A Brief History Of The New Times Square

"No other part of New York has had such a melodramatic, mood-ring sensitivity to the changes in the city’s history, with an image for every decade... No other place in town has been quite so high and quite so low. Within a single half decade, it had Harpo Marx in the Marx Brothers’ valedictory movie, “Love Happy,” leaping ecstatically from sign to sign and riding away on the flying Mobilgas Pegasus, and, down below, the unforgettable image of James Dean, hunched in his black overcoat, bearing the weight of a generation on his shoulders... Traub gives no false gloss to the decay of Times Square; it was really bad. The neighborhood declined to a point where, by the mid-seventies, the Times Square precincts placed first and second in New York in total felonies."

Thanks to Chris Steins