NYC'S NAD OLD DAYS ARE BACK IN TOWN
HOWdo you recreate one of the most famous neighborhoods in the world during its most infamous era? When you’re talking about Times Square in 1971, you have to look far and wide, especially now that the area is sanitized and sterilized (save for Elmos and desnudas).
“The Deuce,” premiering Sunday on HBO, is a drama about the rise of the pornography industry in 1971 in New York City and how mobsters, pimps and prostitutes all tried to cash in. The show takes its title from the old nickname given to West 42nd Street (aka “fortydeuce”) between Seventh and Eighth avenues.
Production designer Beth Mickle went to 30 locations in New York City’s five boroughs, searching for a place where hookers could prowl the streets under the neon marquees of classic porno theaters and peep shows.
Her quest ended in Washington Heights, on Amsterdam Avenue between West 163rd and West 165th streets. This stretch of delis, salons and storefront churches surprisingly checked a lot of boxes on Mickle’s list.
The street “has six lanes, with parking lanes, the same width as 42nd Street,” said Mickle. The sidewalks uptown were almost a perfect match: 20 feet for the real 42nd Street, 19 feet on Amsterdam Avenue. The entire street was “almost the same exact scale.”
Other musts included older store frontage, no trees and no scaffolding, something that is nearly impossible to find in Manhattan today. Washington Heights was also attractive because of its lack of boxy chain stores and glass condos. In other locations, she and her location manager kept finding “Foot Lockers and Duane Reades. [This stretch of Amsterdam Avenue] didn’t have completely new Chase banks,” Mickle explained.
Treating the two blocks as a blank slate, she and her team created subway-station exits and turned buildings into arcades, movie theaters and porn stores — adding plenty of litter to hit just the right, ugly, ’70s NYC notes.
Here’s how “The Deuce” made bad old Times Square come alive again in Washington Heights.