History

On April 8, 1904, officiated by Mayor George B. McClellan, the area known as Longacre Square was renamed Times Square following the arrival of The New York Times to the square. Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs had moved the paper's operations to a new tower on 42nd Street in the middle of the square. Ochs persuaded Mayor McClellan to build a subway stop there and rename it Times Square. Just three weeks later, the first advertisement appeared on the side of a bank at the corner of 46th Street and Broadway.

The Times moved out of the tower in 1913. Now known as 1 Times Square, the tower is the site of the annual New Year's Eve ball drop. On January 1, 1907, a ball signifying New Year's Day was first dropped at Times Square, and ever since the Square has been the site of the main New Year's celebration in New York City. On this night hundreds of thousands of people congregate to watch the Waterford crystal ball being lowered to the ground marking the new year.

Times Square quickly grew as a cultural hub full of theaters, music halls, and fancy hotels. "Times Square quickly became New York's agora, a place to gather both to await great tidings and to celebrate them, whether a World Series or a presidential election," writes James Traub in The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square. Names such as Irving Berlin, Fred Astaire, and Charlie Chaplin were closely associated with Times Square in the 1910s and 1920s.

The atmosphere changed with the onset of the Great Depression during the 1930s. Times Square became a neighborhood full of "peep shows", erotic all-night movie houses, and stores selling cheap tourist merchandise. It was considered a dangerous neighborhood by many. The seediness of Times Square was a famous symbol of New York City's danger and corruption during the period from the 1960s until the 1990s. Influential and dark films such as Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver had many scenes in Times Square.

In the mid-1990s, Mayor Rudy Giuliani (1994-2002) led the effort to clean up the area, including closing up sex shops, increasing security, and opening more tourist-friendly attractions. The cleaning process began when the local government issued an injunction against the tight clustering of the porn shops in the 42nd Street area. Many of the sex shops closed or moved to industrial areas in Brooklyn or Queens. More recently, such establishments have been shut down and more up-scale establishments have opened there.

Times Square today

The theaters of Broadway and the huge number of gaudy animated neon and television-style signage have long made it one of New York's iconic images, and a symbol of the intensely urban aspects of Manhattan. Times Square is the only neighborhood with a zoning ordinance requiring tenants to display bright signs.

 

NASDAQ MarketSite at night

One notable example is the NASDAQ sign at the NASDAQ MarketSite at 4 Times Square on 43rd Street. Unveiled in January 2000, it cost $37 million to build. The sign is 120 feet (36.6m) high and is the largest LED display in the world. NASDAQ pays over $2 million a year to lease the space for this sign. This is actually considered a good deal in advertising as the number of "impressions" the sign makes far exceeds those generated by other ad forms.

In 1998 the Times Square BID (Business Improvement District), a coalition of businesses dedicated to improving the quality of commerce and cleanliness in the district, started operations in the area. The density of illuminated signs in Times Square now rivals Las Vegas.

Times Square now boasts such stores as a Disney Store, a Warner Brothers Store, a major TV studio, as well as restaurants such as Ruby Foo's (Chinese food) and Lundy's (seafood) and a number of multiplex movie theaters. It is also attracting a number of financial institutions. A larger police presence in Times Square has improved the safety of the area. While the revitalized region is undoubtedly safer and more pleasant, some complain that the area has lost its spark and is now a thoroughly sanitized, "Disneyfied" version of itself—just another strip of franchised stores like anywhere else in the United States.

In 2002, NYC's outgoing mayor, Rudy Giuliani, gave the oath of office to the city's next mayor Michael Bloomberg in Times Square after midnight on January 1 as part of the New Year's celebration. In 2001, approximately 500,000 revelers attended the fete. Security was high following the September 11, 2001 attacks with over 7,000 New York City police on duty in the Square (twice the number for an ordinary year).

References

• The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square by James Traub (ISBN 0375507884)

External links

• Times Square Information and Entertainment: http://www.timessquare.com/
• Times Square Tourism web site: http://timessquare.nyctourist.com/
• Times Square Business Improvement District: http://www.timessquarebid.org/

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Vintage postcard of the Times Building postmarked February 1909. From the collection of Alan Ladd.

