Times Square

Description

Times Square is a major commercial intersection, tourist destination, entertainment hub, and neighborhood in the Midtown Manhattan section of New York City. It is formed by the junction of Broadway, Seventh Avenue, and 42nd Street. Together with adjacent Duffy Square, Times Square is a bowtie-shaped plaza five blocks long between 42nd and 47th Streets.

Times Square is brightly lit by numerous digital billboards and advertisements as well as businesses offering 24/7 service. One of the world’s busiest pedestrian areas, it is also the hub of the Broadway Theater District and a major center of the world’s entertainment industry. Times Square is one of the world’s most visited tourist attractions, drawing an estimated 50 million visitors annually. Approximately 330,000 people pass through Times Square daily, many of them tourists, while over 460,000 pedestrians walk through Times Square on its busiest days. The Times Square–42nd Street and 42nd Street–Port Authority Bus Terminal stations have consistently ranked as the busiest in the New York City Subway system, transporting more than 200,000 passengers daily. As of 2013, it had a greater attendance than each of the Disney theme parks worldwide, with 128,794,000 visitors between March 2012 and February 2013, versus 126,479,000 for the Walt Disney World theme parks in Bay Lake, Florida, in 2012. Even excluding residents from the visitor count, Times Square is the world’s second most visited tourist attraction, behind the Las Vegas Strip. The high level of pedestrian traffic has resulted in $4.8 billion in annual retail, entertainment, and hotel sales, with 22 cents out of every dollar spent by visitors in New York City being spent within Times Square.

Formerly known as Longacre Square, Times Square was renamed in 1904 after The New York Times moved its headquarters to the then newly erected Times Building, now One Times Square. It is the site of the annual New Year’s Eve ball drop, which began on December 31, 1907, and continues to attract over a million visitors to Times Square every year, in addition to a worldwide audience of one billion or more on various digital media platforms.

Times Square, specifically the intersection of Broadway and 42nd Street, is the eastern terminus of the Lincoln Highway, the first road across the United States for motorized vehicles. Times Square is sometimes referred to as “the Crossroads of the World”and “the heart of the Great White Way“.

Times Square is the official name of the southern triangle, below 45th Street. The northern triangle is officially known as Duffy Square and was dedicated in June 1939 to honor World War I chaplain Father Francis P. Duffy of the 69th New York Infantry Regiment. A statue by Charles Keck was dedicated in May 1937 as a memorial to Duffy.

By 1872, the area had become the center of New York’s horse carriage industry. The locality had not previously been given a name, and city authorities called it Longacre Square after Long Acre in London, where the horse and carriage trade was As more profitable commerce and industrialization of Lower Manhattan pushed homes, theaters, and prostitution northward from the Tenderloin District, Longacre Square became nicknamed the Thieves Lair for its rollicking reputation as a low entertainment district. The first theater on the square, the Olympia, was built by cigar manufacturer and impresario Oscar Hammerstein I. According to Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, “By the early 1890s this once sparsely settled stretch of Broadway was ablaze with electric light and thronged by crowds of middle- and upper-class theatre, restaurant and cafe patrons.” In 1904, New York Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs moved the newspaper’s operations to a new skyscraper on 42nd Street at Longacre Square, on the site of the former Pabst Hotel, which had existed on the site for less than a decade since it opened in November 1899. Ochs persuaded Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. to construct a subway station there, and the area was renamed “Times Square” on April 8, 1904. Just three weeks later, the first electrified advertisement appeared on the side of a bank at the corner of 46th Street and Broadway. The north end later became Duffy Square, and the former Horse Exchange became the Winter Garden Theatre, constructed in 1911.

Times Square now boasts attractions such as ABC‘s Times Square Studios, where Good Morning America is broadcast live; competing Hershey’s and M&M’s stores across the street from each other, and multiple multiplex movie theaters. Additionally, the area contains restaurants such as the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, a seafood establishment; Planet Hollywood Restaurant and Bar, a theme restaurant; and Carmine’s, serving Italian cuisine. It has also attracted several large financial, publishing, and media firms to set up headquarters in the area. A larger presence of police has improved the safety of the area. The theatres of Broadway and the huge number of animated neon and LED signs have been one of New York’s iconic images as well as a symbol of the intensely urban aspects of Manhattan. Since 1987 such signage has been mandated by zoning ordinances that require building owners to display illuminated signs, the only district in New York City with this requirement. The neighborhood has a minimum limit for lighting instead of the standard maximum limit. The density of illuminated signs in Times Square rivals that in Las Vegas. Officially, signs in Times Square are called “spectaculars”, and the largest of them are called “jumbotrons“. This signage ordinance was implemented in accordance with guidelines set in a revitalization program that New York Governor Mario Cuomo implemented in 1993.Notable signage includes the Toshiba billboard directly under the NYE ball drop, the curved seven-story NASDAQ sign at the NASDAQ MarketSite at 4 Times Square on 43rd Street, and the curved Coca-Cola sign located underneath another large LED display owned and operated by Samsung. Both the Coca-Cola sign and Samsung LED displays were built by LED display manufacturer Daktronics. Times Square’s first environmentally friendly billboard powered by wind and solar energy was first lit on December 4, 2008. On completion, the 20 Times Square development will host the largest LED signage in Times Square at 18,000 square feet. The display will be 1,000 square feet larger than the Times Square Walgreens display and one of the largest video-capable screens in the world.

