The Complicated Legacy of Paul Moss, La Guardia’s Infamous “Gutter-Cleaner”
By Jonathan Kay
Outside the conference room at the Bow Tie Partners offices in Times Square, there is a framed letter, dated September 5, 1944, addressed to one “Master Charles B. Moss, Jr.” — the grandson of legendary New York City film exhibitor B.S. Moss (1878-1951), who still presides over the family film and real-estate business:
My dear Charles:
When you are old enough to read this letter, you will learn that I welcomed you to this great city of New York on your arrival, as one of its citizens-to-be, and I wished you many years of happiness and good health and contentment. In order to give you tangible evidence of that welcome, and of my great regard for you and your parents, I enclose a War Bond for $25.00, made out to your order and hope to go with you to the bank when it becomes due. At this time, a great world-wide war is at its height, and please God we all hope it will end soon and no further wars during your lifetime.
The letter is signed by B.S. Moss’s younger brother Paul, the grand-uncle of the then newly born “Master Charles,” who had come in to the world eight days earlier. Off in the top left corner of the framed version appear the words “Office of the Commissioner.” And though New York City has had many commissioners of one type of another, everyone who mattered at the time would have known the precise nature of this man’s remit. At the height of his powers, in fact, Paul Moss, New York City Commissioner of Licenses, was arguably more famous, and certainly more powerful, than his older brother Benjamin.
Magic in the Dark: One Family’s Adventures in the Movie Business
By Charles B. Moss and Jonathan Kay Sutherland House, 2021
186 pages
As a youngster, around the turn of the century, Paul had performed on stage as a blackface comic. (One source identifies him as having performed in a duo called Clark and Williams, which apparently was known for a tune called We Are Two Dandy Coachmen.) When Paul got older, he helped Benjamin produce movies and operate theaters. He also produced the 1931 thriller Subway Express, and a play called The Mongrel starring Rudolph Schildkraut, a legendary Hapsburg-era Austrian stage actor who would become famous in America for his role as High Priest Caiaphas in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 film, The King of Kings.
All of these achievements, however, would appear as mere footnotes to Paul Moss’s principal claim to fame as gutter-cleaner during the full tenure of Fiorello H. La Guardia, New York City’s mayor between 1934 and 1945. As Time magazine indelicately put it in 1937, “Paul Moss is a big, grey-haired Jew whom Mayor La Guardia picked to be New York’s Commissioner of Licenses when he turned Tammany out of City Hall three years ago. Since the power to license is the power to reform, Commissioner Moss, who is as notable for his integrity as for his dapper dress, lost no time suppressing short-weight ice dealers, market racketeers [and] dirty magazine publishers.”[1]
A conspiracy theorist would be forgiven for noting that Paul and Benjamin’s interests were aligned when it came to keeping the city’s well-known entertainment areas respectable, since pushing out disreputable businesses made it easier to upsell film entertainment to middle- and upper-class New Yorkers. During the early years of the Great Depression, burlesque shows had begun migrating to Times Square, occupying facilities that had been abandoned by “legitimate” theater companies that had run out of cash. The bawdier fare presented women in a state of quasi-striptease and promoted a type of comedian (the so-called “nance”) who presented himself as a barely closeted homosexual. These acts were crowd pleasers, but also legally risky in a city bound by the Wales Padlock Law, which prohibited “depicting or dealing with, the subject of sex degeneracy, or sex perversion,” including homosexuality in virtually any context.[2] Consistent with the appalling homophobia that marked the era, even Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness was banned at one point, on the theory, as one city magistrate put it, that “the weaker members of society” must be protected from “corrupt, depraving and lecherous influences.”[3]
New York City had no shortage of morality monitors during this era, but Moss’s tenure as Licensing Commissioner took puritanism into a new phase, and with fresh allies. The influx of burlesque into Times Square catalyzed the creation of an entity called the 42nd Street Property Owners Association, or POA.[4] As Andrea Friedman wrote in a 1996 study of the campaign against New York burlesque houses, “members of the POA witnessed firsthand the Depression’s effect on Times Square merchants, watching as storefronts increasingly became occupied by proprietors who catered to working-class and lower-middle-class customers. Many of the organization’s members blamed the new burlesque theaters for this state of affairs, claiming that their presence chased away more respect- able merchants, drove down property values, and generally ‘cheapened’ the street.”[5]
The POA’s agenda dovetailed with that of La Guardia, who loved populist stunts such as burning obscene books and magazines, and taking a sledgehammer to illegal slot machines. La Guardia had seized on the moral panic over lurid sex crimes, such as the 1936 rape and murder of a young writer named Nancy Evans Titterton, to demonize burlesques and similar entertainments as mind-addling engines of violence and perversion. The political cover provided by the associated public hysteria allowed Paul Moss to close down New York’s last burlesque theaters (though the court battle over these actions would not end until 1942).[6]
Almost eight decades later, Paul Moss’s name is still sometimes used as a byword for social panic and repressive sexual attitudes. The 2013 Broadway show The Nance included Moss as an unseen character in the crowd, a foil for “Chauncey,” the gay stage entertainer played by Nathan Lane, whose turmoil drives a plot that plays out amidst the 1930s-era crackdowns of the La Guardia administration. At one point, Chauncey described Moss as a “confirmed bachelor,” suggesting that Moss is not only cruel and intolerant, but a closeted hypocrite besides.
