Giuliani did not close off Broadway, Bloomberg did.
What’s more, the area has been turned around with great success.
When the Giuliani administration successfully broke up the porn shops, zoning them out of Times Square, coupled with policing quality of life crimes, the area transformed.
It is not by any stretch of the imagination as awful as it was in the 80s. You say it’s as bad as it was in the late 60s. Were you there in the 60s? If so, can I assume that you are in your 70s or close to that age?
I don’t know about the 60s, but I know that in the 80s 42nd Street was a scary place, filled with (as I said) drug addicts, prostitutes, bums, petty criminals and porn shops/theatres. If you went into Port Authority after midnight, you heard wailing and gnashing of teeth. Bryant Park behind the library was needle park, filled with passed out junkies and alcoholics and prostitutes.
Once again, Giuliani did not close off Broadway to car traffic, Bloomberg did. You unfairly link these three administrations in this regard.
First of all, you do not have to be in your 70s to remember Times Square in the 60s. I was born and raised in New York. I remember that area as a small child when going to the Port Authority to visit family in NJ or attending Broadway shows and eating in restaurants afterwards. So let’s not get ‘age-ist’ as well as using other insults.
Guiliani was very successful in removing crime. But in the process, he remade a Times Square that once had a logical architectural structure suited to our fair city and changed it into a Tokyo that would have intimidated Godzilla. Gone were so many local shops that were replaced by bland chain stores that do not serve the ordinary New Yorkers who live and work in the area once the tourists go home. Small restaurants were replaced by awful national chains like Olive Garden, Ruby Foo’s and others that gave tourists nothing but the same kind of experience they could have in a strip mall. (I said all this in my original post, btw.)
Bloomberg making a pedestrian mall - as if this city is designed like Florence or Rome - was another disaster. I doubt it’s stopped air pollution; in fact, with all the stalled traffic emitting noxious emissions, I’m sure it’s worse than when NYC was coal-fueled. Not to mention the aggravation added to the lives of people travelling to shows (working in shows!) and making their way to the Port Authority and Penn Station after a hard day at work.
DeBlasio (I guess it was him) allowing half naked women and that foolish Naked Cowboy so dear to the hearts of ladies from Alabama to roam the pedestrian plaza further turned Times Square back into the Midnight Cowboy era we all got fed up with in the 70s. Leaving a friend’s show last Saturday night and forcing our way through TS was like living in a Hieronymous Bosch vivant tableau.
If that’s what you like, you’ve got it. I don’t. But I suspect you will win the argument with the authorities and city planners and I won’t.