Times Square is the site of the annual New Year’s Eve ball drop. About one million revelers crowd Times Square for the New Year’s Eve celebrations, more than twice the usual number of visitors the area usually receives daily. However, for the millennium celebration on December 31, 1999, published reports stated approximately two million people overflowed Times Square, flowing from Sixth Avenue to Eighth Avenue and back on Broadway and Seventh Avenue to 59th Street, making it the largest gathering in Times Square since August 1945 during celebrations marking the end of World War II. On December 31, 1907, a ball signifying New Year’s Day was first dropped at Times Square, and the Square has held the main New Year’s celebration in New York City ever since. On that night, hundreds of thousands of people congregate to watch the Waterford Crystal ball being lowered on a pole atop the building, marking the start of the new year. It replaced a lavish fireworks display from the top of the building that was held from 1904 to 1906 but stopped by city officials because of the danger of fire. Beginning in 1908, and for more than eighty years thereafter, Times Square sign maker Artkraft Strauss was responsible for the ball-lowering. During World War II, a minute of silence, followed by a recording of church bells pealing, replaced the ball drop because of wartime blackout restrictions. Today, Countdown Entertainment and One Times Square handle the New Year’s Eve event in conjunction with the Times Square Alliance. A new energy-efficient LED ball debuted for the arrival of 2008, which was the centennial of the Times Square ball drop. The 2008–09 ball is larger and has become a permanent installation as a year-round attraction, being used for celebrations on days such as Valentine’s Day and Halloween. The New Year’s Eve celebrations are usually overseen by thousands of police officers. Aluminum barriers are erected to accommodate spectators; for the 2020 celebration, attended by a million people, barriers were erected from 38th to 59th Street and from Sixth to Eighth Avenue. Typically, the celebrations create large amounts of waste. The waste includes the 3,000 pounds of biodegradable confetti dropped at midnight, a tradition of which started in 1992. The New York City Department of Sanitation estimated that by 8 a.m. on New Year’s Day 2014, it had cleared over 50 short tons (45 long tons; 45 t) of trash from the New Year’s celebration, using 190 workers from their crews and the Times Square Alliance.

The seediness of the area was featured prominently in such films as Midnight Cowboy (1969), Born to Win(1971), and Taxi Driver (1976). The area was shown in the 1980 film Times Square, which featured a punk rock/new wave soundtrack. It was also depicted in the 2011 movie New Year’s Eve. The area also appeared on The Amazing Race as the starting location in a race around the world in the first episode of the show’s 25th season, as well as on the sixth season of the Israeli edition of The Amazing Race with teams finishing their second leg in Times Square. Times Square has been fictionally attacked and destroyed in several movies, including Knowing, when a solar flare destroys New York City; Deep Impact, when a tsunami created from a meteor impact destroys New York City; the 1998 film Godzilla, where Godzilla is chased through the square; the Ghostbusters movies; Stephen King’s The Stand, where the intersection is overcome by total anarchy; Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. It was also seen in the festival battle scene in the 2002 film Spider-Man, and a stand-off in the later film The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Films and TV shows have also employed the opposite tactic, depicting the typically bustling area as eerily still, such as in Vanilla Sky, as well as the post-apocalyptic I Am Legend, in which Will Smith and his dog go hunting for deer in the deserted urban canyon. In the pilot episode of the TV series Blindspot, Times Square is completely emptied due to an abandoned bag being suspected to be a bomb.

Times Square also has featured prominently in video games. For instance, in Grand Theft Auto IV, a recreation of the Times Square area referred to in-game as “Star Junction”, is included in the game’s fictional “Liberty City” setting. Times Square is also shown in Battlefield 3, where the final fight with the main antagonist takes place, where the player must stop him from detonating a nuclear bomb in the square; and Crysis 2, in which player must fight off attacking alien forces to assist U.S. Marines in evacuating the area. Gran Turismo 4 also features Times Square both as a photo spot and as a part of the New York city circuit which also includes Central Park.