Times Square at night is very different than during the day. The bright lights are much more intense, the noise seems louder and the whole vibe is ramped up a level. It’s great to just sit down and watch the intensity of it all. Sitting on the big glowing red stairs, for a while I was just in a zone. It was if I’d paused and the rest of the world was moving about around me.
Times Square by night is different enough to warrant visiting both during the day and at night.
Something that I thought about quite a bit, especially when here at night, was just how different Times Square is today compared to the 1970s and 1980s. Full of lights, advertising and tourists, it used to be so super seedy, and not somewhere that you’d want to walk around at night. It’s that old chestnut really – by all accounts Times Square had a lot more character back in the day, and has really lost its soul in modern times – on the other hand though, it’s now safe. I suppose we are often nostalgic for the good stuff that existed in the past, and find it easier to forget how bad some of it was.
Times Square gets a lot busier during the night. A mixture of tourists wanting to see the bright lights, locals and tourists heading to the theatre on Broadway and a variety of other things – everything steps up a notch at night.
I like this photo quite a lot. Something about it feels very “New York” to me.
Being the week before Halloween, there were carving pumpkins for sale outside of many of the little stores around the city. Being from Australia, where Halloween is not really a tradition, but something that corporations have tried to co-opt from America in recent years, it was nice to see what “real” Halloween felt like in New York.
