Years ago, when Times Square was cleaned of its prostitutes, vagrants, drug addicts, a lament went out that they had genericized this area of New York. Over the years, with its Planet Hollywood (which I still don’t comprehend), its Toys R Us, and chains such as Friday’s, Times Square has become some weird suburban oasis in the midst of a most urban city. Now, the city government has turned Times Square into a mall. Some new decree has made it next to impossible to get a car or taxi through the streets that all have new no turning signs and the goal is to drive all cars from this few\u00a0block radius and to create a pedestrian mall.<\/p>\n
Now a pedestrian mall is not a bad idea – look at the pedestrian plazas in Spain and Italy – but this is more mall than pedestrian with its chock o block of chain stores and overly cleaned up tourist version of what a theater district really is.<\/p>\n
T got all creeped out by Times Square and ran her bony ass down to the Village to escape the mall atmosphere. Whatyagonnado?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Years ago, when Times Square was cleaned of its prostitutes, vagrants, drug addicts, a lament went out that they had genericized this area of New York. Over the years, with its Planet Hollywood (which I still don’t comprehend), its Toys R Us, and chains such as Friday’s, Times Square has become some weird suburban oasis in the midst of a most urban city. Now, the city government has turned Times Square into a mall. Some… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1kHSD-13e","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4044\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}