’Porn-zone’ plan for New York

Press, 18 December 1976, Page 14

’Porn-zone’ plan for New York

From the “Economist,” London

Determined to boost its already thriving tourist trade, New York city has embarked on a fresh campaign to clean up Times Square, once its prime sight-seeing attraction. It began last summer, when it persuaded the state legislature to pass an anti-loitering law specifically aimed at keeping street-walkers from accosting delegates to the Democratic national convention. Although that law is under court challenge, the Beame administration has now proposed an even more controversial ordinance to get rid of the hordes of sex shops clustered in the Times Square area. It is modelled upon similar plans in Boston and Detroit.

The major object of the new proposal is to create discreet and tidy pornographic zones in commercial areas, prohibiting their establishment elsewhere in the city. According to city officials, this will restore the safety of now-seedy Times Square, which once had a

glittering, if tawdry, glamour. The main worry is the rapid and mushrooming growth zone of "adult” bookshops, pornographic cinemas, topless bars and shady massage parlours — frankly catering to thrillseekers and the prurient* minded. Their concentration in Times Square, which in spite of the new loitering law is again thronged with prostitutes, has lowered property values and driven up crime rates.

The Beame administration, which wants to build a cotvention centre nearby, is convinced that only drastic measures can restore the area. It points out that police. prosecutors and courts see prostitution as a victimless crime and are unwilling to take effective action. And it claims that respectable shops, which have fled the area, are unlikely to return so long as Times Square is shunned by respectable customers. But is a "porn zone ' the

solution? The New York Civil Liberties Union, which is leading the opposition to the anti-loitering law on the ground that it involves preventive arrests, has announced that it will challenge zoning as too vague on one hand and too sweeping on the other. Even though Detroit managed to survive a challenge to its zoning law before the Supreme Court, its legislation banned only new porn outlets, not those already in existence. In contrast, the New York proposal is designed to shut down more than three-quarters of the pornographic enterprises now in business and would put a total ban on massage parlours, where prostitutes are readily available.

Legally the city will have difficulty in applying so drastic a reform. Civil libertarians are convinced that suits to protect bookshops and pornographic film operators on the grounds of first amendment rights to free expression will be successful.

Other critics argue that zoning will either make vice and crime legitimate in the chosen area or else spread it all over the city. Boston,

where sex shops are confined to a small strip in the downtown areg known officially as the “adult entertainment district,” but commonly referred to as the “combat zone,” has been cited as an example for not going ahead with zoning in Times Square. In recent weeks two men, one a Harvard football player, were mortally wounded in attacks. Earlier Boston’s retiring police chief had alleged that the police in the zone have been open to corruption. In spite of Boston’s experience and the threat of legal challenges. New York city officials still insist that they will go ahead with their plan for cleaning up Times .Square because pornography has got out of hand. Some cynical observers, recalling Mayor Lindsay's efforts to arrest the flight of established businesses from the area, think that the city is more intent on discouraging new sex shops than on closing down those now in operation. In its present fiscal plight, they say, the city needs a certain amount of vice as a tourist attraction.