How Broadway Broke the Manhattan Grid
Most of Manhattan’s numbered streets run in a regular grid. Broadway predates that plan and cuts diagonally across it. Where Broadway meets Seventh Avenue near 42nd Street, the crossing produces wedge-shaped blocks and small, irregular spaces rather than a conventional square bordered by four straight sides. The name “Times Square” describes a busy urban junction, not a geometric shape.
That unusual layout is visible on foot: sightlines open and close as streets converge, and buildings have to fit parcels with angled edges. The intersection’s form is not the result of a single plaza designed all at once; it grew from the collision of an older route with the city’s later street plan.
A Newspaper Put Its Name on the Junction
The area was known as Longacre Square when the New York Times moved its headquarters into the Times Building there in the early twentieth century. The newspaper’s arrival gave the junction a prominent new landmark and helped make its name commercially valuable. The city’s decision to rename it tied a specific place to a powerful institution—and made that association part of the city’s map.
The newspaper eventually left the building, but the name endured. Today, visitors can read the site’s history in its contrast: an intersection shaped by an old street pattern, carrying a name that began as a newspaper’s address and now identifies one of New York’s most recognizable public gathering places.
