You are currently browsing the stories about the “Times Square” neighborhood.
My first trip to New York as an adult was around a year ago. I went for only three days (to walk Peter Do’s Helmut Lang show) and was put up just off one of Times Square’s endlessly linear streets, in a VERY large hotel, constructed with long metal beams stretching endlessly into the sky. Stepping out of the taxi [...]
There I was, dancing in a flash mob in front of the iconic Red Stairs, next to the TKTS booth in Times Square. “Welcome to New York”—Taylor Swift’s song about inspiration and possibilities—boomed from a loudspeaker perched on a nearby bench. It was four days after the 2024 presidential election, and I was still grief stricken about the inconceivable results. [...]
It’s 8:10 am, just north of Times Square, and soda cans, bottles, and discarded paper face masks are blowing around on the ground outside a grimy office building. The entrance is between a gentleman’s club and a boarded-up restaurant. I use a plastic key card to get inside the building and operate the elevator. Getting off on the ninth floor, [...]
On the fourth morning of my visit, I clung tightly to the girl I loved while riding the C train. She had a warm Jewish face, silky brown hair, and an aura that reminded me of a coffee shop on a brisk fall day. I had spent the weekend staying in her apartment on the Upper West Side and felt [...]
My Martz Trailways bus rolled into Manhattan from Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1969, landing me in Port Authority. I dragged my big, ivory-colored, plastic suitcase up the escalator, stepped onto Eighth Avenue and a cab screeched to a halt at my feet—a lucky break, since I hadn't the vaguest idea how to hail one. I had been discovered by an affable, [...]
The black and white world has enchanted me since I was little. Those films are like fever dreams, so divorced from reality. And film noir is the most fevered dream of all – doomed men and women, gangsters, con-men and dupes, all trapped, all lost, all hopeless. It is hard to imagine these desperate characters and the actors and actresses [...]
As the token reverberates in the machine and the creaking panel slowly begins to lift, we awake from our stupors, throw down our magazines, and thrust forward our best commercial assets. Desperation sets in as the panel creeps up to unveil the face of a homely, unwashed, acne-laden man. Why do so many of them look like this? My competition, [...]
It’s a summer Sunday in New York and my father and I take the subway to 57th Street. We’re going to a movie called My Fair Lady. The movie is about a lady who wears old clothes and then fancy clothes, and goes to a ball where everybody loves her because now she’s pretty. As we leave the theater, I am singing a song [...]
I was a drunk. A 29 year-old out degenerate by night, a hung over school teacher by day, at a prestigious upper west side school, no less. I’d had another all-nighter and wound up on my friend Doug’s veranda in the East Village at six o’clock in the morning with derelicts like myself. Sunk into a torn leather couch, a [...]
“You guys like comedy?” The young Armenian-looking couple stares straight ahead; their paces don’t slow as they walk past me. “No? Ok, no problem,” I mutter to myself before taking a quick drag of my American Spirit. I spot a 30-something white guy in a pressed suit; not my normal demographic but he’s walking slowly so I think I might [...]
I usually hate Times Square. At its best it is a bunch of light bulbs on steroids, marquees on acid and fluorescence on speed. But no real light penetrates this galaxy as reflected milky ways of neon; garish, overpowering signs and streaming advertisements all compete to be the best travesty of the sun. While light races above you, movement down [...]
Long Live Viva Pancho Viva Pancho is a Mexican restaurant in Times Square, on West 44th Street, just off Broadway. It’s verde awning reads, “Viva Pancho”/“Home Of the Sizzling Fajitas,” in chili pepper script. Neither quaint holdover from the old Times Square, nor modern day restaurant group vision, it could very well be situated in a New Jersey strip mall. [...]
Jimmy’s Corner isn’t like other Times Square bars--those oversized Irish pubs made of dark, polished wood or the theater-crowd cocktail lounges with big windows, people inside looking like they’re drinking in a department store display case. Jimmy’s is a dim, narrow cave of a bar, a hunk of coal in a glittering craton. Late in the afternoon and into the [...]
I didn’t know I had a problem until the telephone call. It was 2:31 a.m. I know the exact time because we have a digital clock by our bedside phone. I lay in bed next to Linda in my mismatched pajamas because we’d come home slightly drunk at midnight from Balthazar and I couldn’t find a top to match the [...]
Since my father’s suicide in the Hotel Edison, I made sure never to pass that hotel. I would not even walk down West 47th Street. But suddenly there I was, smack in front of it, thirty-nine years later on a brutally cold night in 2002 with my boyfriend Craig, who innocently suggested we stop in and have a drink. I [...]
