Old Times Square

I think that this is a very funny time to live in New York. When people talk of "Old New York", they are actually talking about a couple different time periods. The older "Old New York" was a time of gas lamps, Irish and Italian immigrants, and the Five Points. And if you look carefully, you can still see remnants from that era; a patch of exposed cobblestone, the last traces of Lower East Side poverty, tours of Ellis Island and Hell's Kitchen tenements converted into shotgun apartments for the young and single.

But there's another "Old New York", and that's the New York of the 70s and 80s, the broken result of a government's total financial disaster and retreat from social services. And the epicenter of that New York was Times Square, a seedy pit of porno theaters and hustlers. Some look back fondly to this time, before Giuliani and the corporations pushed the scum aside to make room for their homogeneous vision of American culture. But if you look around carefully, you can see a period of history fading away. The abandoned marquee for a grindhouse theater still hangs above a tourist rip-off shop, obscured by skyscrapers and neon.