2. Doin’ Time In Times Square

According to Charlie Ahearn, 43rd Street and 8th Avenue of the 80′s had been strangled by the government for at least 20 years. Times Square was shut down because of the potential of a real estate boom in the area. Ahearn says 8th Avenue was ‘The grime crime capitol of NYC’.  The night life was rife with ‘action’. The general public were intimidated by dealers openly selling drugs, young women were being harrased by men looking for prostitutes and the general lawlessness of the area gave rise to organisations such as the Guardian Angels. Street kids from Brooklyn and the Bronx came to 8th Avenue to buy drugs, watch kungfu films and play the amusement arcades in the area, it is said it was common for kids to be robbed while playing games in the arcades. Prostitution, transvestites, drug dealers, pornography. All this, literally under Ahearn’s window. 

He was already fascinated with street culture, making the film The Deadly Art of Survival and Wildstyle. Times Square was in the midst of the Street scene, and so was Ahearn’s apartment building. He moved there in 1980 with his artist wife, Jane Dickson, while in the process of setting up his Wildstyle production office.  Ahearn usually shot on 8mm film, but the birth of his son in 1986 prompted him to buy a video camera.

 8th Avenue night life would become active between midnight to 6 am, and Ahearn wasn’t getting much sleep, he woke up night after night to film whatever was going on in the street outside;  transvetite madness, drug deals gone wrong, fist fights… LOTS OF FIST FIGHTS! As Ahearn put it - TTragedy after tragedy”‘ unfolding.

Times Square Sleaze

Ahearn’s voyeurism became a replacement for the newspaper, if he needed to know what was happening he just looked out the window. Most of the footage in Doin’ Time In Times Square was captured when a commotion out in the street below woke him up. One night, woken by loud Biz Markie music playing, he went to the window with video camera to find a group of people doing crazy dance moves in the street below. When people visited his apartment, Ahearn would show them his video recordings, the video tapes were a mixture personal family activity and drug addict fights and prostitutes on the street. This was what gave Ahearn the idea of presenting Doin’ Time In Times Square as an extended home movie.

If you’re fascinated by the madness that is the underbelly of society then Ahearn made this film for you. This twisted dark comedy of night terrors is prime time viewing for the voyeur in most of us. Hollywood has made billions feeding our hunger for street dreams by repeatedly selling us a dramatised version of what occurs outside our own windows, so wasn’t it inevitable that sooner or later we would want THE REAL THING?

"Get down before the police come!"

Nowadays the viewing of reality tv in the form of street madness is common place, internet sites such as You Tube present us with all the makeshift reality madness TV we require. The cyber voyeur that is everyday Joe Public will unleash the iPhone camera at the slightest altercation, which then can and will be uploaded to our personal channels in an instant. Welcome to the world of bum fights, Nigerian vs Ghanaian bus arguments, MC battle gone wrong, the crackhead street madness, black vs white street fight… There seems to be no art to capturing human tragedy on an iPhone, and equally nothing mentally beneficial to gain from watching the madness on your computer. But in Ahearn’s own words what he captured was “a slice of life of a time gone by“, when society paraded its damaged goods openly hand in hand, up and down Times Square for the world to see. Charlie Ahearn’s film is a documentation of  Times Square’s ongoing nightly reality tv twisted drama… tragic, funny, freaky, fascinating. He played mini big brother with his aerial view of the madness below.

Bum Fights

Woman attacks man with broom stick!

While his family slept, Ahearn filmed junkies and lowlives from the safety of his apartment above, at least it was relatively safe once he had the iron front door fitted. Filming lowlives is one thing but allowing them into your apartment is another! Fitting the iron door came after his front door was kicked off the hinges by thieves. Jane, his wife, home during the breakin screamed out “C’MON MOTHER F%^*£RS I’M READY FOR YOU!!!, which prompted the thieves to flee empty handed.

The Times Square filmed by Charlie Ahearn no longer exsists, his apartment building was torn down and replaced by a “Miami style art deco 37 storey building”. 

“Times Square has been Disneyfied”, but he does not miss it, says Ahearn “why would anyone want to reminisce on the grime and crime of Times Square?”

"Don't be Side kickin my side kick"!!

The punch knocked the guy out cold! He was robbed by at least 3 other characters where he lay

Crack head goes through the unconscious guy's pockets.