Capturing Times Square

Alternately fabulous and filthy, celebrated and reviled, Times Square has evoked strong reactions from New Yorkers and visitors to the city alike for well over a century, ever since an IRT subway station opened in 1904 at the famed intersection of 42nd Street, Seventh Avenue and Broadway.

The Musuem of the City of New York is hosting a conversation with artist Jane Dickson and scholar Lynne Sagalyn about what it means to capture the many lives of Times Square, one of New York’s most iconic, mutable, and perplexing places.  The author, architect, and filmmaker James Sanders will moderate.  

In very different ways, both Dickson and Sagalyn have made Times Square a central focus of their work. Dickson through painting and photography and Sagalyn through historical research and analysis, including her most recent book, Times Square Remade: The Dynamics of Urban Change (2023). Each has developed complex, nuanced portraits of a world-renowned but stubbornly local place that is both real and heavily mythologized: at once a commercial hub, a tourist destination, an entertainment district, a neighborhood, and a perennial subject of fascination for artists, filmmakers, and others for over a century.