Legitimate theater impresarios now fell over one another to open new playhouses in a neighborhood that just a few years earlier none would go near, believing then that Long Acre would never be good for anything but crime, drugs, and prostitution. Before the arrival of the New York Times, the square had developed more of a carnival atmosphere than one conducive to a corporate alley. Not long after, dozens of prostitutes worked both sides of the Times Tower, resulting in relatively few new nonentertainment big-dollar investors relocating directly on 42nd Street.

Indeed, the business of sex dramatically increased its visibility on the city's newest and most popular main drag as its purveyors moved to compete for the newly available entertainment dollars by dressing up their street women and fashionably upscaling the houses they occupied. Onetime two-dollar streetwalkers now dressed in high style and proudly walked with umbrellas twirling on their shoulders in the midday sun. They could afford to spend money on clothes and accessories, as most worked two jobs, one as a prostitute and one as a showgirl at the many new dance halls built along the west side of the street-often referred to now as "Soubrette Row"—to accommodate the neighborhood's growing everyday populace. Five years into the new century 42nd Street became the showcase boulevard where merchants of the sunny side competed with hawkers of the shady to sell the workingman his ticket to get into, if not in on, the great American dream.

As for Abram Hewitt, whose original vision of a subway had led to the first great wave of commercial development on 42nd Street, historical anonymity was to be his fate. Hewitt never again enjoyed any widespread measure of public acceptance. Economic decline, meanwhile, eventually befell the New York publishing empire of William Hearst, whose sensationalist moral outrage he continued to vent in his papers. No longer just Jews but Democrats, union organizers, Wall Street speculators, bootleggers, and show business entrepreneurs all came before the loaded barrel of his editorial gun. Nevertheless, none of his publications was able to displace the stalwart New York Times as it became the city's, and the nation's, newspaper of record.

An excerpt from "Down 42nd Street: Sex, Money, Culture, and Politics
at the Crossroads of the World"
by Marc Eliot

 

Ball Design by Waterford Crystal The Ball is a geodesic sphere, six feet in diameter, and weighs approximately 1,070 pounds. The Ball is covered with a total of 504 Waterford crystal triangles that vary in size, and range in length from 4 ¾ inches to 5 ¾ inches per side. The 504 Waterford crystal triangles are bolted to 168 translucent triangular lexan panels which are attached to the aluminum frame of the Ball.

Ball Light Bulbs Developed by Philips Lighting Company

The exterior of the Ball is illuminated by 168 Philips Halogená Brilliant Crystal light bulbs, exclusively engineered for the New Year’s Eve Ball to enhance the Waterford crystal.
The interior of the Ball is illuminated by 432 Philips Light Bulbs (208 clear, 56 red, 56 blue, 56 green, and 56 yellow), and 96 high-intensity strobe lights, which together create bright bubbling bursts of color. The 696 lights and 90 rotating pyramid mirrors are computer controlled, enabling the Ball to produce a state-of-the-art light show of eye-dazzling colorful patterns and a spectacular kaleidoscope effect atop One Times Square

HISTORY OF TIMES SQUARE NEW YEAR'S EVE CELEBRATIONS

• The first rooftop celebration atop One Times Square, complete with a fireworks display, took place in 1904. The New York Times produced this event to inaugurate its new headquarters in Times Square and celebrate the renaming of Longacre Square to Times Square.
• The first Ball Lowering celebration atop One Times Square was held on December 31, 1907 and is now a worldwide symbol of the turn of the New Year, seen via satellite by more than one billion people each year.
• In 1942 and 1943 the Ball Lowering was suspended due to the wartime dimout. The crowds who still gathered in Times Square celebrated with a minute of silence followed by chimes ringing out from an amplifier truck parked at One Times Square.
• The original New Year's Eve Ball weighed 700 pounds and was 5 feet in diameter. It was made of iron and wood and was decorated with 100 25-watt light bulbs.
• The New Year's Eve Ball is the property of the building owners of One Times Square.