You always remember the first time you went to Times Square.
For me, that was at least 10 years ago - on my first trip abroad without my parents. I emerged from the subway (it must have been the NQRW Times Square stop) and found myself face to face with three African-American men dressed in full samurai gear, complete with armour and swords. Passionately, they gestured to the crowd standing curiously about them and preached racial hatred, while directly opposite them - not even 15 feet away - three police officers leant lethargically against a police car, watching the scene with mild amusement. All around were the giant, insistent, screaming TV screens of Times Square, hawking their wares.
I turned the corner to find a massive Disney Store. One of the many much vaunted improvements brought to the New York City landscape as part of Rudy Guiliani's attempt to clean up this chaotic metropolis. Out with the XXX stores, seedy bars and heavens forbid... jaywalkers. NYC was to become the new Disneyland - a clean, completely commercial caricature of its older self - ... until you turned the corner to find the the XXX stores that survived the Guiliani sweep.
June 2007 - Times Square has got a lot bigger. Not the Square precisely. But the screens now extend for about 7 blocks, where I'm sure they didn't before. There's a massive ferris wheel in the Toy's 'R' Us store and a marvelous M&M store (two stories with every M&M inspired knick knack and souvenir you can think of - pillows, to plates to golf balls). I bought a few circular plates with large M&M faces on them. The Hershey's store paled in comparison.
On this day, we passed a man in the square, who was dressed as Spiderman and another man with a massive albino python wrapped around his neck and chest. Pickpockets, people selling knockoffs, and peddlars all out to make a buck, competed with the raving, screeching TV screens. Some things don't change.
For me, that was at least 10 years ago - on my first trip abroad without my parents. I emerged from the subway (it must have been the NQRW Times Square stop) and found myself face to face with three African-American men dressed in full samurai gear, complete with armour and swords. Passionately, they gestured to the crowd standing curiously about them and preached racial hatred, while directly opposite them - not even 15 feet away - three police officers leant lethargically against a police car, watching the scene with mild amusement. All around were the giant, insistent, screaming TV screens of Times Square, hawking their wares.
I turned the corner to find a massive Disney Store. One of the many much vaunted improvements brought to the New York City landscape as part of Rudy Guiliani's attempt to clean up this chaotic metropolis. Out with the XXX stores, seedy bars and heavens forbid... jaywalkers. NYC was to become the new Disneyland - a clean, completely commercial caricature of its older self - ... until you turned the corner to find the the XXX stores that survived the Guiliani sweep.
June 2007 - Times Square has got a lot bigger. Not the Square precisely. But the screens now extend for about 7 blocks, where I'm sure they didn't before. There's a massive ferris wheel in the Toy's 'R' Us store and a marvelous M&M store (two stories with every M&M inspired knick knack and souvenir you can think of - pillows, to plates to golf balls). I bought a few circular plates with large M&M faces on them. The Hershey's store paled in comparison.
On this day, we passed a man in the square, who was dressed as Spiderman and another man with a massive albino python wrapped around his neck and chest. Pickpockets, people selling knockoffs, and peddlars all out to make a buck, competed with the raving, screeching TV screens. Some things don't change.
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