New York City is one of the most diverse cities in the world, with Times Square in its heart. Today, Times Square is considered the “Crossroads of the World” as people from all different countries worldwide, make it an essential destination to visit Time Square when in New York, and get their picture taken. To visitors, Times Square represents the whole of New York City. The bright lights and bubbly night life are a constant representation of “the city that never sleeps.” Times Square is a place that is overcrowded with families and tourists and adds greatly to the economic and financial success of New York City (Chakraborty 2016). People come to Times Square with their children to take in the exciting atmosphere or watch a broadway show. According to Chakraborty, there are more than 100,000 pedestrians on 42nd street on a given day, and 5,000 legitimate theatre seats in use (Chakraborty 2016).

However, Times Square was not always this way. Times Square once had a dangerous atmosphere that people would want to stay away from, and those taken seats were that of X-rated theaters. As we see in both readings, there was a drastic change from the old Times Square until it became this new and exciting Times Square. Before the government stepped in to revitalize Times Square in the 1980s, and the Walt Disney Company jump-started the revitalization, it was a sleazy, dangerous, and scary place to be. The streets were filled with crime and illegal activities. The small and congested area was poverty-ridden with barbarous living conditions which often led to crime and violence (Reichl 1999). Prostitution, sex shops, and X-rated theaters took over the streets. The low and filthy atmosphere in the area allowed the sex market, drug trade, and crime to thrive. Among other New Yorkers, it was known as “the wrong side of the tracks” (Chakraborty 2016). People stayed away from Times Square because of the danger that it held. Times Square was that place that everyone’s parents warned them to stay away from. And so people really did stay away until the government finally did something to “fix it”.

The readings prompt us to ask the question: which Times Square is better, the old or the new? Most people would resort to arguing that the new Times Square is better because it became more of a valid representation of what New York City actually is. Which is, the most important urban area culturally and economically.

But there is also an argument to be made that the new Times Square is not so different today than the old Times Square was. Of course it is not the same place, as over 30 years of a rebuilding project can show; however, there are some similarities in today’s Times Square that must be addressed. According to Chakraborty, the president of the Times Square Alliance, Tim Tompkins, addressed the issue of human traffic in Times Square . Years ago it came from the homeless people that were living on the streets of the congested poverty-ridden neighborhood, but recently it has come from the contrast between the amount of people that want to visit Times Square and the lack of space for those people. Tompkins said, “the problem used to be that you couldn’t get through Times Square without getting mugged or killed, and then by the 2000s, the problem was you couldn’t get through Times Square because it was so crowded” (Chakraborty 2016).

According to Gehl, Risom, and Day, this issue led to the pedestrianization of Times Square, the Plaza program, which focused on making the city more people-friendly. Ironically, this has led to an even bigger and current issue in Times Square of the “desnudas”. The pedestrianization of Times Square made it possible for body-painted topless women, also known as “desnudas”, to be “working” the streets. This issue haunts Times Square of its past, and actually prompted Mayor Bill Deblasio to announce a review of the entire project of pedestrianizing Times Square. Deblasio took extreme measures by calling his police chief’s to tear up pedestrian plazas in the city. He did this because “the affair has touched a nerve — a sense that somehow the plaza has made Times Square only more sleazy and vulgar than ever” (Day et al 2015). This incident comes back to the roots of Times Square. It proves that if appropriate measures are not taken, and the government stops to intervene in the continued “well-being” of Times Square, then the new Times Square (which is the current Times Square) won’t be much different than the old Times Square.

 

References:

Chakraborty D (2016) When Times Square was Sleazy http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/18/us/80s-times-square-then-and-now/ (last accessed 19 March 2017)

Day G, Gehl J, Risom J (2015) Times Square: The Naked Truth  http;//www.nytimes.com/2015/08/31/opinion/times-square-the-naked-truth.html?_r=0 (last accessed 19 March 2017)

Delany S R (1999) Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. New York and London: New York University Press

Reichl A J (1999) Reconstructing Times Square: Politics and Culture in Urban Development. University Press of Kansas