Times Square is famous for looking upward, but its history begins at street level. Broadway crosses Manhattan’s regular grid at Seventh Avenue, producing an elongated meeting of streets rather than a conventional square. Around that junction, theatres, transport, newspaper offices and illuminated advertising created a place whose identity depends on people moving through it. Slowing down is the best way to separate those layers from the brightness overhead.
The area was once Longacre Square. Its new name was approved in 1904 as The New York Times prepared its tower, while the newspaper moved into the building in January 1905. The distinction between naming and occupation is small but revealing: the place was already changing before the newsroom arrived. The building now known as One Times Square remains a landmark of that transformation, even though the newspaper soon outgrew it.
