Tag: times square

Violence in Times Square! …Wait, I saw this movie. It was called ‘The Seventies.’

This will not end well.

I know that that sounds a little weird, but it’s an actual problem: or at least one of two problems. Basically, the combination of over-aggressive picture vendors and the way that former mayor Bloomberg has made the area a lot less motor vehicle-friendly is allegedly making Times Square’s highest-status office tenants reconsider staying in the area once their leases expire. It’s a little less dire than the article makes it out to be – companies HATE moving, especially at this level – but it can happen, and if it does the city will take a hit.

For that matter, so will Times Square. Which is a plus for some people, bizarrely enough: believe it or not, there are those who are nostalgic for the days when walking through Times Square meant getting accosted by pimps on a regular basis. I swear to God: save us all from the people who seem to think that cities should be demented, dystopian theme parks…

Good news: Bill de Blasio appoints gentrifier to head City Planning. #nyc

No, I am not being sarcastic, actually.

Mayor Bill de Blasio on Friday appointed a veteran of the struggles to transform New York City neighborhoods such as Times Square into hubs of tourism, luxury housing and high-price offices to lead the city’s urban-planning efforts.

The choice of Carl Weisbrod, an elder statesmen of the city’s development community, to lead the City Planning Commission and the City Planning Department unsettled some of the mayor’s liberal supporters and reassured the real-estate industry.

I mean, did you ever SEE the sh*thole that was Times Square before it got fixed?  I walked through there ONCE in the bad old days, and didn’t go back for years afterward.  People on the Left may sneer at ‘Disneyification:’ but what they carefully forget to mention is that the process by definition makes the surroundings safer for kids. Mayor de Blasio is going to run NYC in the ground, sure – but at least he’s not appointing somebody who actually regrets losing Times Square to the forces of bourgeois morality*. Continue reading Good news: Bill de Blasio appoints gentrifier to head City Planning. #nyc

Resenters Of Civilization Watch: Times Square edition.

(H/T Instapundit) This is profoundly unsurprising to me:

Broadway star Patti LuPone gave an interview to the DC gay mag Metro Weekly, in which she unloaded several strange bursts of liberal celebrity-speak. The most notable one was resenting Rudy Giuliani for cleaning up Times Square into an “arcade” and wishing Times Square was “tawdry and dangerous again.”

In case you thought there would be absolutely no one who missed drug dealers and prostitutes dominating Times Square (other than those people), there is Patti LuPone…

Continue reading Resenters Of Civilization Watch: Times Square edition.

Choosing Disney over hookers.

This Jim Geraghty post about Bill Clinton’s NYC nostalgia reminds me of my own reaction to Times Square.  Right after college I was looking for work in NYC (didn’t find any, because it was 1993); I walked through Times Square once during that time.  Once: even at noon on a winter’s day the pimps were incredibly aggressive.  Fast-forward four or five years; more-or-less tossed out of grad school*, looking for work again in the City (a lot easier in the late 90s).  Was in Times Square during that and had a moment of extreme confusion because I did not recognize anything.  It was like they stripped out the squalid despair right down to the bedrock, and rebuilt.  The result?  Gaudy, corporate, somewhat crass – and a place where you could have your kid in tow and not be a justifiable case for intervention by Child Services.

There are actually people who are bothered by this.  Speaking as somebody who is actually a productive member of society, I’m not one of them.  And as the previous sentence might suggest, I’m not really impressed with the “But it had character!”  To which I reply**: so does a overstuffed bag of garbage after three days in the hot sun.

Moe Lane Continue reading Choosing Disney over hookers.

So… who did it?

‘It’ being the failed car bombing attempt on Times Square yesterday, of course: there’s been some fairly obvious choices for assigning a perpetrator, but nothing’s confirmed.  Yet*.  Allahpundit over at Hot Air is keeping track of this story; about the only thing that we know for certain is that NYPD cops have guts that go well past ‘steel’ and straight into ‘gold-titanium alloy’ territory.

But you knew that already.

Moe Lane

*Do not be surprised if this is a lone nut, in other words.  I suspect that we’ll know more tomorrow: it sounds like they have video of the guy, which – if true, and if we’re being told about it – means that they’re close enough to getting him that it doesn’t matter that we’re being told about it.

Crossposted to RedState.