ADULT VIDEO WORLD
To the left of the dilapidated New Amsterdam Theater, Adult Video World, located at 210 West 42nd Street, was originally Black Jack; a scumatorium beneath contempt. The most interesting thing about Black Jack is what it was before Richie took over. Black Jack, although a seedy bookstore, offered a large selection of erotic paperback books, foreign correspondence mags, and (60) coin-operated peep-booths to view 8 mm X-rated films. These squalid booths alone made Black Jack a serious contender for condemnation by the NY Board of Health; the failure of the rancid ammonia concentrate to properly disinfect the disgustingly filthy booths. Black Jack also showcased the ‘Frisco S + M Theater’, which featured other forms of beatings, other than the one on your nostrils. By all counts, Black Jack dealt a winning hand; as upstairs featured a crummy open-window Peep-A-Live, with loose girls working the windows for a fistful of dollars, and a misbegotten Love Team copulating on center stage in a pool of bodily fluids. Aside from the touch-a-rama and the live acts; an unsightly drag queen often hovered the blue and yellow booths surrounding the stage, propositioning customers for $5 blow-jobs in the oversized 25 cent peep booths.
The original owner of Black Jack was Joe ‘Baldy’ Bicchini, who was found shot dead in a used-car lot. The entrepreneurs that took over following the ‘hit’ were Sonny Scotti and his brother Jimmy, both from Italian Harlem, and both degenerate gamblers. Sonny, who bragged he was ‘going to make a lot of money with white powder’ was busted for selling blow and landed in the can where he died. But as Lady Luck would have it, Richie took over the depraved Black Jack and transformed it into pristine Adult Video World, minus the residue of stale ejaculations and the acrid smell that goes with it. Though Show World employed professional swabbers with a G.E.D. in janitorial skills, it was Richie’s concoction of fresh lemon-cherry decontaminant that effectively purged the putrid booths of any impending germ warfare. Thus Black Jack became the Deuce destination for nightcrawlers, narcissists, Negroes, and Caucasians who remembered the repulsiveness of the previous tenant, yet readily embraced the new spanking-clean version in the chic Show World style.