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least ninety-nine percent black that passes this entrance everyday. There isn’t such a thing as a white person coming through. You come down here three in the morning, it’s impossible to walk on 42nd Street with all the gangs, hoodlums, and riffraff. But there’s no trouble in here, no fights, not in forty-four years. We’ll have a hundred people playing video games. We may have one that’ll give us a hard time, or we’ll have none. That one creates a disturbance with all the rest of the good people around. We don’t have any bad people in here. All our help is instructed to immediately get them out. You’ll have plenty of lip, arguments, but get ‘em outta here. Once they’re outta here, I don’t care what they do, it’s not my business anymore. I see someone even smokin’ a reefer, I says, you get the hell outta here!
    “You wanna change 42nd Street, you gotta start at 34th going up to 50th, between Seventh and Eighth, and tear every building down! Then, maybe you could change it. You think you can tear some of those buildings down and have a change? No, sir! So long as you have the low-priced theaters, movies, peep shows, cheap bars and hotels, glamorous lights floatin’ around, you’re not gonna change this neighborhood for any money. Your bus terminal brings in people from all over the world. This is the dumping grounds of 42nd Street.”
    Rubenstein won an appellate court decision to remain open until 3 A.M. , after the Metropolitan Transit Authority tried to force him to close earlier, making him a “scapegoat for street problems.” Three years ago he was ordered to install $10,000 worth of glass partition, which drunks continually break. But on Times Square’s most hair-raising corner remains Charlie Rubenstein, the only man to hold out after every other street-level proprietor from the old 42nd Street era had long since disappeared. Bring on the aggravation—Rubenstein’s gnarled fingers are forever pointing troublemakers to the exit, and he remains spry and sharp as a razor.
    “You talk to those hoodlums, they will not listen. How many summonses! a day I see the police give out, but they tear ‘em up. They don’t care about jail, it’s a joke. You have to come back and use that nightstick, and I say let them use it to have discipline and respect. I remember the day they did use it, and I know what’s happening now that they don’t. The policeman does wanna work, keep law and order, but his hands are tied from higher up. Those men would be rarin’ to go, they could clean it up in twenty-four hours, where respectable American people could walk down 42nd Street and not be bothered. Like Theodore Roosevelt said as police commissioner of New York, he says, ‘Men, don’t make any arrests. There’s more law at the end of a nightstick than all your courts put together.’”
    Rubenstein’s business began with crank-handle penny arcades showing Chaplin and Ben Turpin shorts, Dempsey fights, Ziegfeld girls in bathing trunks or playing basketball—“Not no peeps,” he claims, though he does admit to running one of a bikini-clad girl in 1953, which he was “quickly told to remove.” He’s seen the games he buys go from $35 to $100 in the old days, up to $4,000 for today’s largest videos. But one relic stands out amid the Ms. Pac Mans and Breakouts: “I still have the old grandmother with the crystal ball that dispenses a card, tells your fortune. That machine is with me since 1920. It’s not making any money, but I have it as an attraction of the old days of the penny arcade. I’m not giving it up.”
    Dancing on the Frying Pan
    A swarm of five black boys, each under ten years old, are trying to break into street-corner show business. They scatter out from the Hotel Carter’s new welfare rolls in Times Square, before the Broadway curtains rise. They run alongside pedestrians on 45th and Broadway, the folks headed toward Shubert Alley and a dozen surrounding theaters, and force people