Wendy Robert
Forget the brightly lit, family-friendly tourist hub of today. The Times Square of the 1970s was a different beast entirely. It was the gritty, beating, and often broken heart of a New York City that was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. This was a place of peeling paint, buzzing neon, and raw humanity. It was a world most people hurried past, but photographer Kenneth Siegel called it his studio. Armed with his camera and a profound sense of camaraderie, Siegel didn’t just document the area; he preserved the souls of its inhabitants, capturing the defiant, vibrant life that thrived in the city’s most notorious neighborhood.
The Landscape of Decay and Desire
Walking into Times Square in the 1970s was like stepping onto a movie set for a film about urban decay. The air was thick with the smell of roasted nuts, exhaust fumes, and damp pavement. The famous glowing signs, the “Great White Way,” had taken a hard turn. Towering marquees advertised not Broadway musicals, but pornographic films with lurid, sensational titles. These signs cast a constant, colorful, and sleazy glow on the sidewalks below, bathing the entire scene in a perpetual twilight of red and blue.
At street level, the area was a chaotic mix of storefronts preying on every human vice and desire. Grimy arcades blinked and chimed, promising cheap thrills. Narrow hot dog stands served thousands of customers a day. And everywhere, there were the sex shops, the adult bookstores with blacked-out windows, and the “peep shows” that charged by the minute. The entire district was a testament to survival, a seedy melange of small-time entrepreneurs and hustlers making a living on the fringes.
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The city’s financial crisis was written on every surface. Graffiti snaked across walls and storefront grates. Mounds of trash bags lined the curbs, and the sidewalks themselves were a grimy mosaic of dirt and neglect. This wasn’t a place of polished glamour; it was a place of raw, unfiltered reality.
The Cast of Characters
The true soul of 1970s Times Square was its people. This was the domain of the outsider, a magnet for those who didn’t fit in anywhere else. The sidewalks were populated by a cast of colorful habitues, each with a story etched on their face. Street hustlers with watchful eyes scanned the crowds, sex workers in platform shoes and fur coats claimed their corners, and runaway teens with a mix of fear and defiance tried to navigate their new reality.
Kenneth Siegel’s lens captured them all. His photographs are a gallery of the era’s street style, untamed and unapologetic. People sported elaborate tattoos that snaked up their arms. Their clothing was a wild mix of leather, denim, and flamboyant patterns, accessorized with a “street-wise expression” that served as both a shield and a statement. This was a uniform of survival, a way of signaling that you belonged to this tough, unforgiving world.
The Camera of a Friend, Not a Voyeur
What makes Siegel’s work so powerful is the connection he had with the people he photographed. He was not a tourist stealing snapshots of the strange and exotic. He was a fixture in the neighborhood, a familiar face who walked these streets daily, camera always around his neck. He approached his subjects not as specimens to be studied, but with a deep camaraderie and a sense of identification.
This trust is evident in his pictures. His subjects look directly into the camera, not with suspicion, but with a sense of ownership. They are not being captured; they are presenting themselves. Siegel explained this unique relationship himself. “Most of the portraits are of people I know, usually by street name,” he said. “They all knew me or knew of me often asked me to take their portrait.”
This flips the entire dynamic of street photography on its head. The people in his photos were not victims of a voyeuristic gaze. They were collaborators. Siegel believed they had a “need for recognition,” a desire to be seen and acknowledged in a world that often rendered them invisible. “I could not have made these images without their cooperation,” he stated. His camera became a tool for them to assert their identity, to declare their existence with pride and dignity.
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