It is true that Paul Moss was indeed a lifelong bachelor (whether gay or not), and that he pushed through many of the notorious above-described policies of the La Guardia administration. But The Nance presents only one side of the man. Much like the suffragettes and teetotalers of the early 20th century, who also embraced racism and even crackpot eugenics, Paul Moss had a decidedly mixed legacy as a social reformer.
As his New York Times obituary noted, many of the new policies Moss brought in were actually liberal and humane. Prior to his tenure, children weren’t permitted to attend movies unattended, and would often loiter outside until some stranger agreed to escort them inside (a practice that, in itself, posed all manner of unsettling risks). In 1936, Moss had a law passed that allowed children to enter on their own “provided they sat in a separate section, with a matron in attendance.”[7] He shut down genuinely unsavory business operators, such as grifters who preyed on tourists, minors, and the unwary. He began rigorous implementation of a much-abused law that had been designed to prioritize wounded World War I veterans in the awarding of newsstand licenses. He also pushed through a 1941 law that permitted such newspaper vendors to sell their products from enclosed kiosks (“news booths,” as the press described them), instead of standing around on the sidewalks (as Paul’s brother Benjamin had done as a boy). As any visitor to New York City knows, those kiosks exist to this day.
Additionally, on July 8, 1945, four weeks before the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a black military veteran named Jacob Johnson was refused entry to two beachside bathhouses in the Rockaway Park area of Queens. Along with other black bathers, Johnson, who had served as an anti-aircraft gunner in the South Pacific during the war, summoned a police officer to confront the bathhouse owners. According to news reports, the managers responded by simply closing their ticket windows. When Johnson came to Moss with the story, the License Commissioner held hearings, and concluded that the businesses had “willfully and knowingly discriminated against Negro citizens by refusing to grant them admission… Such conditions cannot and will not be tolerated.”[8] PM newspaper reported in August, 1945 that this was a new form of action under New York State’s Law Against Discrimination, thus making this scourge of the gay performing arts world and former blackface performer something of a human-rights pioneer, a complicated legacy to be sure.
For the Moss family, Paul Moss delivered a more particular kind of legacy. During the Great Depression, Times Square really was at risk of losing its reputation as a first-rate entertainment hub, as mainstream theaters were replaced, as one writer put it, by “burlesque halls, vaudeville stages, and dime houses.”[9] If things had continued to deteriorate, there would have been nothing to discourage the city’s highbrow entertainment — including Broadway theater — from migrating completely to other areas, such as the Upper West Side, where Robert Moses’ Lincoln Square Renewal Project (now known as Lincoln Center) took shape in the 1950s.
Paul Moss’s puritanical campaign, however reviled by many artists, helped maintain Times Square’s public respectability, and facilitated the golden age of Broadway theater that began with Oklahoma! in 1943 and extended into the 1960s, a period that overlapped with the heyday of the Moss family’s flagship Criterion Theatre, which became the site of countless blockbuster premieres during the tenure of B.S. Moss’s son Charles and grandson Charley.
In time, Paul Moss’s clean-up operation also would provide a template for the analogous transformation of Times Square engineered under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in the 1990s, after the area had once again fallen into decay. It was B.S. Moss who created the family’s film exhibition business. But it was Uncle Paul who sowed the seeds for its future survival.
Adapted, with permission, from Magic in the Dark: One Family’s Adventures in the Movie Business, by Charles B. Moss and Jonathan Kay. Copyright © 2021 by Charles B. Moss Jr. Published by Sutherland House.
Jonathan Kay is a Toronto-based author and ghostwriter.
[1] Theater: Moss v. Lice, Time magazine, May 10, 1937
[2] Friedman, Andrea. “‘The Habitats of Sex-Crazed Perverts’: Campaigns against Burlesque in Depression-Era New York City.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 7, no. 2, University of Texas Press, 1996, pp. 203–38.
[3] Knauer, Nancy J. (2000) “Homosexuality as Contagion: From the Well of Loneliness to the Boy Scouts.” Hofstra Law Review: Vol. 29 : Iss. 2 , Article 2.
[4] Foley, Brenda (2005) “Undressed for Success: Beauty Contestants and Exotic Dancers as Merchants of Morality.”
[5] Friedman.
[6] Friedman.
[7] Rosenbloom, Nancy J. “From Regulation to Censorship: Film and Political Culture in New York in the Early Twentieth Century.” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, vol. 3, no. 4, [Cambridge University Press, Society for Historians of the Gilded Age & Progressive Era], 2004, pp. 369–406.
[8] PM magazine, August, 1945.
[9] https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/brooks12/now-times-square/