By Courtney Wentz | Editor-in-Chief
Everyone around the world dreams about visiting New York City, specifically Times Square, where Manhattan is not at its finest or most impressive.
Times Square is full of tourists blocking the way because they have to get a selfie in front of oversized, electronic billboards. Cars are constantly running red lights and honking their horns at pedestrians, who have the walk sign to cross the street. The locals pretend the tourists do not exist or ignore them like the plague. Do not ask for directions because there is a good change the locals are not going to help you.
With this comes a sense of loneliness and disconnect of human interaction. Everyone wants to get where they are going without interacting with the millions of other people in Manhattan. It is like the cool clique in high school you will never be a part of because they pretend you do not exist. The locals walk the streets like nobody else in the world exists. Meanwhile, the tourists cannot stop marveling at how amazing Times Square is.
Before I ever went to Times Square, I did not think it was this great place. Mostly because New York is home of the Yankees, and being an eight year old devoted to the Red Sox, the Yankees were the enemy. As I grew older and my views changed, I thought maybe it would be great to see Times Square.
I wanted to understand why the people I knew were describing Times Square as this magical place. I wanted to feel the bubbling excitement of stumbling upon something amazing. Stepping off the tour bus and walking down the street, the feeling of disappointment started to settle in.
Everything was obscured by skyscrapers, everywhere you turned there was another tall building, and every window you looked out of you saw even more windows across the street. Every corner you turned, there was an even larger group of people walking towards you and even more cars to not be hit by. I felt boxed in with nowhere to go.
Maybe the other reason why I do not find Times Square incredible is because of what we expect from it and what we think about it. We all have a general idea of what it is going to look like before we even get there, since millions of people live on the small island and millions have visited before we got there.
In Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature,” he explains how we really are not seeing or experiencing something because countless other people have seen it before us and shared their experiences, causing more and more people to have the same experience. So now when we see or experience the same thing, we have an expectation we hope the thing lives up to.
We grow up with people telling us about how great New York City is and how great it is to being able to see Times Square at night, but it is a headache, between the bright lights and constant sounds of horns from cars echoing through the tall buildings, blocking your sight from the rest of the world.
There is never-ending noise, clumps of people walking towards you, who don’t care if they run into, and endless cars trying to drive through the mobs of people.
Times Square is not beautiful. The streets have homeless people begging for money and people shoving their product in your face, hoping you will give them money. Everyone is trying to get money out of you. There is garbage everywhere, including the smell in the air. It is like all the hopelessness in the world settles there, except the bright lights of the theatres scattered throughout the city.
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