Many of New York City’s political and business leaders are desperate for office workers to come back. In 2016, Times Square’s economy was the same size as the city of Nashville’s. Times Square is vital to New York City’s recovery, given its concentration of office buildings, tourist attractions and hotel rooms around the city’s busiest subway station. Hotels depend on nearby office buildings to bring business travelers in for meetings, helping to fill up rooms on weekdays. Many businesses rely on commuters to spend money around the office on coffee, lunch, dry cleaning and happy hour. The surrounding blocks are home to more than two dozen office buildings.
This is bad news for Times Square, where 20 percent of storefronts are still closed. Four months earlier, Michelle Go, a Deloitte employee, was pushed to her death on the subway tracks at the Times Square station. Daniel Enriquez, a Goldman Sachs employee, was fatally shot on a subway last Sunday on his way to brunch. Lately, the conversation around returning to the office has centered on public safety following a string of violent crimes on the subway. The Return of Return-to-Office Plans Though Covid cases are on the rise again, companies are still attempting a return to some form of in-person work, amid hybrid-work models and office revamps. Only 8 percent were back five days a week. As of late April, 38 percent of Manhattan’s office workers were at their desks on a typical weekday, according to a survey released this month by the business advocacy group Partnership for New York City. On some days this month, there was even more foot traffic than on the same day in 2019.īut even as restaurants, Broadway shows and concerts are feeling crowded again, the office is not. More than 300,000 people are regularly walking through the neighborhood each day, about 20 percent below prepandemic levels, according to the Times Square Alliance, which represents the area’s businesses. The more crowded Times Square becomes with visitors, the more off-putting it is for the white-collar office workers who now have the choice to work from home. The problem is that’s only half the equation. Images of the eerily empty square ricocheted around the world and became a symbol of the city’s devastation as an epicenter of the pandemic.Įarly in the pandemic, an existential question facing New York City was what would still attract people to neighborhoods like Times Square.Īs it turned out, the Palace Theater would symbolize a key piece of the answer: People come to New York to have fun. In March 2020, the entire ecosystem collapsed. But that was Times Square as it was intended to be - a destination for both work and play. The revitalization of Times Square was almost too successful at attracting people, turning the sidewalks into a live-action video game where lawyers and accountants were forced to push past selfie sticks and costumed Elmos to get inside their offices five days a week. The theater where Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli once performed was now showing “SpongeBob SquarePants,” the musical. A Doubletree Hotel was built on top of the Palace Theater, heralding a booming era for tourism in the city. In the 1990s, an effort to clean up the seedy image of Times Square brought new office buildings to the area.
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It became a movie house, then a Broadway theater. The Palace opened as a vaudeville venue in 1913, at a time when the invention of neon lights was turning the area into a nighttime theater district. The theater’s evolution is a tidy encapsulation of the evolution of the city’s entertainment scene, an economic engine that has always drawn visitors to New York. In an interview, he said this 46-story entertainment venue and luxury hotel, called TSX Broadway, would be like “the metaverse intersecting with Times Square and Las Vegas,” but without the gambling.Īnd at the heart of that intersection is the famed Palace Theater, which has been lifted 30 feet into the air as part of the $2.5 billion TSX development, presiding over a Times Square that is grappling with its post-pandemic future. The developer, David Levinson, has described the new building as a “vertical Disneyland.” If it sounds like an amusement park in the middle of Manhattan, that is the point. It will be an enviable perch to gaze out at Times Square, a neighborhood that before the pandemic represented 15 percent of the city’s economic output in just 0.1 percent of the land area. The sensory-overloaded tower will offer visitors the chance to do quite a lot, all in one place: They will be able to sing along with a hologram of their favorite pop star, spend their cryptocurrency, marvel at ever-changing digital art on the walls and dine on a 10,000-square-foot outdoor terrace.
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