Times Square Night Walk in NYC | Friday Night

Times Square is named after a newspaper that no longer has an office here. One Times Square, the tapering 26-story tower at the square's southern tip, was built in 1903–1904 as the headquarters of The New York Times, designed by Cyrus L.W. Eidlitz in a neo-Gothic style that's almost impossible to make out today under the layers of billboards wrapped around it. The city renamed the square — until then called Longacre Square — in the paper's honor on 5 April 1904, and the name outlasted the tenant: the Times moved out in 1913, and the building has held only a handful of office tenants since.

What kept One Times Square relevant wasn't journalism, but a New Year's Eve stunt. In 1907, the paper's publisher chose the tower's roof for the first ball drop, reasoning that a building this tall would be visible for miles — around 200,000 people showed up for that first celebration, and the tradition has run almost every year since, watched now by roughly a billion people worldwide on television and online.

Today the building generates its income almost entirely from its facade. The electronic billboards wrapped around One Times Square are among the most valuable advertising space on Earth, priced not by square footage but by how many million eyes pass beneath them — the same neon density that fills this walk, from the digital screens overhead to the bank branch and food stands at street level, all lit up on a Friday night in the middle of Manhattan.

This is what TravelHubCam is here to show you: not the headline event of New Year's Eve, but an ordinary Friday night in the same square — the billboards still running, the crowds still moving, around a newspaper building that stopped printing news from here more than a century ago.