You are currently browsing the stories about the Times Square neighborhood

Marsha Hunt Visits The New York Times

by 10/09/2022
Neighborhood: Times Square

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 […]

Sex in the City: The Playpen

by 12/12/2021
Neighborhood: Times Square

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 […]

The Camera and The Audience

by 04/25/2018
Neighborhood: Midtown, Times Square

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, […]

Subway CPR

by 04/26/2016
Neighborhood: Times Square

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 […]

Barking at Tourists

by 06/29/2012
Neighborhood: Times Square

“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 […]

My Life Among The Pedicabbers

by 02/20/2011
Neighborhood: Midtown, Times Square, Uncategorized

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 […]

Long Live Viva Pancho

by 01/18/2011
Neighborhood: Times Square

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 […]

Under Jimmy’s Awning

by 08/22/2009
Neighborhood: Times Square

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 […]

Tolerance

by 06/08/2008
Neighborhood: Times Square

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 […]

Hotel Edison

by 12/15/2007
Neighborhood: Times Square

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 […]

Strange Bedfellows

by 12/09/2007
Neighborhood: Times Square

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 […]

Elliott Gould and The Men In the Truck

by 12/01/2007
Neighborhood: Times Square

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 […]