Cutting a swath of lights from the tip of Manhattan, Broadway beckons to the star struck like a blazing theater marquee—as it has for decades. The Broadway of the 1980s, captured in these photographs, included a sometimes seedy side.

The steamy diversions on Broadway’s Times Square area provoke bored yawns from native Manhattanites who have seen it all.

—From "Broadway, Street of Dreams," September 1990, National Geographic magazine