Today, New York’s Times Square is a gigantic commercial intersection, a brightly illuminated hub of the Broadway Theater District and one of the world’s busiest pedestrian intersections. It is a major center of the world’s entertainment industry, located in Midtown Manhattan at the junction of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, stretching from West 42nd to West 47th Streets. “Longacre Square” as it was once called, got renamed to Times Square in 1904, by a proclamation of Mayor George B. McClellan, Jr. at the urging of Adolph Ochs, the owner and publisher of the New York Times.

The northern end later became “Duffy Square”. After Rudy Giuliani’s “disneyfication” and commercialisation of Times Square (and in fact the whole city), things radically changed and profit started to rule. Yet you can still feel the aura and atmosphere it once had back in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, where hustlers, artists, musicians, pimps and whores and New Yorkers of all sorts populated the square and surrounding streets, theatres, clubs, peep shows and bars. As we know from the coin, there is an up and downside to everything.