Time really is the great leveler. The other night I went to BB King’s Blues Club and Grill to hear the Psychedelic Furs of all things. Or a better way to put it, in my case, would be that I went to hear the Furs at BB King’s of all places. Either way, you get the point. BB King’s, it [...]
The American Theatre of Actors is located at 314 West 54th Street. The same building as Midtown Community Court. During the day, you have to pass through a metal detector to enter, emptying your pockets into a plastic tray and running your bag through an x-ray machine, under the supervision of NYPD. Fortunately, when court is not in session, you [...]
My new play, “Asterisk,” recently opened. It was workshopped at The Crucible of American Theater, which planned to produce it in their first season, but went bankrupt after their first production. I had a show fold at The American Theater of Actors, when the director’s wife asked for a divorce, and he lost his job, all in the week preceding [...]
I had watched it dozens of times on TV. At midnight, on New Year’s Eve, the buildings spew out tons of confetti, littering the streets and crowds below, as if by magic, with no human interference, celebration spontaneously erupting from the city itself. Unbeknownst to me, there were people who chose to spend the night hanging around in empty office [...]
I hit the same bus every morning, Monday to Friday. It comes at 7:03 am. It doesn't matter whether I am running late or if I am ahead of schedule. I never miss this particular bus. To make it, I will sprint like my life depends on it; I will chase the bus two blocks to the next stop. I [...]
When I walk through Midtown Manhattan, I think of The Jetsons. One episode in particular, where George and Co. bought a new apartment, and that apartment was taken up by a big space-age crane and placed in an empty hole in an apartment building, thus making it full and round. That’s how I think of the offices in those huge [...]
I had been living in New York for three years before I saw my first dead body. Sure, there were those moments of uncertainty all New Yorkers experience, when stepping into an empty train car and seeing a body splayed out, usually a poor homeless person who certainly smelled like death; but you were never sure. I even played a [...]
I was still young enough to like am radio. I hadn't been exposed to the much cooler fm stations yet. Sometimes, when we drove into the city, my father listened to Bernard Meltzer's call-in advice show. It wasn't so psychology-based, just heavy on common sense and consumer advice. Women could find out how to get their husbands to pay them [...]
For some reason I was lonely, even though my dream of being a professional actress was coming true. He seemed lonely too. One day he was just there. He appeared in the lobby of the Maiden Lane Theatre on 44th Street. I was rehearsing my first New York City show, a revival of Under the Yum Yum Tree. He was [...]
There was a while when it seemed like every year New York played host to a parade of hand-painted fiberglass animals. The cows were the most famous. The German shepherds were a lot less famous and they disappeared from the streets pretty quick. But, here and there, you'll still see one, sitting guard outside the entrance to a hospital or [...]
I saw your ad for RNC experiences and thought I'd share mine with you. My wife and I participated daily in protests against the RNC and our organizing efforts were filmed by a documentary film crew from Spain's CANAL+ network. When we first heard the Republicans were holding their convention in NYC, we were outraged. It was yet another example [...]
"Different day, same shit, old mac, new clip Thirty two hollow tips, gloves, no rubber grip…" The reporter and I stand quietly in the underground garage. We don't want to look like we're interested in shooting anyone, in any sense of that word. Two minutes earlier the reporter received a call in the deli across the street. His desk told [...]
Imagine a 20th-century history of the United States that omitted the 1900s, 1930s, 1950s, and 1960s. Something of the kind has attended the chronicling of Times Square's latest identity as Disneytown, Goofyville, or Mickeymart. Most accounts of West 42nd Street's conversion have been content to say that for decades the district was a magnet for penny- ante drug dealers, dollar-ante [...]
This was late on a Saturday afternoon, in the half gloom of the subway station at Times Square. W and N and R trains were barreling through, and the girls stood on either side of the platform, each guarded by a patrolman, looking bored and despairing. They were just mestizas, the kind who were raised in their own big cities [...]
All the days have been strange since. Though I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to leave my friend Luke’s apartment, where I spent that Tuesday night, I woke up determined to get to work Wednesday morning. Life needs to go on, I thought. I walked out of Luke’s apartment building. The sidewalks were lonely; instead of the usual morning [...]
I don't tell many people about the E-Bay thing. I usually just do the easy version. Like today -- four weeks later already -- I walked into the salon and when the Dominican beautician who does my hair asked where I'd been (you know that question: "So where were YOU when it happened?") I already knew my answer would sound [...]
Last week ABC and Ted Koppel had on a panel of authors to comment on what has happened to our city and our world - the always-awful Maya Angelou, the cliché-laden David Halberstam, and two better sorts, NPR-favorite Bebe Moore Campbell and Jonathan Franzen. Whether it was Koppel or the facts that proved too much for them no one can [...]
