Times Square Alliance
The Times Square Alliance works to improve and promote Times Square, one of the world’s most recognizable and intensely used urban districts. The organization manages public spaces, provides sanitation and public-safety services, supports businesses, produces events and public art, and advocates for the continued vitality of Times Square.
The Alliance has also played an important role in reshaping how cities think about streets and public space. Beginning in 2009, the closure of portions of Broadway to vehicle traffic transformed Times Square’s congested streets into pedestrian plazas—first as an experiment and ultimately as a permanent redesign. The project became an influential example of how relatively simple interventions could reclaim valuable urban space for people and helped inspire similar pedestrianization efforts around the world.
Arts and culture have been equally central to that transformation. Through Times Square Arts, the Alliance commissions contemporary artists to create work specifically for one of the world’s most unusual public stages, from large-scale installations and performances to Midnight Moment, which synchronizes digital artworks across Times Square’s enormous electronic billboards each night.
Together, these efforts have made Times Square an important laboratory for public-space management: a place where pedestrianization, programming, art, commerce, tourism, and the everyday life of the city collide at an extraordinary scale.