April 1986...along the east side of Broadway, looking south toward the heart of Times Square. This is a wider shot of the Howard Johnson's sign from my earlier post, showing the narrow slice of Broadway leading downtown. At the extreme right is an ad for Minolta (cameras, copiers, video), the only ad on the building known as One Times Tower. In 1986 New York Newsday, an NYC edition of the Long Island paper, had its name on the one-time Allied Chemical building. Minolta was one year away from revolutionizing the 35mm market with the first autofocus SLR, the Maxxum 7000; in 2006 they left the camera business entirely.
If you enlarge the picture and look at some of the other signs, you'll see other quaint period markers, like that the video store sold discs, too. Remember those 12 inch laser precursors to the DVD?
The movie theater was the Circus Cinema, and, according to some quick web searches, still is. The Big Top was an adjacent gay porn theater. I don't know if it survives in any form today, I'll have to check the next time I'm in town. It's hard to read the marquee of the Circus, but I would like to point out that the star of the feature attraction at Circus, Paula Meadows, has gone on to a career as an erotic artist. Sell what you know.
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