is the dumping grounds of 42nd Street. But I’m not a-scared of any individuals that tries to threaten me. You have to use that nightstick, and I say let ’em…
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