Times Square and Broadway

Times Square is the bowtie-shaped junction where Broadway crosses Seventh Avenue, running roughly from 42nd Street to 47th. It was called Longacre Square until 1904, when the New York Times moved its offices there and the city renamed it. The ball has been dropped from the roof of One Times Square on New Year's Eve since the very end of 1907.

It is the most visited place in the city and the one New Yorkers most reliably avoid, and both of those facts are useful to a visitor.

What it is actually like

Enormous, deafening, relentless and entirely commercial. The pavements are full, the signs are the size of buildings, and the air at street level is a mix of exhaust and sugar. It is also, at night, genuinely remarkable in a way no photograph conveys — the light comes from every direction and there are no shadows.

Here is a detail that explains the whole place. The signs are not there by accident or merely by commercial enthusiasm: the zoning rules for the district require buildings to carry illuminated signage of a minimum size and brightness. A developer who wanted a discreet frontage would not be allowed one. The spectacle is written into the planning code.

The honest advice is to come once, after dark, stand still for ten minutes somewhere out of the flow, and then go and eat somewhere else. People who book a hotel here for the convenience of the theatres frequently regret the noise.

Since 2009 the central stretch of Broadway through the square has been closed to traffic and turned into pedestrian plazas with seating, which made it very much more pleasant to stand in. The red glass steps at the northern end, above the ticket booth, are the standard place to sit and look south at the lights.

Three practical warnings

None of these is about danger. The square is heavily policed and busy at all hours, and the risk here is to a wallet rather than a person.

The costumed characters expect money. The cartoon figures and superheroes posing for photographs are individuals working for tips, not employees of anybody, and some become insistent about payment once a photograph has been taken. A photograph taken from a distance costs nothing; one taken with an arm round a shoulder is understood as a transaction. The city has painted designated activity zones on the plazas to contain all of this, and characters and performers are supposed to stay within them.

Nobody standing in the street has real theatre tickets. People offering tickets, tours or "comedy club" admission on the pavement are at best selling something worth less than the price and at worst selling nothing. The legitimate routes are listed below and none of them involves a stranger with a clipboard.

The restaurants on the square are the worst value in Manhattan. This is not snobbery — it is simply that rents on those blocks are extraordinary and the clientele is captive. Walking one block west into Hell's Kitchen transforms both the price and the quality.

The theatre district, and what "Broadway" means

This is the thing most worth understanding, and it is almost never explained.

Most Broadway theatres are not on Broadway. They are on the side streets, chiefly between 41st and 54th and between Sixth and Eighth Avenues. Only a handful actually front onto the avenue itself. Somebody looking for a particular theatre by walking up Broadway will not find it.

"Broadway" is a category rather than an address. A Broadway house is one of roughly forty theatres in the district with five hundred seats or more. Below that:

• Off-Broadway houses have between a hundred and about five hundred seats, are scattered across the city rather than concentrated in midtown, and are where a great deal of the more interesting work happens. Several shows that later became enormous started here.
• Off-Off-Broadway means under a hundred seats, and is where the genuinely experimental work is.

For a visitor the practical upshot is that restricting a trip to Broadway proper means seeing the biggest and most expensive productions and missing the ones the city is actually talking about.

Getting tickets

In rough order of usefulness:

• The theatre's own box office, in person. This avoids the booking fees that every other channel adds, and the staff will say honestly which seats have a restricted view. Underrated and frequently the cheapest route to a good seat.
• The show's digital lottery. Most productions now run an online lottery for a block of cheap seats, entered the day before and drawn in the morning. Free to enter, and the only realistic way into the hardest-to-get shows at a sensible price.
• Rush tickets, sold cheaply when the box office opens on the day of the performance, and standing-room tickets, sold only when a performance is otherwise sold out. Both involve turning up early and both vary by show.
• TKTS, the booth under the red steps at the north end of the square, sells same-day seats at a discount. Availability is unpredictable, the queue can be long, and the shows on offer are the ones not selling out — which is sometimes a bargain and sometimes a reason they are available.
• Resale sites last, and with care. Prices above face value are normal there and the fees are substantial.

Two timing points. Matinees, usually midweek and at weekends, are easier to get into and cheaper than evenings. And most theatres are dark on Mondays, which catches out people who have built an itinerary without checking.

What else is there

Beyond the theatres and the lights, the square's attractions are mostly indoor and mostly aimed at families: a waxwork museum, a chocolate shop of some scale, and a number of large branded stores. Breakfast television is broadcast from a glass-fronted studio on the square, and the presenters do interview people outside it, which draws a small crowd each morning.

Bryant Park, three blocks east behind the public library, is the nearest thing to an escape — lawn, chairs, a carousel, and a Christmas market in season. Hell's Kitchen, one block west, is where the people who work in the theatres eat.

Things that have gone

Writing about Times Square dates faster than writing about almost anywhere, so for the avoidance of fruitless journeys: the Virgin Megastore, the vast toy shop with the indoor ferris wheel, the Lindy's delicatessen on Broadway and the blues club named after its guitarist owner have all closed. The Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center is no longer a restaurant anyone can simply book a table at. And the clothing racks being wheeled through the streets, which older accounts describe as characteristic of the area, have largely gone with the shrinking of the Garment District.

What has not changed is the thing worth coming for, which is the lights, and the forty-odd theatres within a few minutes' walk of them.