10 Things I Hate About Times Square
I am cheating... here's an old essay from
1999
2 April 1999: 10 Things I
Hate About Times Square
After working
at home for the day, since our office is being moved and our computers are down,
I went down to Times Square to meet N. She wanted to go see 10 Things I Hate
About You, a teenage version of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. I sort of
like to see these teen movies, just so I can keep pace with the pulse of today's
youth. Don't want to be an old fogey before my time. I need to know what all
this Letters to Cleo business is all about.
"What-EVER..."
Times Square, as you all
know, has been cleaned up. It's good, I suppose, that it's all clenaed up, but
without further ado, here are...
10 Things I Hate About Times Square
1. It's too crowded.
2. Tourists in the street are too
slow
3. Tourists in the stores are too
slow
4. It's no longer an open area, but a glass
canyon
5. The buildings look terrible
6. The lights look more like Las Vegas than the
old Times Square
7. You can wait two hours on line at TKTS and
still wind up with nuthin'!
8. Food is just way too expensive
9. It looks more like Disneyland than New
York
10. Every trace of my misspent youth seems to be
gone
I suppose there are some good things too. It is
"cleaner" but it seems like it's been cleaned of its character. What bothers me
is that people somehow judge all of New York on that one area. Last year, a
bussiness acquaintance remarked how "Mayor Giuliani has made it possible for me
to come to New York and not get
mugged."
This guy was from Oregon. He'd
only been to New York a few times before. So I had to batter
him.
"Have you been mugged in New York
before?"
"No."
"Do
you know anyone who was mugged in New
York?"
"No."
The
Mayor had pulled off a public relations coup. People visit New York, but
sometimes only stay within a few square blocks. Stay at the Paramount, go to the
theatre, and then take a safe double-decker tour of
Manhattan.
But rapes are up. The initial
stopping of Amadou Diallo was to see if he fit the profile of a rapist whose
struck 51 times in The Bronx. The police, not in uniform, scared the heck out of
this unarmed street vendor from Guinea, and shot at him 41 times, striking him
19 times.
Meanwhile, while waiting for N,
happy tourists take photos with seemingly friendly police. What they don't see,
or don't want to see, is that these same cops are not required to live in New
York City. They are only required to have two years of college or only military
experience. They have inadequate training when it comes to either weaponry or
sensitivity to non-whites. They used racial profiling to stop 45,000 citizens
last year and only 9500 of them were arrested. Black and hispanics mainly. The
police are here to "serve and protect" but it's a sick fraternity that inflicted
bodily harm on Abner Louima, sodomizing him with a toilet plunger. It's very
frightening, that da Mayor and Police Commissioner Safir cannot find a way to do
good policework without trampling our civil
liberties.
So the mayor has succeeded in
ridding Times Square of "undesirables" and tawdriness--by spreading it all over
the city indiscriminately, and made Times Square "safe for families." But those
families are not New Yorkers. Their safe suburbanites spreading word about hos
wonderful New York is, based solely on their Times Square
experience.
New York is safer overall. A
lot of that actually started with the efforts of the previous mayor, but Mayor
Giuliani won't tell you that. Crime in the country has dropped overall for a
variety of reasons, the most important of which is that there has been a drop in
the demographic that perpetrates a lot of crime: Men in their teens and early
twenties. So it's a great time to be a police
commish.
So come to New York, please do,
but don't just stay in a ten-block area and think you've seen the whole story.
Go over to Ninth Avenue for an affordable meal. Walk around Brooklyn Heights. Go
to a restaurant that's not part of a chain. See the whole picture.
Posted: Fri - October 28, 2005 at 02:21 AM