Loud, bright, and genuinely worth twenty minutes once. Go after dark, keep your hands on your bag, and do not eat here.
Why it looks like that
Times Square is bright because it is legally required to be. The zoning that governs this stretch of Midtown sets a minimum for illuminated signage — measured in something called LUTS, Light Unit Times Square — so a building here cannot opt out of the display. It is the only district in the city where the law obliges you to put up a giant screen.
It was called Longacre Square until 1904, when The New York Times moved its headquarters to the wedge-shaped building at the south end and got the square renamed as part of the deal. The paper left the building in 1913. The name stayed, and so did the New Year’s Eve ball, which the Times started dropping to promote itself.
For most of the twentieth century this was not a place you brought children. The pornographic theatres and the street crime through the 1970s and 80s were real, and the cleanup from the mid-90s onward was thorough, corporate and effective. What you get now is safe, extremely commercial, and about as representative of New York as an airport duty-free is of a country.
Go once, at night
Daylight does it no favours. The screens compete with the sun and lose, and you are left standing in a crowd looking at office buildings. After dark the whole thing works — the light is genuinely strange, bright enough to read by at midnight, and the scale of it lands in a way photographs never manage.
Twenty minutes is the right amount of time. Walk up Broadway from 42nd to 47th, stand on the red steps above the TKTS booth at Duffy Square for the view back down, and then leave.
The things that will cost you money
Costumed characters — Elmo, Spider-Man, several Statues of Liberty — will pose with you and then ask for payment, sometimes aggressively. There is no fixed price and no obligation, but the path of least resistance is not to engage. The same goes for anyone handing you a CD, a bracelet or a flyer.
The restaurants in the immediate square are chains at a markup. Walk two blocks in any direction and the food improves and the prices halve. Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen, ten minutes west, is where the theatre crowd actually eats.
The souvenir shops sell the same stock at wildly different prices depending on the block. Nothing here is unique.
What it is genuinely good for
The TKTS booth at Duffy Square sells same-day Broadway tickets at 20 to 50 per cent off. The queue moves faster than it looks and the board of what is available is worth reading even if you buy elsewhere.
It is also the most convenient transport interchange in Manhattan — eleven subway services meet here — which is genuinely useful and the main reason most New Yorkers ever set foot in it.
New Year’s Eve is a specific kind of endurance event: penned into a barricaded block from mid-afternoon, no toilets, no leaving and returning. People do it once.
More Landmarks
Statue of Liberty
A French gift that arrived in 214 crates and spent a year in pieces on an island nobody wanted. The ferry is the ticket — everything else is an upgrade.
Brooklyn Bridge
Fourteen years, three Roeblings and twenty-odd deaths to build. Free to walk, best at seven in the morning, and the direction you cross matters more than the time.
Grand Central Terminal
A working commuter station that happens to be one of the great interiors in America. Free, open, and the ceiling is backwards on purpose — or by accident, depending who you believe.