Times Square Characters and Performers May Get Confined to Designated ‘Activity Areas’
Map courtesy of the Times Square Alliance
It looks like Mayor de Blasio’s wish of coralling the costumed characters and topless performers in Times Square may be coming true. The Daily News reports that the Times Square Alliance has endorsed the “Times Square Commons” plan, which Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and Councilmen Daniel Garodnick and Corey Johnson publicized in an op-ed in the paper yesterday.
The proposal would rezone Times Square’s pedestrian plaza so that instead of being mapped as a street it would become a special district called Times Square Commons. This area would be divided into three zones: general civic zones, which would feature tables and chairs and arts events; pedestrian traffic flow zones, areas to walk with no physical obstructions; and the aforementioned designated activity zones, small slivers of space that “would allow any activity involving the immediate exchange of money for goods, services or entertainment.”
Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance, said “It strikes the right balance between freedom of expression and freedom from hassling and congestion. It will no longer be a free-for- all.” Similarly, Mayor de Blasio, who went so far as to propose ripping out the pedestrian plazas altogether, said while a guest on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” that “this is going to be an equal-opportunity enforcement situation, so Naked Cowboy and his days of naked bliss are going to change a little bit.”
[Via NYDN]
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