My friends and I used to take the subway to Times Square when we were kids, just to walk around. Porn/prostitution was pretty much underground then. Toward the late Fifties and early Sixties, the "sex shops" started to appear. Those were pretty tame compared with what came later, when the Supreme Court in effect legalized porn. That's when most of the old movie houses started showing XXX-rated films. Female and male prostitutes were on the streets, but not really blatant. Then, ca. 1970, one of the NY courts temporarily suspended police busts of prostitutes on a technicality, and they were just all over the place. You couldn't take ten steps without being solicited. By the early Nineties, Disney owned just about everything. Cleaned up, but corporate.

What I remember of Times Square from the Fifties: Hubert's Flea Circus; Grant's Bar (where they served me when I was 15); Romeo's spaghetti joint; the scuba diving store west of Eighth Avenue; the knife shops and souvenir/cheap electronics ripoff storefronts that also sold "nudie" pictures in the back...