Times Square
Times Square is not a square. It's a bowtie of asphalt where Broadway and Seventh Avenue cross, and standing in the middle of it — screens stacked twenty stories high, cabs threading the gaps, strangers from everywhere reading the same crawling news ticker — you understand why a century of people called this the crossroads of the world.
The pedestrian plazas between 42nd and 47th Streets have folding chairs and wide sidewalks now, which makes it easier to stop and look up without being carried along by the current. That small change — reclaiming the street from traffic — turns the place from a thoroughfare into something you can actually inhabit.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to seek out Father Duffy Square, the northern triangle where the bronze George M. Cohan stands with his hat tilted, and climb the red glass staircase of the TKTS booth for a slightly elevated angle on the whole spectacle. Same-day discounted theater tickets are sold there too, which is reason enough to make it a stop before dinner.
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How Times Square came to be
Long Acre Square was carriage-maker territory until 1904, when Adolph Ochs — publisher of The New York Times — moved his paper to a new tower at the junction of Broadway and Seventh Avenue and lobbied the city to rename the intersection after it. Architect Cyrus L.W. Eidlitz completed One Times Square that same year in neo-Gothic terracotta and granite; it briefly stood as the second-tallest building in Manhattan. The first New Year's Eve ball drop followed on December 31, 1907.
By the 1920s the theaters had made it famous. By the 1980s, the area had become so derelict it contributed only $6 million in property taxes to the entire city. The turnaround came in the 1990s, when the State of New York purchased nine historic 42nd Street theaters and the district began its transformation into what it is today. One Times Square itself lost its original facade in 1963 when Allied Chemical stripped it to bare marble and concrete; it survives now largely as a billboard tower and the platform for that geodesic ball — 12 feet across, nearly 12,000 pounds — that descends every December 31.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Summer in Times Square means heat radiating off pavement and screens alike, with July highs around 84°F. Winter is cold and often sharp, but the light from the signs means the square never really goes dark or gloomy — a fact that makes a January night there its own kind of experience.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.