It's often joked about that tourists and the people who actually live in New York have vastly different opinions on and experiences of Times Square. In short, the former make some kind of effort to go to there; the latter make every possible effort to avoid it.
While living in New York, I did my share of avoiding Times Square where possible, but I'd qualify that by saying that the more I took photos on the street, the more time actually spent there. At the very least, if, like on this summer Friday in 2016, I had some time to kill, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to wander down there and take a few shots.
This location attracted me because, admittedly, I am not a particularly bold street photographer. I don't want to get right up into people's faces, and I don't want to provoke a confrontation with anyone. Though it may limit just what sort of shots I can take, I am most comfortable shooting on the street when I know I can easily blend in to my surroundings.
Times Square is perfect, sort of, because there are a lot of different looking people from all over, clustered into this relatively small geographic area, and most of the time, they're looking not at me taking a picture, but at the bombardment of billboards, lights, skyscrapers, and costumed characters around them. And, if people see me taking a picture, I don't stand out all that much—it's Times Square. A lot of people are taking pictures.
Its main problem, though, is that there is so much going on and so many people around that it can be hard to find a clear subject. And I've often shot first and figured that I'd sort it out later through cropping. (It's not a great habit, and I do aim to do better.)
Still, by sheer saturation of people and how they cluster and group, even using that fingers-crossed method, it isn't too hard to find at least something.
As I went back through these, I noticed a contradiction to the common wisdom about differing tourist and New Yorker opinions on Times Square. That Hyundai Elantra billboard that asks "DOES IT GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS?" feels like some sort of mean trick, because I don't get the sense that that's the sentiment of many of the persons sitting on these steps. Most look about as happy as New Yorkers teleported from a few blocks over into this peculiar public space, this bank of steps on which one sits as if to watch a show, but, to anyone walking uptown, you there sitting on the steps are the show.
In fact, aside from this one photo I have of a happy photographer walking away with their shot (come to think of it, given what I just wrote, they very well could've taken a photo of me and I didn't even know it), it looks like I didn't see many thrilled or excited people that summer Friday afternoon.
It also turns out that, at the time I was shooting this, it was a whopping 92 degrees in New York City. So I can understand how, after however many hours of travelling or walking, one finds oneself here in the supposed center of the universe, it's boiling hot, and you're catching your breath in front of a sign that suggests that you are supposed to be having the most amazing time right now.
I empathize, in part because I now realize I lived through a different version of roughly this same scenario.
My wife and I vacationed in France in August of 2018. We arrived excited, but also quite jet-lagged and exhausted, and we just so happened to get there on the trailing end of a sever heat wave. But, having read A Moveable Feast a few months earlier, I was eager to visit Ernest Hemingway's old haunts, and that's how we found ourselves having lunch in the outdoor café section of Le Select, quite hot and very uncomfortable, with few actual Parisians in sight.
The only thing we would need to complete the picture would be a billboard behind us saying in French, "DOES IT GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS?".