'Times Square’s decline can be dated to the Depression, which introduced burlesque, flea circuses, and dime-a-dance halls, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that the bottom fell out. The grand Broadway palaces partitioned themselves into grindhouse theaters; Forty-Second Street became “the Deuce”; Strip-Tease gave way to Peep Show; Peep Show gave way to Live Sex. Still, it is possible to detect, in Friedman’s chronicles, beneath the squalor and disgust, contravening subtones of glee, ribaldry, even elation.'

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8549-how-the-movies-captured-times-square-s-grimy-golden-age