The Price of Success: Crowding of Times Square

From the ‘Be careful what you wish for’ file – in the New York Times: 

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Times Square’s Crushing Success Raises Questions About Its Future

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The Crossroads of the World has never been more popular. And that is becoming a problem. …

Howard S. Fiddle, vice chairman at the real estate services company CBRE, said, “It’s so successful as a tourist destination that people say it’s too congested for New Yorkers to conduct business.” …

“Crowding in Times Square is a big problem right now,” said Tim Tompkins, president of the alliance. “It’s not just the costumed characters, but all the different people who are hawking and hustling there.”

Theater owners are enjoying record attendance. But some of them are also worried that the proportion of tourists is on the rise while the number of New Yorkers is declining. That does not bode well, they say, when the high tide of tourism inevitably begins to ebb.

“I think everybody is concerned about the crowding issue,” said Robert E. Wankel, co-chief executive of the Shubert Organization, which operates 17 theaters. “We’re having a problem from our success. We spent a lot of time and effort cleaning up Times Square and now it’s the place everyone wants to be.” …

Since 1996, the number of tourists visiting Times Square every year has doubled to an estimated 40 million. The tourists have attracted a growing number of people dressed as Elmo, Spider-Man and other cartoon characters.

The latest crowd surge in Times Square began in 2009, after the city closed a stretch of Broadway between 42nd and 47th Streets, creating a series of public plazas and nearly doubling the amount of pedestrian space. As a result, the number of pedestrians in Times Square has jumped to as high as 480,000 a day, from about 350,000 before 2009.

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“Foot traffic has increased,” said Jeffrey S. Katz, who owns several buildings in Times Square. “The retail is doing great; hotels are doing great. The plazas just exploded the rents. It’s beyond even my imagination.”

Annual rents for street-level retail space have quadrupled since 2008, according to Cushman & Wakefield, a commercial real estate broker. ….

A survey conducted by the Times Square Alliance in May found that one of every four building owners, office workers and property managers in Times Square was “dissatisfied” with overcrowding, the construction of the plazas and the costumed characters.

“The recent overcrowding problems of Times Square have been caused in part by the construction of the plazas,” said Douglas Durst, chairman of the Durst Organization, which owns 4 Times Square. He also said the city needed to address what he described as a proliferation of aggressive costumed characters and vendors that have contributed to the gridlock.

All are hoping to avoid a situation Yogi Berra once described: “No one goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.”

“Our concern,” said Ellen Goldstein, vice president for planning and policy at the alliance, “is that the public realm is so unpleasant that we may at some point hit a tipping point, where companies won’t take space in Times Square. We’re not there yet, but the data is telling us we could get there.”