2005/06/15 Council Agenda Packet

TIMES SQUARE: ITS PROMINENCE AND ITS PEOPLE The Times Square and Clinton communities, which the Business Improvement District encompasses or abuts, are_dynamic and diverse neighborhoods.- The area is home to some of the city's major corporations and there are more than 30 million square feet of office space. The BID has more than four hundred property owners, representing five thousand businesses in 'its membership: -More than "250,000 employees_ work -at -enterprises that '. range from giant - recording .'companies ` to international• security firms to ''one person theatrical •agencies: `Among -the 'major corporations now making their- home in Times.- Square - are Morgan Stanley, Bertelsmann, Viacom, and many more. And of course, limes Square contains the highest'-b-oncentration of''legitimate'theatres'anywhere-in -the -world ;��thirty-seven theatres, "with as many—as 25,000 seats to tie filled on"' ech performance day. Times Square has a daily pedestrian count of 1.5 million persons. There are approximately twenty hotels, with 12,500 hotel rooms, in the Times Square area, one-fifth of all hotel rooms in Manhattan. Twenty million tourists and five million overnight visitors arrive annually. -There are more than two hundred restaurants in the Times„Square, area. It is indeedNew York City's center":for commerce and "the performing arts; `business and tourism. -But the area is also a home for thousands of residents who -live adjacent to and in the `midst'of-this'vib•rant midtown`' commercial core: ° The area * is - replete with churches '-block associations; civic associations,"business' `oFganizations and theatre related organizations. The Times Square BID knows—and works with -=some 35 social service agencies In the greater Times Square area. It also has the largest concentration of pomography establishments in the city. The number of such businesses reached a high of about 14.0 establishments in the 1970s and early 1980s, and declined thereafter to approximately forty. There is some indication that the number has increased somewhat In the Times Square area and on Its periphery, particularly on Eighth Avenue, in the past months. EVER00201 15