Times Square

What it is

Times Square is a street junction rather than a site with a gate: the point where Broadway cuts diagonally across Seventh Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, widened into a chain of car-free plazas that a visitor walks through rather than enters. It was Long Acre Square until 1904, named after London's carriage district and occupied by William H. Vanderbilt's American Horse Exchange. The Times Square Alliance's own history records that Mayor George B. McClellan signed the resolution renaming it that spring, after Adolph Ochs chose the block between 42nd and 43rd Streets for the New York Times's new tower. The paper moved in during January 1905, outgrew the building within a decade and left, and the New Year's Eve celebration Ochs staged to mark the opening is the one thing that stayed. What followed was a long decline through the Depression, the wartime dimout of 1942, the peep-show years and the arrival of crack in 1986, and then a rebuilding that began in the early 1980s and is the reason the place a visitor sees today looks nothing like the one in the photographs. The Alliance, the business improvement district founded in 1992 that runs the plazas, gives its own boundaries as most of 40th to 53rd Street between Sixth and Eighth Avenues, plus Restaurant Row on 46th between Eighth and Ninth.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What's inside

Almost everything worth looking at is above eye level. The screens, which the Alliance calls spectaculars, are owned by individual outdoor media companies rather than by the square, and they carry advertising for all but three minutes of the day. Those three minutes are Midnight Moment: from 11.57pm to 12.00am, on more than ninety-two digital displays running from 41st Street to 49th, the billboards drop their advertising and run a single artist's work in synchrony. It happens 364 nights a year, the artist changes every month, and more than a hundred have shown work since the programme began in 2012. At ground level the fixed points are Duffy Square, the northern triangle at 47th Street, where the TKTS booth sits under a flight of red glass steps, and the two bronzes that stand there: Father Francis Patrick Duffy by Charles Keck, facing his former parish at Holy Cross on West 42nd Street, and George M. Cohan at the southern end. Public seating runs along the Broadway plazas from 42nd Street to 48th, on Paramount Plaza between 50th and 51st, and in the mid-block passageways between Seventh and Sixth Avenues from 42nd down to 40th. The Times Square Museum and Visitor Center is permanently closed and is not an option.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

How long to spend

Allow an hour. The Times Square Alliance publishes no suggested visit length, so sixty minutes is this guide's judgement rather than a figure read off the operator's site, and it is built from the distances the operator does publish. The Broadway plazas run from 42nd Street to 48th, roughly half a mile end to end; the Alliance's own self-guided history walking tour and the commercial Broadway Up Close tours both cover about half a mile and the latter take an hour and forty-five minutes with a guide talking the whole way. Walking that stretch, standing still on Duffy Square long enough to actually read the screens, and sitting down once uses about an hour without hurrying. Less than twenty minutes is enough to say you have been, and many visitors give it no more than that on the way to a theatre. More than ninety minutes only pays if the extra time goes into something specific: a queue at the TKTS booth, a shop, a meal on Restaurant Row. The one case for staying later is Midnight Moment at 11.57pm, which is three minutes of content and an evening of waiting unless the rest of the night is already planned around it.

Checked 2026-08-26

Season and crowds

The Alliance counts pedestrians and publishes what the counts show, which makes this one of the few crowd questions with an operator's answer behind it. The busiest hours are typically noon to 2pm and 4pm to 7pm. The quietest are 1am to 6am, and, during the working week, 10am to 11am. By season, the Alliance names summer and the month of December as the two busy stretches. A visitor who wants the screens at full effect and does not mind the crush should come after dark, when the displays stop competing with daylight; one who wants photographs without a wall of people in them should come at 10am on a weekday, accept flat lighting, and take the emptiness as the trade. The single most crowded night of the year is 31 December, when the Ball drops, and it is not a casual visit: it means hours penned in a viewing area with no re-entry. Midnight Moment runs at 11.57pm every night except one, which gives a late visit a fixed reason to be there. Nothing here closes for a season, and there is no month when the plazas are shut.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Tickets

