This week’s defeat of the Times Square casino proposal came at a tipping point for the “Crossroads of the World.”
We’ll never know whether the project led by developer SL Green and Caesars Entertainment would have been a godsend or a disaster for the city’s cultural and symbolic heart.
But one thing’s certain: Times Square is more troubled than it’s been in two decades, and the prospect of a likely Zohran Mamdani mayoralty portends only more trouble.
Times Square’s condition is more precarious than cheery pedestrian counts and mostly full hotels suggest.
It certainly isn’t the free-fire, mugging and pimping ground of the 1980s and early 1990s. But neither is it as thriving and wholesome as in the golden years before and after the 2000 millennial.
The tectonic plates are ominously shifting beneath the feet of 220,000 daily visitors.
Much public infrastructure is in awful shape. The sprawling Times Square subway station turns grungier by the week.
Whatever the casino proposal’s merits or flaws, it would have provided $250 million in direct payments for transit and pedestrian improvements.
Office buildings are hemorrhaging tenants, empty stores proliferate and nominally high hotel occupancy conceals lower room rates needed to attract tourists.
Unlicensed vendors selling dubious goods have the run of sidewalks.
The 42nd Street block between Seventh and Eighth avenues — the “Deuce” — is blighted by vacant showplaces and ugly, block-long concrete sidewalk barricades installed by the city for no logical reason.
A project to reopen the long-dark Times Square Theater is going nowhere.
The former home of BB King’s Blues Club, closed since 2018, remains dark.
The only reason large crowds continue to enjoy the Red Steps at West 47th Street and pop-up entertainments in the pedestrian plazas is confidence in the bowtie’s low crime rate.
That is, low serious crime.
A mayor inclined to shackle the NYPD and give free rein to “misdemeanors” and quality-of-life nuisances will encourage worse crimes citywide — and no place is as vulnerable as Times Square.
Murders have been nonexistent there this year and fewer felonies were recorded than 10 years ago.
But I fear to think what would happen if a Mamdani-chosen, woke police commissioner dissuades the cops from doing their jobs.
Or if Mamdani manages to push through the legalization of prostitution, the scourge of old Times Square.
Times Square hasn’t been the same since the Toys ‘R’ Us store with its indoor Ferris wheel closed in 2015.
Complaints to 311 about uncollected garbage and psychotic homeless have skyrocketed.
Visitors, theatergoers and workers cringe over public disorder, from harassment by aggressive “Elmos” to flagrant shoplifting to rare but terrifying shootings — like one that sent three people to the hospital following a 1:30 a.m. fight last week outside a chicken joint.
Unlike elitist New Yorkers, I love Times Square. I walk its length every week.
Every time I take its temperature — a subjective measure, but informed by my 25 years of reporting on its real estate and restaurant scene — the warning on the thermometer goes up a little bit more.
Perception not only outweighs data in the public mind — it often presages the grim outcome that many fear.
And perception in late 2025 is not a happy story.
The owner of several Times Square-area cafes told me, “The crowds haven’t left yet. But they’re nervous. My customers and my employees tell me every day they were frightened by raging lunatics or hustlers trying to sell them CDs. Who buys CDs anymore?”
Office towers that are critical to support stores, restaurants and theaters are in trouble: Times Square’s 27% vacancy rate is much higher than the Manhattan average.
The sense of random chaos helped to chase out Conde Nast in 2014, and both ABC’s “Good Morning America” and “CBS Mornings” this year, and has spooked others from moving there.
There’s so little demand for space at 5 Times Square — one of the circa-2000 quartet that proclaimed the area’s rebirth — that it’s being converted to apartments.
At 1515 Broadway — the proposed casino site — sole office tenant Paramount Global, which merged with Skydance last year, is expected to lay off tens of thousands of employees.
The workforce reduction will leave Times Square with fewer daily visitors to spend money.
All’s not lost. The Times Square Alliance does its best to arrest the decline, and recently helped boot a dozen illegal pot shops.
This fall, a spectacular visitors’ center, Broadway museum and viewing deck will open at the redesigned One Times Square, site of the New Year’s Eve ball drop.
But what will visitors see from the top floor?
Let’s hope it isn’t a scene of bloody mayhem — currently only a fear, but one that a Mamdani mayoralty could make all too real.
