How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Like Times Square

While reasonable, that’s also basic. Sometimes life just takes you to Times Square, for work or theater or en route to Port Authority. Might as well enjoy it. In a City bent on heartless self-destruction of its landmarks, Times Square is one of the few spaces in Manhattan that has stayed pure, or nearly so. Its glamorous artifice remains gaudy, chaotic, and seedy in all the most modern and terrifying ways.

To visit Times Square is to arrive into light, from the blinking bulbs at the 24-hour McDonald’s marquee outside the West 42nd Street subway exit and rising several stories in all directions. Acceptance and immersion into this light is one way to interact with Times Square on its own terms, an electric through-line to the stoned wonders appreciated in the Beat ‘50s just as much as the neon and first-run porn theaters (and Jenny Holzer installations) of the more violent ’80s, where certain adult shops also sold pot and even LSD. In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Samuel R. Delany argues that one element missing from Times Square is the rich strata of businesses that once populated 42nd Street and made it an actual neighborhood, the small diners and clothing stores and corner shops and family-run porn theaters that facilitated cross-class contact. He blames the 42nd Street Development Project for robbing the area of its soul. In other ways, though, Times Square is perhaps the only dependable part of Manhattan.

Walking up Broadway, the light becomes engulfing around 42nd Street itself. Like Las Vegas crossed with a never-ending Super Bowl ad break, Times Square gives itself license to put extreme capitalism on absurdist display and has become a literal advertising platform with its own rules and atmospheres. In 2012, Ad Age estimated the average prime billboard real estate to be renting for between three and four million dollars a year. Over the past half-decade, it’s included a 7-story Amazon Echo (the tallest replica home surveillance device ever?), 3D robotics from Coca-Cola, social messaging, and Chinese state propaganda. A riot of pixels and branding made visible, it’s almost enough to float away.

This spring, on 42nd just east of Eighth Avenue, a giant ad for Uncle Bud’s Hemp CBD products dominated. Psychedelic fractal spirals coiled up the pinched end of 1 Times Square. Like a subset of the screens, it’s hard to tell if it’s art or advertising at first, but easy to guess which it actually is. Above the American Eagle Outfitters, several stories of an LED screen flashed images by the late artist Keith Haring, who animated billboards as a participant in the landmark Times Square Show in 1980. “LOVE IS THE MESSAGE” the new billboard read, along with Haring’s signature and the store’s logo. One of the messages, anyway.

Like the Flower District and Gem Spa, the new experiential economy is nudging itself into Times Square — which is a bit like Silicon Valley reinventing a public utility, since “experiential” has been Times Square’s selling point since it went electric well over a century ago. TSX Broadway is the biggest missile in the current arms race, a veritable casino minus the gambling, about to shoot up amid a “retail apocalypse.” Other craven Instagram-ready projects include the Design Pavilion’s now-annual installations in the pedestrian mall between 45th and 46th Street, another layer of color.

Already feeling like a well-populated video game, the hyperreal glow of Times Square is unsurprisingly the backdrop for numerous marketing-driven Augmented Reality experiments. Times Square is where all the new worlds meet, from social media to bleeding edge surveillance tech. Whatever weird future emerges next will surely do so, in part, in Times Square.

One recent spring afternoon, a couple in wedding regalia stood and had their picture taken, posing with the billboards behind them, two more characters amid a cast of Elmos, Mickey and Minnie Mice, Spidermen, Hulks, Captains America, Statues of Liberty (one on stilts, one in a bikini), the not-actually-Naked Cowboy and Cowgirl, all with their own hustles.

On 42nd Street, next to the Lyric Theater—where Harry Potter and the Cursed Child currently resides—is the Times Square Theater, a hulking movie palace vacant since 1986 and about to be gutted and rebuilt by a developer. “Flagship building for lease,” a sign on scaffolding advertises.

Down the block, the marquee at BB King’s has been empty since the venue closed last spring, perhaps awaiting a Jenny Holzer installation of its own. Across the street, the Madame Tussauds and Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museums provide a link to the Barnum-like attractions of yore, even if they, too, are chains. The movie palaces, single-screen theaters, and vaudeville houses have been replaced by the twin multiplexes, the AMC Empire 25 and Regal Cinemas E-Walk 13 & RPX, where (some of) the extended cinematic experiences of old New York can be recreated with good old-fashioned on-the-sly movie hops.

Despite all the global brands holding psychic space in Times Square, the result is still nothing but Manhattan. In its own way, it’s all just as threatening as ever, the threat displaced from imminent violence of the crack epidemic to the long-term vampiric—perhaps even experiential—effects of predatory capitalism. There’s still real life amid Times Square, too. The arts organization ChaShaMa operates several lobby-galleries in the neighborhood for the kind of work that exists without international backing. The Strand operates a well-stocked kiosk on Broadway, the type of used book stall that is hard to come by anywhere in New York. While Colony Music, the sheet music store, departed in 2012, the Brill Building remains a node in the media world, with well-used screening rooms.

In fact, Times Square ranks highly in several idiosyncratic categories of New York Best-Ofs. Under the right circumstances, it is certainly one of the City’s best music-listening spots. With a well-chosen soundtrack and good vantage point (or properly slowed-down walking pace), the cityscape can turn Koyaanisqatsi-like in a New York minute. In the snow, especially, or under an umbrella in the rain, the later at night and the emptier the better, Times Square is one of the best and most tangible atmospheres in the boroughs.

Times Square is also home to the best literally underground record store in town, and perhaps even the oldest of any elevation in the whole City: Record Mart, opened in 1958, located in the mezzanine of the subway station. Requiring a MetroCard swipe for entrance, it’s a cozy and well-stocked record store in the midst of one of the busiest subway hubs in town. With old-style LP cubbies, they carry a diverse selection of new LPs, including jazz, pop, hip-hop, indie, country, classic rock, and a wide range of Latin music. There are CDs, DVDs, and a full spectrum of headphones, audio devices, and BlueTooth accouterments for the sound-needing commuter.

With nothing corporate about it, they’ve outlasted both the Virgin Megastore (1996-2009) and even Colony Music (1948-2012). It’s not quite a bargain basement, but the prices are fair, the selection is surprising, and if you need a clean pressing of a canonical record in a hurry, they might just have your back.

It’s one of the best places in the City to feel seen, too. The Army Recruiting Office, with its LED American flag topped by an array of security cameras, makes quite the tableau. And, perhaps obviously, Times Square is also the best place to feel like you’re in Blade Runner, especially on rainy or foggy nights staring up towards the top of 2 Times Square, where China’s state-operated Xinhua News Agency occupies a 60-foot LED billboard, flashing its logo and news in Chinese. Times Square remains as weird as ever, every visible space filled with layers of history and identity, both local and corporate.

Downtown, on La Guardia Place, one can visit Time Landscape, an installation by artist Alan Sonfist that mimics Manhattan Island before the arrival of the Dutch. Times Square itself is primal in the same way, a fantasy of New York as it never really was, and always will be.