There is no admission. Times Square is public street and public plaza, the Alliance states plainly that it is open and accessible to all, and no ticket, booking or timed entry exists for the space itself. What costs money is what happens around it. The TKTS booth on Duffy Square, at 47th Street and Broadway, sells same-day tickets to dozens of Broadway and Off Broadway shows at 50, 40, 30 and 20 per cent off full price, plus a small per-ticket service charge that supports other Theatre Development Fund programmes; it takes credit cards, cash, travellers cheques and TKTS gift certificates, and the discounts available change through the day at each production's discretion. Its evening window is 3pm to 8pm Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, 2pm to 8pm Tuesday, and 3pm to 7pm Sunday; the matinee window is 10am to 2pm on Wednesday and Saturday, when no evening tickets are sold at this booth, and 11am to 3pm on Sunday. Broadway Up Close runs guided walking tours of the theatre district at 37 dollars for adults and 32 for children twelve and under, an hour and forty-five minutes over half a mile, capped at fifteen people, reservations required.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Getting there

No car is needed and a car is the worst way to arrive. Three subway stations sit on the square itself: Times Sq–42 St at 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue, served by the N, Q, R, W, 1, 2, 3, 7 and S; 42 St–Port Authority at 42nd and Eighth, served by the A, C and E; and 49 St at 49th and Seventh, served by the N, R and W. 47–50 Sts–Rockefeller Center on the B, D, F and M is a short walk east. Times Sq–42 St has elevators at the southeast corner of 42nd and Seventh and the northwest corner of 42nd and Broadway; Port Authority has them inside the terminal on Eighth between 41st and 42nd and at the southwest corner of 44th and Eighth. The passageway linking the two stations is stair-free but its ramps do not meet ADA guidelines. Buses M5, M7, M20, M42 and M104 serve the surrounding avenues, with commuter QM and SIM routes on Sixth. Citi Bike docks stand at 41st and Broadway, 48th and Broadway, 51st and Broadway, and on Sixth Avenue at 45th, 47th, 51st and 52nd. Garages exist — 1633 Broadway, 1515 Broadway, 231 West 48th among many — and are a last resort.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What to watch out for

The costume characters are the thing most visitors get wrong. The Alliance is explicit: they are not officially licensed, a tip is not required, but if you take a photograph with one a tip is expected. Treat the photograph as a purchase you are agreeing to before the camera comes out, not afterwards. There are rules about what is allowed on the pedestrian plazas, and if a character or anyone else behaves aggressively the Alliance asks visitors to contact the NYPD or a Times Square Safety Officer, or to call 212 452 5218, which reaches the Alliance directly for anything needing an immediate response. Non-urgent problems — illegal vending, con artists, street defects, someone who needs help — go through the report it service, by texting Streetwatch to 63975 or filing online in English, Spanish or Chinese. Anything criminal is 911. The second trap is planning around a building that no longer exists: the Times Square Museum and Visitor Center is permanently closed. The third is traffic during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, when on game days 42nd Street becomes a bus-only street for a set period, along with two lanes each on Fifth and Sixth Avenues, so check before arranging to be dropped off.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Photography

The screens defeat automatic exposure. They are far brighter than anything around them, so a camera metering for the whole frame will render them as white rectangles and everything else as mud. Meter for the brightest sign, let the street go dark, and the result matches what the eye actually notices. The best twenty minutes of the day are the ones just after sunset, when the sky still holds colour and the displays are already at full output; once the sky is fully black the contrast becomes brutal again. A wide lens is more useful than a long one, because the subject is the enclosure — signs on four sides and a strip of sky — rather than any single facade. The red glass steps above the TKTS booth on Duffy Square are the only elevated public vantage in the square and give a clean view south down Broadway with the screens stacked; they are also crowded, and getting a seat near the top takes patience. Tripods are impractical in a space carrying hundreds of thousands of people a day, so brace against a plaza barrier instead. If empty pavement is the goal, the operator's own count data points at 10am on a weekday, or the small hours.

Checked 2026-08-26

Where it is

Nearby

External links

• View on Wikidata