The Tales of Times Square Archive

Josh Alan Friedman: Tales of Times Square Archive, 1950s–2008 In 1976, twenty-year old Josh Alan Friedman began covering Times Square for Screw, a weekly underground newspaper in New York with a run of 1,800 issues that, from 1968 to 2002, reviewed porn movies, peep shows, erotic massage parlors, brothels, escorts and other offerings of the adult entertainment industry. Founded by Al Goldstein and Jim Buckley, Screw was piled high alongside the New York Post and Daily News at every newsstand in New York. Its offices were ground central for dozens of underground cartoonists, editors, and writers who learned their craft then branched out into the mainstream. Friedman took on assignments that no other writer would touch, but in the nooks and crannies of this depravity, he found beauty: an irreplaceable urban ecosystem where a crude yet culturally distinct form show business was mastered. All gone in the wake of Disney-fication, Friedman documented his ten-year New York odyssey in three bo