Link: Podcast: Making TKTS Hip to Be Square - City Room - Metro - New York Times Blog.
When George M. Cohan wrote “Give My Regards to Broadway,” he never figured he would be gone this long. But his jaunty bronze figure still remains hidden behind a blue plywood construction fence in the heart of Times Square. The statue is accessible only to the pigeons that brazenly roost undisturbed on the songwriter’s bare head. As a Times reporter, my purview goes well beyond Times Square. But I do pass through it every day. Things that many New Yorkers ordinarily take for granted tend to pique my curiosity.A year ago, I wrote about the strange groaning noise emanating from a subway grate on a pedestrian island. It turned out to be a “sound sculpture” deliberately unidentified by the artist so the source of the sound is left entirely to the imagination of passers-by.For months, I’d been passing the ugly blue fence surrounding Duffy Square and wondering what, if anything, had been going on behind it.An ambitious renovation of the temporary TKTS discount theater tickets booth that old trailer camouflaged by pipe and canvas signage since 1973 was envisioned nearly a decade ago. A design competition was announced in 1999. Nearly 700 submissions, a record at the time, were received
