Watch your words, you should love this square
Every snobbish traveler has ever uttered the following words: “Times Square? That horror? I don't step on it when I go to New York." We have pronounced them. We have been that snobbish traveler.
Times Square, luckily, is above us and people like us, who think we are sophisticated because **we choose to walk through NOLITA or DUMBO**, instead of through the intersection between Broadway and Seventh Avenue.
Use these words as act of atonement before one of the most totemic spaces on planet Earth. Times Square again You don't need these words because she doesn't feel offended: we are ants that they cannot fight against its symbolic power.
For Times Square, we are ants
Face it: if you like New York, you like Times Square. This intersection of streets, which was born called long acre , is everything that interests you in this city: it is the triumph of will and creativity human, vibration, scale.
maybe you are too busy drinking kombucha on broome street to realize this. Maybe it's that you don't deserve to go to new york , like someone who does not deserve to go to Athens because he says that It's hard to climb the Parthenon and that, total, is half broken; or as someone who complains that Venice is full of people what a barbarity, and how expensive the coffee in the Plaza de San Marcos.
Times Square is there to tell you, you, that let's see what other city in the world has the nerve to build something like that, between the banal and the serious, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the functional and the useless, between the beautiful, the sinister and the sublime , to make us Kantians.
Times Square, an explosive mix
The history of New York can be explained from Times Square . At the end of the 19th century, it was a cross streets without much interest no reliability, but the light was made. Literally. Electricity led to businesses having illuminated signs and the area outside gaining in security.
The arrival of meter helped because the streets had fewer vehicles and more pedestrians, and this the real estate market was rising. Times Square, which was still called Long Acre, benefited.
Here a character appears on the scene: Adolph S. Ochs , owner and publisher of New York Times from 1896 to 1935. There is always someone smarter than the rest. In this case it was him, who was looking for a good location for the newspaper and he saw that this place was the right one.
There he built the Times Tower (at the time, the second tallest building in the city) which, yes, you guessed it, gave that crossroads the name by which we know it now.
The New York Times soon moved, but it left two important marks: the name and the celebration of the New Year . Ochs was the first who, in 1904, taking advantage of the inauguration of the building, organized an event on New Year's Eve.
Since then, thousands of people meet on December 31 in Times Square to see the famous Ball Drop Ceremony or 'Ball Drop'.
Today the New York Times is two blocks away from the square, in a transparent building of Renzo-Piano that deserves us to go and pay our respects.
The 1920s in Times Square
But let's not get distracted, even if we are already with desire to open the champagne and celebrate 2018.
Let's go back to the past, which is a very exotic territory who always likes to travel. At the end of the World War I, Times Square was already packed with theaters, restaurants and hotels As the Astor Y Knickerbocker.
It was a zone emerging and coveted . Furthermore, in the late 1920s, all public transport in the city stopped at 42nd street, who became the midtown manhattan.
But came the Great Depression . We already know that energy is neither created nor destroyed, it only transforms. The one in Times Square turned into brothels , peep shows, cheap bars, burlesque theaters and porn cinemas.
The World War II and the postwar did not help. On the contrary, the area became a crime and drug trap who settled there for decades. see Taxi Driver, Midnight Cowboy or The Deuce.
always twinkling
During all this time, the vast majority of tourists and locals they avoided times square and surroundings.
However, looking at photographs of his lumpen years, it is found that his aesthetic was always impressive, and that there was no other place in the world that concentrated in such a charismatic way architecture, spectacle and vitality.
In the late 1980s, the new age of times square . He started what many called his ' Disneyfication'.
Mayor Giuliani went to great lengths in 'clean up' the area of drugs and prostitution. He filled her with light, shops and entertainment.
The new Times Square Scorsese would have been less interested but it was safer. The luminous ones were more and more so, the television sets broadcast live every day in view of the world and the superstores and macrorestaurants they covered everything.
