To get back to the original post:

Aons ago, when I was 10 or 11 and lived in Brooklyn, my friends and I would just jump on a subway and ride to Times Square when we had nothing else to do. Just walked around, took in the sights, came back 3 hours later--parents didn't even know we went. Never felt in danger because we were too young/dumb to know better.

When I was 15, I had an after-school job as a messenger boy for the old New York Post, which was on West Street in lower Manhattan (years before the World Trade Center was built). Arrived there about 3:30 and delivered and picked up advertising copy at ad agencies all around the city until 9 or 9 p.m. Great, exciting job for a kid--running all around the city at night, very much different than daytime--a real adventure. Times Square was getting kinda edgy by then. I carried a knife, to make me feel "safer" (as if it would have made a difference); but except for getting cruised by an occasional "chicken hawk," never had a problem.

Worked in Manhattan from 1959 through 1971, then moved to and worked in suburban NJ from '72 on, so we missed the really bad years of NYC's decline. When we visited the city, it was a never-ending blitz of dirt, aggressive panhandlers, hustlers, noise and sirens.

In '97, I took NJ Transit to Penn Station and walked all the way up to a big hospital on 100th Street and Fifth Avenue to visit a sick aunt. I was amazed at the improvement in the city: the homeless and the panhandlers were gone, the streets were clean, it was relatively quiet, and it felt completely safe. In the intervening years, Disney had transformed Times Square into something sanitized, like Disneyland for adults. I suppose it had less character than it did in the late Fifties (cheap bars and restaurants, what passed for X-rated movies and shops, crumbling theaters, street hustlers, overpriced souvenir shops), but I just consigned that era to nostalgia.