Thanks for your post Max!

I really appreciated your assessment of Reichl’s piece and your discussion on the Disneyization of the Times Square area. I agree with you that Time Square today, as a more family-oriented, entertaining, and tourist-attracting hub is safer than a place infested with drugs and prostitution. However, upon reading Reichl and Delany’s pieces, I found myself questioning who city planners design the city for.

Is the city designed for its inhabitants or for its tourists? You characterized Times Square today as a place of “live entertainment, exciting merchandise, and revamped tourism.” This is true, and tourism definitely benefits the city as a whole. It bolsters the economy, brings different kinds of people to the city, and adds a flavor the overall environment that you can’t get elsewhere. But I wonder if sometimes this great focus on how foreigners perceive the city is a bit overdone. Shouldn’t city planners also be concerned with how New Yorkers perceive New York? Shouldn’t city planners care what people think about the city they live in- its successes as well as its shortcomings? I think they should. And while tourism is a great boon for the economy, and brings with it various other benefits, planners need to be wary of over-disneyifying the city to the point where even its inhabitants feel like tourists. Over-disneyification could lead to a city that seems warm and inviting, but is actually just a facade of cold profit.

I found your discussion of rebranding really thought provoking. The idea of the use of Disney as a rebranding tool makes total sense, as city planners were obviously very concerned with how the city was perceived and what overall message it sent. What is somewhat ironic is that just as Disney was used as a rebranding tool, so too the black and white characterization of Time Square at that time as dirty and dangerous was also rebranding at work. Maybe branding is a better word, since people did already perceive is as dirty and dangerous. However, as Reichl points out, the extent to which the Times Square area was dirty and dangerous was blown largely out of proportion. He even explains that this is partly due to the way small-town dwellers had notions that the city was more dangerous than their towns, even though New York was more safe than most small towns. Additionally, Reichl explains that there was some misunderstanding as to what constituted commercial sex, and that so much of the sexual activity that went on was misidentified as commercial, when in fact most of it was way more complicated than that simple label.

While I think that prostitution, drugs, and violence are definitely a bad thing, and that Times Square is better off without them running rampant, I’m not so sure that what Times Square has become is truly inclusive and considerate of the city’s inhabitants. The fact that all this work went into branding the area in a certain way shows that the city as an idea was being sold to the highest bidder. And there’s something about that that doesn’t sit right with me. At least we can all continue to enjoy the beauty that is the humongous billboards and Naked Cowboy.

Thanks again for getting me thinking!