This reconversion of Times Square has lasted 30 years . The area is accused of ' parquethematization' , but it's still a show . Even today, if you have a business in Times Square, you should advertise it with a light billboard.
The 80s were hell-bent on "cleaning up" Times Square
We already know the past of Times Square and we want to see Taxi Driver again and walk around the area on our next trip.
We will want and do we want to sleep there? Why would we choose a hotel in Times Square? For feel like in a movie , for instance. This is what he stands for Albert King , journalist, television presenter and ex-Manhattan resident.
He states: “I like nothing more than the hushed views of Times Square from a sky-high floor . I feel like a James Bond villain." It is a great reason for choosing that area to stay there.
Let's not make the mistake of measuring Times Square by the same standard as the rest of the world. That is, we are not looking for a Charming little hotel with eight rooms: this is not Tuscany: it is Times Square!
here we want scandalous architecture , power, heights, not knowing our neighbor (but being able to if we want), hustle and bustle 24 hours a day and heart attack views.
A prototype of a hotel in this area would be the Hyatt Centric . It has everything we look for in the area: life, heart-stopping views, services unthinkable for Europeans and po-de-river. The hotel welcomes you with hot apple cider and cookies in the lobby. Note: eye with the Cider , drink on the rise.
The rooms make you feel like you have your own apartment in midtown , coffee maker with starbucks included and possibility of ordering food to your room in neighborhood restaurants frequented by the hotel staff thanks to the service grubhub.
The hotel is so mixed with the city that you can be having a soup thick with parmesan in the T45 , the bar-restaurant on the ground floor, and not remember that you sleep there.
The Hyatt is another nice place in the city, with service with smiles and an appetizing menu . On the terrace is the Bar 54 . One moment: let's try to remember how many bars on floors 54 we remember East attracts to everyone who knows him, who keeps the data for surprise friends and lovers. This New Year's Eve they pay up to $2,500 for watching the ball drop between Cosmopolitans and appetizers.
Around the bar they see groups of friends newcomers from Miami, couples who want a intimate place in the heights, lonely travelers who end up being the bartender best friends . This is pure New York City lonely Hearts who aspire to cease to be.
Bar 45 fits perfectly into the spirit of Times Square
A walk through Times Square is a catalog of characters and situations. Stores close at midnight or some, like Old Navy , at two O'clock in the morning; and the vendors greet you with a “ Enjoy! ” full of tons of vitality.
Over there it keeps swarming the naked cowboy , a classic of the square, like the statue of Francis P Duffy . they look groups of dancers looking for success, groupies who want to see live good morning america , people who walk slowly looking up, dazzled, while they stumble.
In Times Square there fire trucks adorned with Batman dolls. That's where we learned what it was. nasdaq and we took pictures before those hyperactive numbers and the eternal lights of gap Y Toshiba .
Now it's a smoke free space and advertise the series it's from the season. The lights are excessive, of course, and that's what we expect.
The lights are used to announce, but also to to protest : these months are used as spaces for campaigns against the harassment of women.
In Times Square you have to be ready for anything
Times Square is like Las Vegas: you never know whether it is day or night. You hardly see the sky or a tree, but no one comes here looking for them; here we want light, neon and energy . There are many souvenir shops in Times Square, it is a way to show pride: "You are in this city, take a souvenir ”.
We also look for theaters in Times Square. this was always theater area, and still is. Broadway is more than a geographical space: it is a space symbolic . 42nd Street (and adjacent) concentrate more and better scenarios than any other city.
People from all over the world come here who want to see their classic _ Miss Saigon _ or those looking for the hit of the season, like Dear Evan Hansen . They also come hollywood star chasers like Uma Thurman, that these months debuts on broadway with The Parisian Woman.
If this is your first time in New York, maybe Times Square is the first place you should go. If suddenly you have to go back home, at least, you will have already seen everything that New York has been and is. Then you become the modern and you go to brooklyn .
Times Square has always been very "theatrical"