Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Now the World's Most Famous Strip Mall!

BREAKING NEWS (-2 days): Because of some transportation commissioner's brilliant new idea, Times Square (and in fact most of midtown Broadway) is now permanently closed to traffic. The idea is to make it into an outdoor pedestrian mall because it was a great success in Copenhagen. You can read more about it here.

I'm not even sure where to begin discussing this absurdity, but my deep investigative journalism has got to start somewhere.

A) Copenhagen = a city of 1.8 million Hans Christian Andersens
New York City = a city of 8.2 million lunatics, like our friend, Ace.

B) At first, when they kept mentioning the word 'mall' and 'Europe,' I thought maybe they meant mall in the British sense of the word, which basically means a (usually scenic) section designated for pedestrians. But, nope, they definitely meant it in the Long Island/Jersey, Abercrombie & Fitch, sketchy kiosk sense. I'm really excited to get asked if I would like to try hand lotion in addition to if I like comedy every day. That's evolution, baby!

c) This is their idea of welcoming tourists to the notion of Times Square as a pedestrian's paradise:


80s neon lounge chairs.

Or, if you're feeling a bit more nostalgic:


The ones in front of Toys R Us were graciously donated by the propmaster from the original Brady Bunch set.

I'm sure I'll have plenty more to say on this subject. But for now, I'm going to look on the bright side. This should bode well for my velocity-challenged photography skills as I have high hopes that people like Ace, Dingy Elmo, et. al will need to take a load off from their highly taxing lives and will be drawn like flies to poop to these lovely seating arrangements.

And here's one more photo, just because:

2 comments:

  1. Oh my god. Does this mean there will be tourists and taxi stands lines up on like 10th ave and 2nd Ave?! This is penalizing actual New Yorkers who have to drive in the city and who know better than to drive through Times Square. Fuck you traffic commissioner.

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  2. Ha, I read about this yesterday and assumed that this was your doing. That obviously, this transportation commissioner had read your blog and wanted to increase the number of crazies you're likely to encounter on any given lunch break.

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