How To Love A New York Pervert

R.I.P. New York City

Let’s offer a moment of silence for some of New York’s fabled homes of hedonism.

CBGBs (punk rock club)
Plato’s Retreat (sex club)
The New Amsterdam Theater (famous grindhouse movie theater, now a Broadway Theater)
The Playpen (strip bar)
The Factory (Andy Warhol’s studio)
Max’s Kansas City (rock club)
The Rawhide (gay leather bar… oh, wait a minute – nevermind)

One Dollar Pizza

The plain slices at this nameless pizzeria on the corner of 41st and 9th Avenue are supposed to be pretty good for only a dollar. It’s not only the food you’re here for though, y’know?  I mean, you’re right near the Lincoln Tunnel, Port Authority, and a shelter for junkies and the homeless – catch my drift?

Tompkins Square Park

The East Village has gotten several facelifts in one decade alone. No, it’s no longer the bohemian hell dive that Jonathan Larson elegized in RENT, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still edgy. Take Tompkins Square Park for example. After forty years, it’s still home to all the freaks, protesters, dirty hippies, and drug dealers Williams S. Burroughs used to write about. If you ever need to score, get a fake passport, or arrange any “private affairs” with a special someone (wink), hit up Tompkins at dusk.

8th Avenue: A History of Smut

After Giuliani leveled Times Square into Disney World, all of Hell’s Kitchen and Clinton slowly followed suit through-out the ’90s and ’00s. Bodegas turned into gourmet eateries, dive bars and roach motels became organic supermarkets. 8th Avenue, however, was the long hold-out and battleground.  Littered from 34th Street to 59th Street was every porn shop and strip joint known to mankind. However, soon enough, luxury hotels and condominiums were erected.  The brand new New York Times building occupies half of the block between 41st and 40th. Change is coming and what is a scumbag to do? Hock the finest in evening escorts to Starbucks customers and tourists? If you want some final glimpses of the seedy side of The Big Apple, hurry up and get here. Even The Playpen (above) was recently torn down for a new set of condos.

Burroughs & Huncke: Give Me Your Filth

There are no two writers that come more easily to mind when it comes to “seedy New York underbelly” than William S. Burroughs and Herbert Huncke. Both men were members of the iconic Beat Generation, a group of writers whose work shattered convention with its style and content. Burroughs loved the New York underground, writing several novels about drug use and philosophy. His landmark novel, The Naked Lunch, is an erratic, disjointed story of a junkie in New York City. The book was regarded as so perverted in the 1960s that it was put on trial for obscenity. Huncke was more of a figurehead, but a poet in his own right. He is famously known for exposing Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac to everything depraved and beautiful in New York. Without these men, Mike Bloomberg would have you believe everything was always G-rated.

Travis Bickle, be not proud

Everyone knows that one of the greatest documents of New York’s edgier side is Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. The film follows the story of vigilante/sociopath Travis Bickle’s crusade against moral decay. If you haven’t seen it, shame on you, you moralist heathen.