The heart of New York City and the hub of tourist central, Times Square doesn’t have many apartment buildings, however there are plans for new apartments in the works and conversions from commercial office space into residential space has already begun. While there may not be a lot of places to live, there are definitely a lot of places to visit.

Restaurant Row located on W 46th St, between 8th and 9th Avenues is one of the best neighborhoods to live in. The block is lined with Restaurants on both sides of the street, above each restaurant are brownstones converted into apartment buildings. These are hard to get apartments but once you do find one, you’ll never have to worry about how far you will have to go to get a decent meal.

Theaters There are over 30 Broadway theaters and another set of Off-Broadway theaters in the Theater District. Now that you live in New York you can see a Broadway show anytime you like. Seeing a Broadway show can often get expensive, unless you go to the TKTS Booth on the corner of 47th Street and Broadway. TKTS sells tickets to almost every Broadway show and most Off-Broadway shows at discounts up to 50% off. The catch, you have to get to the booth early to ensure you get tickets to the show you want, you must get there early to avoid a long line as well and you have to pay cash for your tickets. The pay off is worth it as you will almost never get a bad seat for the price you pay. West 42nd Street, of course, is one of the world’s most legendary streets, or "crossroads."

In the early part of the 20th Century, many of New York’s most famous theaters lined it between Seventh and Eighth Avenue, a block that later became known as "The Deuce." As the Theater District expanded a bit northwards and the Depression took hold, many of the theaters were converted to movie houses, one of which, the Apollo, became one of the first in the city to show foreign movies on a regular basis for years. By the late 1950’s, however, most of the theaters had fallen into considerable neglect and were relegated to being second-, or, more often, third-run houses.

With the sexual revolution of the early 1960’s, many of the theaters changed from seedy to sleazy and the West 42nd Street environment, especially around Eighth Avenue, became bizarre, intimidating and dangerous. Widely perceived as a major blight in the very heart of the city, not even the presence of the headquarters of The New York Times on 43rd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues nor the creation of a police sub-precinct on a vacant lot on the south side of the street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue could stem the decay. Because of the presence of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Bus Terminal straddling 41st Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues and the fact that the subway stations at 42nd Street between Eighth and Seventh Avenues and Broadway were perhaps the busiest in the world, the street had the highest pedestrian traffic in the country as well as the highest concentration of porno venues and riffraff. Although it lost Hubert’s Flea Circus, its cheap movie tickets made it a regional attraction for low-cost entertainment. Eventually, the city and state forged a redevelopment plan and in the early 1980’s and the Prudential Insurance Company and Park Tower Realty, headed by developer George Klein, agreed to develop four major office buildings around the base of the former Times Tower at the foot of Times Square and finance the restoration of many of the famous theaters on the block. Philip Johnson and John Burgee were commissioned as the architects for the ambitious endeavor, which was hoped by public officials to not only clean up the street but also spur new commercial development on the West Side. Their plan called for four large towers with Gothic-style roofs and the plan was widely criticized for its aesthetics, which were rather ungainly and uninspired. Johnson and Burgee subsequently revised their designs and came up with very flashy and glitzy new towers, which were a vast improvement and quite good, especially the tallest tower, although not all critics were so convinced. The project had gotten bogged down with lawsuits that challenged the legality of the tax incentives for the redevelopers and the condemnation process. Not surprisingly, the real estate market collapsed in the late 1980’s following the stock market crash of 1987 and the street continued to flounder, although recent rezoning of the Times Square area had resulted in a rush of new projects to the north. The decision of developers to go ahead with new projects nearby was predicated in large part on their beliefs that the mess at 42nd Street was going to be cleaned by the Prudential/Park Tower project. Many civic critics of the 42nd Street Development Project then argued that the project was no longer needed to encourage new development since the new development was occurring. True, but the projects were not filling up fast. Moreover, after years of negotiations, the Kennedy family finally backed out of plans to develop a major "merchandise mart" directly across from the bus terminal similar to one it owned in Chicago. The proposed mart, whose site had been a vacant parking lot, had been viewed as the very important western anchor for the block.

Now many years and many, many millions behind their schedules, Prudential/Park Tower wanted some relief and eventually the city and state extended their rights to develop, but now the marketplace had a lot of new space and the demand for the Prudential/Park Tower project’s space was not enormous.

Meanwhile, the condemnation process had proceeded, and West 42nd Street was pretty much boarded up and many of the sex centers closed. The street was still dying, even though it was less intimidating.

Along came Disney in the late 1990’s and it acquired the New Amsterdam Theater on the south side close to Seventh Avenue, the street’s most important theater, erected in 1903 and designed by Herts & Tallant in Art Nouveau style. The real estate market was changing and many of the new buildings in the theater district were filling up, the city’s economy was improving, attendance was up at the theater and the hotel occupancy rates soared.

The theme store and theme restaurant schemes were working well further uptown as demonstrated by the great success of the Warner Bros. Studio Store on the northeast corner of 57th Street and Fifth Avenue and the popularity of such theme restaurants as Planet Hollywood and Hard Rock on West 57th Street.

The Disney name worked magic on 42nd Street and before long most of the street was gobbled up by "clean" enterprises and the developers of a proposed hotel on the northeast corner at Eighth Avenue even commissioned Arquitectonica, the flamboyant and fine Miami-based architectural firm for its important project.

Prudential/Park Tower then sold off two of its office building sites, one, on the southwest corner of 43rd Street and Broadway, to Douglas Durst, a long-time critic of the 42nd Street Development Plan and a major builder in the area, and the southeast corner of 43rd Street and Seventh Avenue to the Rudin Organization. Durst quickly landed Condé Nast as a major tenant and the Rudins got Reuters and both had new designs. Clearly, the street was once again in play and soon the city began to study a plan to permit theater owners in the area to transfer their unused development rights to other sites for even more new projects.

The new projects in Times Square complied with new stiff city regulations to ensure that the bow-tie open space still rippled with electric/neon signage and indeed in the late 1990’s it looked better than it had since the great Hotel Astor and the Claridge Hotel across from it with its famous Camel "smoke-ring" sign were demolished a few decades before.

Some planners, of course, voiced concerns that the new Times Square and 42nd Street might become too "squeaky" clean and antiseptic, but such voices were in a minority given the hordes of tourists flocking to the area’s new and pretty exciting places such as the All-Star Café and the Virgin Record Store in the very attractive, blue-glass skyscraper, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, on the east side of Broadway between 44th and 45th Streets.

The new commercial buildings in the theater district were considerably better than the prior generation that was highlighted by the Marriott Marquis Hotel designed by John Portman in a fortress-style reflecting the mood of the 1970’s in the area and One Astor Plaza, the finned tower designed by Kahn & Jacobs that replaced the famous Astor Hotel. Portman’s project, a major convention hotel, has his trademark huge atrium and two revolving restaurants that offer good and rare public midtown vistas. A major investment bank took over much of the space in a silvery large tower at 1585 Broadway, designed by Gwathmey Siegal & Associates, a couple of blocks to the north on the west side of Broadway. The Rudins built a very elegant, polished gray granite tower at 1675 Broadway and Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo & Associates designed a black tower with canted skylit setbacks at 750 Seventh Avenue, which was completed in 1989.