Whirling in a chaos of competing lights and advertisements, Times Square is New York's white-hot energy center. Hordes of people jostle for space on the sidewalks to walk and gawk. Like many New York City "squares," it's actually two triangles formed by the angle of Broadway slashing across 7th Avenue between West 42nd and 47th streets. Times Square (the name also applies to the general area, beyond the intersection of these streets) has been the city's main theater district since the turn of the 20th century: from West 44th to 51st streets, the cross streets west of Broadway are lined with some 30 major theaters; film houses joined the fray beginning in the 1920s.

Before the 1900s, this was New York's horse-trading center, known as Long Acre Square. Substantial change came with the arrival of the subway and the New York Times, then a less prestigious paper, which moved here in exchange for having its name grace the square. On December 31, 1904, the Times celebrated the opening of its new headquarters, at Times Tower, with a fireworks show at midnight, thereby starting a New Year's Eve tradition. Now resheathed in marble and called One Times Square Plaza (W. 42nd St. between Broadway and 7th Ave.), the building is topped with the world's most famous rooftop pole, down which an illuminated 200-pound ball is lowered each December 31 to the wild enthusiasm of revelers below. (In the 1920s the Times moved to its present building, a green-copper-roof neo-Gothic behemoth, at 229 West 43rd Street.)

Times Square is hardly more sedate on the other 364 nights of the year. You'll be mesmerized by its usual high-wattage thunder: two-story-high cups of coffee that actually steam; a 42-foot-tall bottle of Coca-Cola; huge billboards of underwear models; mammoth, superfast digital displays of world news and stock quotes; on-location network studios; and countless other technologically sophisticated allurements. Zoning actually requires that buildings be decked out with ads, as they have been for nearly a century. The contributions to the electronic kinetics are visible in the sky-high Reuters headquarters (at the northwest corner of 7th Avenue and 42nd Street), and across 42nd Street from Reuters, at a skyscraper known as 5 Times Square. No group magnifies all this energy better than the throngs of teens who gather each afternoon in front of MTV's studios in the heart of the square, hoping to be chosen to be part of the show Total Request Live.TRL, as it's popularly known, is filmed live from the second-floor glass windows at West 44th Street and Broadway. Since such well-known performers as the Eminem and Britney Spears make regular rounds here, Times Square has become a mecca for youth. The traffic island in front of the Armed Forces Recruiting Office (in a shiny metal box with neon American flags) provides the best angles on the whole of Times Square's helter-skelter welter. Subway: 1, 2, 3, 9, N, Q, R, W to 42nd St./Times Sq.