New York Love Affair Part 2

So, onward I march through the memories of my great City. Time to stop soul searching for a second and chronicle. All my devoted readers can take a trip back to the 90s...

Times Square

It's time I talked about Times Square, the neighborhood I knew so intimately and that which I still keep a close relationship. I could probably write ten posts about Times Square, but I'll start with this one...

I want to preface this by saying that now, in 2008, I truly don't like walking through Times Square. It is a victim of it's own success -- too crowded and too many tourists. But it wasn't always so.

There was a time when it was actually easy to walk around in Times Square. It was the Times Square of the mid-90s, when few people crowded the streets and we were waving the banner begging people to come and telling them that the neighborhood was "cleaner, safer and brighter!" Cleaner because there were street sweepers picking up the trash that people would drop, safer because the NYPD was doing its darndest to bring crime rates down, and brighter, well brighter because larger streetlights were installed on the "scary" side streets. The theory at the time was that when you fix the small stuff, the larger picture falls into place. (It was the same thinking that helped decrease crime across NYC at that time.) So by picking up the trash, and cleaning up grafitti, helping the homeless come off the street, closing up decrepid shops, and sprucing things up in general, the neighborhood became much more attractive to the investors who would eventually take the neighborhood and turn it on its end to become what it is today. We conducted media event after media event, telling everyone that -- hey, this place is great, isn't it??? And people believed us. It was like a chain reaction -- we told people it was better, people invested and it got better, we told them it was hot, others said it was hot and more people poured money into the area. We end up with the Times Square of today -- fully developed, insanely busy, crowded and everything we wanted it to become 15 years ago. Of course this oversimplifies the regeneration of Times Square.

If you know me, you know that I can take any complex situation and boil it down to it's most simplistic form, because I truly believe that every complex situation can be simplified. I can apply whatever basic formula I've convinced myself of to whatever I am analyzing at the time. So I feel totally comfortable saying that the revitalization of Times Square is a good analogy for revitalizing one's life in general. When you can't point your finger on a single reason for dissatisfaction and unhappiness, it helps when you fix all the little broken things -- one by one. All the little annoyances are suddenly gone and you are left with a simpler, more clear, and somewhat easier life than you had before. Now this presumes that there is not something totally terrible overshadowing a situation. And even when there is something huge causing issue, if all the little things are taken care of, then the impact of that big problem diminishes.

The second grand theory of which Times Square is an example is the fact that when you are a credible voice and you tell people something which seems to be logical and make sense, most people will actually believe it (whether or not it is actually true). When we said the neighborhood was great (and it wasn't quite great yet; it was better but not great), those we told said it was great. Now that's what they mean by buzz...

It's all very simple. And if it isn't that simple, don't tell me.