What do you think about Times Square? Do you love it? Do you hate it? Have you ever been? It's a pretty

polarizing place. On the one hand, it's a pretty unique and amazing place, a place where massive LED

screens beam the results of billion-dollar advertising campaigns, where the lights of Broadway glimmer

to beck and theatergoers into shows, a cultural flagstone where hundreds of

thousands, if not millions of people, pour out of subway tunnels each day to go to work or sightsee

or simply be in the middle of the city that never sleeps. But also, it can feel pretty gritty,

a bit dystopian, a place where strange people in dirty Elmo, cookie monster, and transformers costumes,

pressure you for a hug and then insist on being paid for this hug that you never wanted,

a hug you might have been willing to pay to not get, a place where so many people are running

so many different scams, a place where you can just feel the energy of vice, of all kinds,

lingering in the shadows. Again, for many, it's polarizing,

a place they either really, really want to visit or have zero interest in ever-stepping footing.

Times Square has been polarizing for at least 100 years, going back to the time when the New York

Times established its headquarters there and gave the square its current name. Back when the city opened the 42nd Street subway station and when a charismatic

and brilliant advertiser named Oscar Goode decided to mount his advertising spectaculars,

massive displays of colored lights that move like movie animations, dazzling crowds who had only just gotten used to

regular street lights. Upright, aka fun-hating citizens, complained about how Goode's displays were

degrading the space, making it seem cheap and tacky. And there were wars with Goode and others

like him who wanted to advertise, who wanted to turn New York not only into a hub of commerce, but into

entertainment itself, would last for decades. And then New Yorkers would have a new reason to complain

about Times Square. Newly nicknamed the Deuce by 1960, Times Square was considered the worst

area in town by the New York Times. Overrun by sex workers, pimps, petty crime,

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