LARKER ANTHOLOGY Issue 1: Times Square Edited by Patricia Silva www.larkeranthology.com Published by Shambalissima Editions New York, NY, May 2013 Cover: Irving Underhill: The north side of Times Square illuminated at night, 1921. Cover: Plasmatics and Wendy O Williams show in the late 1970’s, sledgehammering a television set. This page: Billy Rose Theater, photographer unknown.
It used to be called Longacre Square, although technically it has always been an inter
A well-known spot for sailors and their cravings. When Alice’s uncle Oswald was due to sail away, he gave Alice permission to use his camera. Alice was then ten and this was her introduction to photography: a bulky wooden box she would grow up tinkering with. And lug around, despite its weight settling in at almost 50 pounds. In a horse-drawn buggy in the 1880s and 1890s, Alice transported her equipment to expose on glass plates. After the Depression, she lost everything and didn’t make any more pictures. When Alice Austen set up her tripod towards the Hammerstein Theater to make this picture, a woman taking a photograph was in itself a spectacle. Theater baron Oscar Hammerstein opened his Victoria Theatre on March 3, 1899. The rooftop featured a Dutch-style dairy farm with live cows and a costumed dairymaid. “Eddie Foy Jr. remembered the glass of warm fresh milk the dairymaid gave him after he and his brothers finished performing.” This was during Prohibition, when other theaters ended their evenings with guests drinking champagne out of a large bowl with a nude showgirl floating in there. That kind of flash.
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Longacre Square was the center of the carriage-maki on horseback attempt crowd control during the Clash’
ing industry, mirroring London’s urbanity. Policemen h’s one week run at Bond’s International Casino in 1981
1976. Wendy Orlean Williams arrives at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. She spots an ad in a magazine lying open on the station floor. It was a casting call for Rod Swenson’s experimental Captain Kink’s Theatre. Williams replied to the ad. “I knew right away she was one-of-akind”, Swenson has said. Two years later they formed the Plasmatics. Blowing up cars on stage, bringing the street and its energy into performance. Live at Pier 84, Williams writhes on top of a speaker, screaming into the microphone, just before blowing up a Chevy Nova SS : “You live just for these / You’re a sex junkie / You’ll do as I please / Your name is sleaze, You’re a sex junkie / You’ll do as I please...”
“spic,” “nigger,” “faggot,” “bum,” your daughter is one.
The Sleeze Sisters. Two runways, Nicky Marotta and Pamela Pearl, an angsty misfit and a sulky sweetie, meet in a hospital. Together they flee, fall in love and start a band, while living in an abandoned pier on the west side, celebrating their “escape from mental illness.” That’s the basic premise of Times Square, the 1980 film by Allan Moyle. Times Square’s Nicky Marotta has the vocal brashness of Suzy Quatro, the stylings of Joan Jett, an intense swagger similar to Shane McCutcheon, and the aura of Angelina Jolie’s Margaret “Legs” Sadovsky in 1996’s Foxfire. Nicky Marotta’s rebel ethos preceeds the Riot Grrrl movement by least one decade. The Sleeze Sisters’ signature was pushing television sets out the window. They were radio girls...
Curtis Hanson, Children of Times Square, 1986
David Wojnarowicz , Arthur Rimbaud in N.Y. (Peep Show), 1978-1979
Lahoma van Zant and Judy LaGrange leave their Times Square hotel room for ice cream
July 17, 1986. Video by Nelson Sullivan
Kate Moss in Glenn Luchford’s City Slick for Harper’s Bazaar, 1994.
Circa 1930. Men, reading in Bryant Park, “...a small park adjoining the Public Library on Forty-second Street...well known to straight and gay men alike as a meeting place for young ‘fairies’ in the 1920s and 1930s.” — George Chauncey
Lillian Bassman, Anneliese Seubert in Times Square, New York. The NYT Magazine, 1997
Monica Mugler outside Sally’s Hideaway II, 1994
Norman Parkinson, Wenda in Times Square for American Vogue, 1949
“Sure, long before models on television expropriated the word, Sylvia was the original fierce and I am grateful to her for that, but more, I’m glad for the softness she taught me in all the fierceness. I’m most thankful that the last word I shared with Sylvia was
love.”
— Alyssa Harley for Sylvia Rivera’s 60th birthday
Family, Times Square by Louis Faurer, 1948
In 1885, Oscar Hammerstein purchased plots of land along Broadway, between 44th and 45th Street, and built the Olympia theater. Saturday, January 15th, 2011, 45th and Broadway. Carlos Castro’s sisters release his ashes onto the street, two weeks after Castro’s brutal murder at the Intercontinental Hotel, by his male lover, Renato Seabra, who wanted to free himself from “demons, from the virus.” Angola-born and Lisbonbased, Carlos Castro was a prominent journalist, gay activist and television personality for 35 years. He came out publicy the mid-1990s. Up the block on 46th street, one year later, Max Neuhaus’ Times Square sound piece is reactivated at the original sidewalk grate that it was installed from 1977 to 1992. Church bells soaring from the underground.
OWS protest on June 6, 2012 by Tracie Williams
Madonna fans; Nicky Minaj; X-Ray Specs; Yoko Ono; Strolling blind Times Square 1938, during the filming of Alexander’s Ragtime Band;
musician, 1944 by Peter Stackpole; The Times Square show, June 1980; The Clash on the rooftop of Bond’s Casino, by Laura Levine, 1981.
ISSUE 1: TIMES SQUARE