Times Square is best known today for its more glamorous side as the neighborhood where Broadway and American theater reside.The “Broadway” part of Manhattan encompasses the blocks from West 39th to West 52nd Streets (between Sixth and Ninth Avenues).The name Broadway comes from the Dutch Breede weg.Broadway, the street, was once the Wickquasgeck (Indian) Trail and ran from Battery Park to Wall Street when the British took over New Amsterdam.Today Broadway (the street) covers the length of Manhattan from downtown Bowling Green to Columbus Circle and continues to upstate New York and Albany ending at Champlain, New York at the Canadian border.

Visitors to Broadway musicals and plays are an extremely important part of the City’s economy; attendance to Broadway shows in the 2006/2007 season was 12.3 million people. Grosses grew 8.9 percent to $939 million. There are 39 Broadway theaters -- some of the oldest are beautiful structures. The Lyceum Theater (onW. 45th Street) is my favorite and the oldest surviving theater in “continuous use in New York City” and the first Broadway theater to be designated as a landmark (in 1974). It was built in 1903 by theater manager, Daniel Frohman, who lived in an apartment overlooking the theater’s stage with a peephole window where he would wave his handkerchief at his wife, actress Margaret Illington, if he thought she were overacting. Several Broadway theaters are named to honor theater celebrities: the actresses Ethel Barrymore and Helen Hayes; the dynamic acting team of Lunt & Fontanne; actor Edwin Booth; producer David Belasco whose Belasco Theater had advanced lighting systems for its time; critics Brooks Atkinson and Walter Kerr; Pulitzer Prize winning playwrights Eugene O’Neill and August Wilson (whose plays chronicle the history of African-Americans in the 20th Century); composers George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers; and New York Times caricaturist Al Hirschfeld (whose black ink drawings of actors and theater personalities offer their own unique view of modern American Theater). One of America's greatest playwrights, Eugene O'Neill, was actually born in this neighborhood in 1888 (before it became Times Square). News reporter and writer Damon Runyon (Guys and Dolls) requested that his ashes be scattered over Broadway (and they were upon his death in December 1946).

Photo 1: Majestic Theater with the famous logo for the Phantom of the Opera, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical which opened in January 1988 and is still running.

Photos 2 & 3: Lyceum Theater on W. 45th Street

Photo 4: Lunt-Fontanne Theater

Photo 5: the Music Box Theater