The Ongoing Renaissance Of Times Square

One highlight of my recent honeymoon was an evening spent wandering Times Square with my wife. Like millions of visitors before, we came expecting lights, billboards and theaters, but also street life, which has greatly improved since I first visited in the 1990s. Breakdancers drew crowds with gravity-defying routines, drummers made concerts out of plastic buckets, and one particularly memorable moment involved a man offering two parrots. My wife held her arms out and they both flew onto them, rocking up and down. Simultaneously, a photographer—apparently independent from the parrot owner—captured an atmospheric shot of the moment. The whole experience cost $20—$10 to each entrepreneur.

The interaction captured what makes Times Square great. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of independent entrepreneurs mix with established businesses—in theater, hospitality and entertainment—to make memorable experiences for 50 million annual visitors. Times Square is America’s most recognizable attraction and known as the “Crossroads of the World.” 

But that was not the case decades ago. Older Americans remember a 1980s Times Square synonymous with urban decline: adult bookstores, peep shows, and drug deals, all of which contributed to more serious crime.

Its renaissance is linked to a few highly-visible interventions. The first was New York City’s quality-of-life policing and subsequent crime decline under Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s. Giuliani made Times Square central to his civic cleanup. 

Around that time, Disney made what proved to be one of the most consequential private investments in the city’s modern history. CEO Michael Eisner toured the historic but decrepit New Amsterdam Theatre, signed a 99-year lease, and restored it to once again host live musicals. Eisner only agreed to this under the condition that the city would commit long-term to cleaning and maintaining Times Square—which fit Giuliani’s plans. Hotels, restaurants, and retailers soon followed Disney.

The next leap came under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Rather than treating Times Square solely as a transportation corridor, he recognized that it functioned mainly as a public gathering place. His administration closed large sections of Broadway to automobile traffic, replacing car lanes with plazas, seating, landscaping and pedestrian space.

The move first drew skepticism, with many predicting traffic chaos. Instead, these plazas became among the city’s greatest public spaces, and it is hard today to imagine the district any other way.

Less appreciated, however, is the Business Improvement District, or BID.

The Times Square Alliance, founded in 1992, exemplifies how such organizations quietly improve urban life. The non-profit’s $29m budget is funded through a combo of corporate sponsorships, concession agreements, and special assessments on property owners within the area. The Alliance gets almost no government funding, but works with the city in a public-private arrangement.

Its responsibilities are broad—keeping streets clean; employing public safety officers who assist visitors and coordinate with police; maintaining public spaces; overseeing beautification projects; organizing events; and providing visitor information. None of these functions are glamorous, but together create an environment that feels safe and welcoming.

BIDs have become one of New York City’s most successful governing innovations. There are 78 across the city, and they have successfully managed other formerly crime-plagued areas such as Bryant Park and the Financial District. The lesson is that city governments do not need to perform every task directly; and in fact, property owners are entitled to demand services beyond what the city provides, as long as they pay special fees for it. 

But ultimately, people don’t visit Times Square because of policing policies or sanitation schedules. They come because thousands of private actors create reasons to visit. Broadway theaters continue to plug along, setting a new historic box office record of $1.91b last year, at a time when other live entertainment struggles in a digitized America. The Hard Rock Cafe continues to thrive two decades after opening. And the district still has flagship stores from many retail brands, including M&M’s 3-story candy palace.

Times Square of course does not achieve administrative perfection. One disappointment is the street food, with simple Sabrett hot dogs costing $5-10, amid limited variety. The high prices are due to the city’s cap on mobile food vending permits, which causes permits to be leased at high cost on secondary markets. This raises the fixed cost of operating these stands, leading to price escalation throughout the city, not just Times Square.

But overall, the district shows that successful cities are rarely the product of centralized control. They emerge from entrepreneurial networks that operate within layered governance.

That decentralized model also makes neighborhoods like Times Square more resilient to political turbulence. Every election in New York City and elsewhere brings proposals for sweeping change. Current Mayor Zohran Mamdani, for example, is the polar opposite of Guiliani, as he calls to defund police and decriminalize certain behaviors such as prostitution. Regardless of how one views those ideas—they likely aren’t coming to Times Square. The district’s layered governing structure, found in its BID, gives stakeholders the power to resist whatever gets pushed by City Hall (Mamdani, to his credit, supports expanding BIDs to the city’s working-class areas). The Times Square Alliance, property owners, businesses, cultural institutions, and residents all play a role in how the neighborhood is shaped. Cities work best this way.  

Standing in Times Square with my wife, it was easy to appreciate how much of this remarkable place is built not through grand schemes but countless individual acts of entrepreneurship. Its renaissance is no longer simply a story of recovery, but ongoing refinement.

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