What Is The Early History Of Times Square
Located in Midtown Manhattan, Times Square is a significant business crossroads, tourist attraction, entertainment centre and neighbourhood with Broadway, Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street come together to form this intersection.
Between 42nd and 47th Streets, Times Square forms a five-block bowtie with neighbouring Duffy Square.
An estimated 50 million people visit Times Square each year, making it one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world. On its peak days, Times Square sees upwards of 460,000 pedestrians and an average daily traffic of 330,000 people, many of whom are tourists.
After The New York Times moved its headquarters to the newly constructed Times Building, today known as One Times Square, in 1904, the area was renamed Longacre Square to Times Square. Since 1907, Times Square has hosted the New Year’s Eve ball drop, which attracts more than a million tourists each year.
Lincoln Highway’s eastern terminus can be found at Broadway and 42nd Street in Times Square, where Broadway meets 42nd Street.
West 42nd, West 47th, 7th Avenue, and Broadway form the boundaries of the neighbourhood. The “bowtie” shape of Times Square is created by the intersection of Broadway, which runs diagonally through Manhattan’s horizontal and vertical street grid, as laid out by the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811.
The southern triangle, below 45th Street, is officially known as Times Square, but the northern triangle is officially known as Duffy Square. A memorial to Father Francis P. Duffy, a World War I chaplain from New York City’s U.S. 69th Infantry Regiment, was dedicated to him in 1937.
The George M. Cohan statue and the TKTS bargain ticket office for Broadway and off-Broadway shows are both located here.
Near what is now 10th Avenue and 40th Street, three tiny streams joined to form the first settlement on Manhattan Island, which was founded by the Dutch and were known as the “Great Kill”. Near present-day 42nd St, the Great Kill flowed into the Hudson River, where it emptied into a deep bay.
The upland to the south and east became known as Longacre, and the name Great Kill, a small town that became a centre for carriage-making, preserved the name.
A New York militia leader who served under George Washington, John Morin Scott, owned the territory prior to and following the American Revolution. Around what is now known as 43rd Street, Scott’s manor residence once stood, surrounded by farmland where horses were bred and raised.
He built his second fortune selling off lots to hotels and other real estate firms as the city rapidly extended uptown in the first half of this century, making it one of his most valued holdings.
New York City’s horse carriage industry had its epicentre here by 1872. Local officials named it Longacre Square after London’s Long Acre, the core of the city’s horse and carriage trade, which had never been given a name before.
American Horse Exchange was owned and run by William Henry Vanderbilt, a prominent New York businessman. A year later, in 1910, it was renamed the Winter Garden Theatre and reopened.
Longacre Square became known as the Thieves Lair because of its image as a raucous, low-end nightlife neighbourhood as Lower Manhattan became increasingly prosperous..
Oscar Hammerstein I, a cigar tycoon and impresario, built the Olympia, the first theatre on the square. At one point in the early 1890s, a stretch of Broadway that had previously been sparsely populated was ablaze with electricity and thronged by hundreds of middle-class theatre, restaurant, and café visitors.
1900s–1930s
Ochs transferred the New York Times to a new tower at 42nd Street and Longacre Square in 1904, replacing the Pabst Hotel which had been there for less than a decade when it opened in 1899.
Time Square was renamed in 1904 when Ochs convinced Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. to build a subway station there and three weeks later, a bank at 46th Street and Broadway had its first electrified advertisement. Duffy Square was created near the north end, and the ancient Horse Exchange was renamed the Winter Garden Theatre in 1911.
Moving to larger quarters one block west of Times Square in 1913, the newspaper eventually sold the property in 1961. When the Lincoln Highway Association was founded in 1913, it selected 42nd Street and Broadway (near the southeast corner of Times Square) as its Eastern Terminus.
After World War I, the population of Times Square expanded rapidly. It developed into a cultural hotspot with a slew of theatres, concert halls, and luxury hotels.
In the 1920s, advertising revenue climbed from $25 million to $85 million over the course of the decade and in Times Square, the ads were criticised by certain contemporaneous critics, including Thorstein Veblen and G. K. Chesterton.
It’s no secret that Times Square was a hotspot for celebrities like Irving Berlin, Charlie Chaplin and Fred Astaire in the early to mid-20th century and seeing Times Square in 1923 inspired Fritz Lang to create Metropolis, a bleak, dystopian vision of the future.