a guy as he shuffled past me when I hit 48 th . I laughed and kept moving, neatly sidestepping two o

Let me start off by saying that I cannot stand Times Square. The time I was too tired to realize that getting off the Q from Brooklyn at 42nd on a warm Saturday evening might be a bad idea was probably my worst MTA decision in months (aside cheap hotel amsterdam from every time I walk down the L train tunnel ever). I don t like the tourists, the glitz, the naked cowboy. I don t want to go shopping in a four story Forever 21, I can get shitty Sbarro s pizza at the mall back home, and they have cheaper I Heart NY shirts in Chinatown.
Yet there s something to be said for indulging in the traditional rites of tourism. So what, momentarily suspending thoughts of imperialism/capitalism/consumerism (any -ism, really), transforms Times Square from a innocuous geographic location to the vortex full of awful it is today?
The beautiful Times Square is an abandoned one. What makes the film  I Am Legend so chilling at first is not the zombie/vampire hazard pursing an increasingly despotic Will Smith, but instead the stark beauty of a New York lost to civilization. The juxtaposition of the emptiness and the borderline vulgar emblems of Western culture (because what shouts cheap hotel amsterdam America! more loudly than a fifty foot glowing Coke ad) is haunting. The dissonance of emptiness, cheap hotel amsterdam especially in a city like this, is worth admiring. Next time you re headed back from campus at some godawful hour when no Starbucks is open and the tourists have returned to their hotels, stop off at 42nd and see Times Square free from the crush of high-school-field-trip-from-Ohio or painfully-loud-family-of-five-with-high-strung-father-and-passive-aggressive-mother.
My first memory of Times Square cheap hotel amsterdam is from when I was eleven. While I had been to New York as a younger child to visit family, most of my memories from those trips are restricted cheap hotel amsterdam to the playgrounds around my step-grandfather s Lower East Side apartment. After days of pestering him about being cooped up in said apartment (we ventured out for such exciting necessities as groceries and getting the mail), my father finally relented and walked me up Broadway a day or two before New Year's Eve. I still have the shiny gold "2005" glasses he bought me in Herald Square and I remember standing in the shadow of that massive Ferris Wheel in the Toys R Us and feeling just so damn cool as I swayed, neck stiff from looking at all those lights cheap hotel amsterdam painting the sky electric.
When I was eleven, passively moving with the tides of tourists was exciting. Now, getting bumped and shoved by everyone else looking for their one little New York moment to last on the car ride back to Ohio or Jersey or Michigan is just annoying. Guess you can only be punch drunk on an idea of a city for so long. The last time I was in Times Square I was just passing through on a trip to Battery Park from campus. It was nearly deserted, around four or five in the morning. "Cocaine? Ecstasy?" cheap hotel amsterdam mumbled
a guy as he shuffled past me when I hit 48 th . I laughed and kept moving, neatly sidestepping two obviously drunk business trip-looking guys preserving their night in the neon glow of their iPhones. "You think he's hot, right? You want to have sex with him, right?" one of them shouted to my back. I said nothing and kept going, cheap hotel amsterdam slowing down by that Ferris Wheel to drink in the fading echoes of my big eleven year old New York moment. But I don't stop. I keep walking.
The New York they sell on Glee, or to the people waiting in line at the Olive Garden near Letterman s studio, or to geeky eleven year old kids who are desperately seeking something anything bigger cheap hotel amsterdam and better than themselves is not the New York I live in now. I ll take the rats and the guys selling drugs and the cab drivers telling me to go fuck myself and that nasty ass sewer smell that fills Columbus Circle after two am over a New York still glowing with the sheen of its plastic packaging. New York shouldn t belong to its tourists. So yeah, go to Times Square. Drink in the static cheap hotel amsterdam haze of all those lights, cheap hotel amsterdam all that energy. But ditch the crowd.