MIRACLE ON 42ND ST.

Every New Yorker has a Times Square story. Rudolph Giuliani, the city's high-strung mayor, fondly recalls trips to see the comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis at the Paramount theater. "They were my favorite comedians as a youngster," Giuliani recalls. "The crowds would spill right out onto Times Square. It would almost be like a New Year's Eve celebration. Dean and Jerry would hang out the window of their dressing room and throw programs and things down to their fans." According to Giuliani, Times Square in those days was "the center of the world" --just the sort of boosterish hyperbole one expects from a New York City mayor. But Giuliani does have a point. Times Square probably has as great a hold on the nation's imagination as any piece of American real estate: The Great White Way! Bobby-soxers and Frank Sinatra! V-E day!

Ratso Rizzo! Porn! Human scum!

Here's another Times Square story, set a few decades after Giuliani's and told by Maria Alvarado, coordinator of tourism services for the Times Square Business Improvement District: "One summer, when I was about to give birth to my first child, I came down to have lunch with my husband, who worked on 43rd and Sixth. I took the E train, so I had to walk down 42nd. Here I was, eight months pregnant, and I was offered everything from sex to cocaine. Eight months pregnant, and they wouldn't leave me alone." She is referring, of course, not to Martin and Lewis but to the pimps, hustlers and drug dealers who by the 1970s had replaced sailors as perhaps the area's most emblematic denizens.

Decline and fall is a familiar urban arc. But out-of-towners whose lurid visions of Times Square have been formed by movies like Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver--or shocking discoveries made after taking a wrong turn on the way from the tour bus to Victor/Victoria--might be surprised by the extent to which the area is approaching the millennium in a clean and sober state. That is, if "sober" fairly applies to a cityscape that has become more enthusiastically garish than ever thanks to the capabilities of modern signage. Tourism is rising; crime is dropping, at an even faster clip than in the rest of the city. The area is bustling with new hotels, new office buildings--not to mention new chain stores and corny theme restaurants that would be at home in any suburban mall. Not that Times Square (which technically refers only to the triangle above 42nd Street where Broadway and Seventh Avenue meet but casually takes in the entire neighborhood) doesn't still retain some of its seedy, pre-Gap allure. Indeed, sailors still flock here during Fleet Week, but last year they were reportedly heard complaining that prostitutes had grown scarce.