But Times Square changed as companies like Starbucks and Disney moved in and it became the high rise center of the metropolis we know today.Īdult male hustler kisses a 16-year-old child prostitute in Times Square.Ĭhild prostitutes talk with chicken hawks, men who buy sex with boy prostitutes, in Times Square. Buildings were left vacant becoming home to squatters as they fell into disrepair.
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Others called them street hustlers, and many may have supported families through prostitution.Ĭrack dens would double as “sex-for-drugs” centers where boys would exchange sex for crack cocaine. The majority of the young lads who ended up leading this depressing life were runaways or kids that had been thrown out of their homes. These shocking photographs taken by Stephen Shames reveal the abuse and depravity of 1970s New York when male prostitutes and hustlers roamed the streets openly.Īccording to the book titled Runaway Kids and Prostitution, the young boys who fell into a world of drink, drugs and sex work were known as “chickens” and the perverse older men who exploited were called “chicken hawks”. “I don’t even keep the Playboys anymore,” says Rotenberg.In the 1970s, pimps and prostitutes haunted Times Square along with crime-filled subways and drug dealers. At the request of Dian Hanson, head of Taschen’s Sexy Books division, there’s even a category for dirty feet. The photos are organized in binders, and the binders are multiplying: Victorian hard-core, Edwardian postcards, fifties cheesecake-which is itself subdivided into blondes, twosomes, threesomes, big breasts, fetish, famous models, Irving Klaw, bondage, whips, Asian, black, and older women. She writes the introductions to his books, and her only qualm with the collection is that it has taken over the house. “Two boxes did make it to the bottom of a very wet Dumpster,” he laments, “while the others were delivered unto me.” reel of Candy Barr getting down and verrrry dirty.” The seller, he explains, didn’t want these items to be associated with her late husband, so she asked the auction house to destroy them. A local auctioneer gave him four boxes of material-“including a 16-mm. If these films do exist, says Rotenberg, their discoverer would make a mint.īack at Rotenberg’s old stone farmhouse, he tells his wife, Laura Mirsky, about the day’s unexpected haul. But the erotic artifacts most fantasized about are the possibly apocryphal blue movies made by mainstream stars like Marilyn Monroe and Joan Crawford.
Still, there are a few uncontested holy grails for a porn hunter: The most valuable magazine is the first-ever Playboy, with Marilyn Monroe on the cover ($7,000), and the most prized dirty book is one of the seven remaining original copies of My Secret Life, a Victorian hard-core sex diary ($500,000). Complicating matters further is the rather Proustian tendency of porn buyers to be most attracted to what they saw when they were young. There’s no value book and little turnover, so firm prices are hard to come by. Porn collecting isn’t codified into an industry like baseball cards and comic books. Recently, a single buyer bought $1,400 worth of erotic playing cards, and Rotenberg was once offered $30,000 for a rare film by the early-twentieth-century California photographer Albert Arthur Allen. Today, Rotenberg earns his living from pornographic books and sales on his Website,. It was only after a friend suggested he show his finds to an editor at Screw that he realized there might be money in it. Already something of a pack rat, the then-26-year-old Rotenberg scavenged Cruikshank drawings, Civil War newspapers, signed Picasso lithos, and lots of erotic material. City workers hauled armloads of obviously valuable first editions out of the apartment, but they left everything else to be tossed into the trash. Rotenberg became a porn-hound back in Brooklyn Heights in the late seventies when his neighbor-an heirless man who had been hoarding prints, magazines, first editions, and pornography for decades-died. There are vintage-nude-photo auctions ending every 30 seconds.” “EBay is like New York to me-it’s the land of temptation. “I want to acquire all that I can afford,” he says. Four Taschen books have been based on his personal stash-nearly 200,000 pieces and growing. Rotenberg is one of the country’s preeminent porn collectors. You never know when someone wants to sell some smut.”
“They have no idea what I do,” he whispers as we sit down, “or that I’ve got a thousand bucks in my pocket right now. Mark Rotenberg greets all the waitresses at his local New Jersey diner by name. Mark Rotenberg, with a fraction of his vast porn collection.