Times Square is indeed located at the juncture of Broadway, Seventh Avenue and Forty-Second Street, but this – the drawing which serves both as frontispiece and as chapter one in the book – is rendered from a few blocks north of that celebrated intersection. We are looking southward from a point between Seventh Avenue (to the left and east) and Broadway (to the right and west). While the impressionistic inexactness of the drawing makes positioning the exact point of view difficult, there is at least one cross-street clearly rendered (on the right of the drawing, towards the background, probably Forty-Forth Street). The considerable distance Marcus puts between the viewer and the Times Building (at center) suggests that the Square is rendered from somewhere between Forty-Sixth and Forty-Seventh Streets. More support for this hypothesis comes from the distribution of median islands separating the Seventh Ave and Broadway. A 1939 map shows islands between Forty-Third and Forty-Fourth, between Forty-Forth and Forty-Fifth, and then another between Forty-Sixth and Forty-Seventh. Neither of the southern islands would present the Times Building from so great a distance as that presented in the drawing. Marcus positions the spectator at a point from which s/he is safe from oncoming traffic, then Times Square is here represented from the island between Forty-sixth and Forty-seventh Streets. At present this location is the site of the "Tickets" booth – memorable for the skeletal, bright-red pipe sculpture surrounding it – which has been an important landmark among theater-going tourists since the 1970s.

Before April 1904, Times Square was called Long Acre (also spelled Longacre) Square. When the New York Times erect its central office on the triangular plot bordered by Forty-second Street (to the south), Seventh Avenue (to the west) and Broadway (to the east), the city renamed the intersection. In October of that year, the first portions of what would become the New York Subway were opened; what had in the nineteenth century been a disreputable neighborhood became easily accessible to people from all over Manhattan, and the theater district at Herald Square began to move itself uptown. By World War I the area was unrivaled in its position as New York’s entertainment district, the undisputed center of the mass-culture which Marcus regards with such ambivalence. Its domination of light theatrical entertainment – both as live performance and as film projection – endowed it with a widely-recognized centrality that extended beyond the theater. That Times Square’s privileged position in 1921 is prehaps best represented by a 1920 map produced for the Queens Chamber of Commerce. In order to illustrate the proximity of outer borough housing developments to Manhattan cultural activity, the map superimposes on an image of Greater New York concentric circles drawn around Times Square at increments of one mile. It was hoped that the map would convince reluctant suburbanites to give Queens a try by demonstrating that Astoria was even closer to Times Square than Wall Street.

The Times Building itself – the shadowy obelisk at the drawing’s center – was designed by partners Eidlitz and MacKenzie and was completed in 1904. At the time it was the second tallest building in New York. It opened officially on December 31, 1904 with a celebration which inaugurated not only the building, but the year 1905 and a New Year’s Eve tradition that continues into the present day. The building itself lacked the longevity of the tradition it helped to establish. It was stripped down to its steel frame – among New York’s first – in 1964. Over the following ten years its interior and exterior were redesigned and rebuilt. The building as it stands now, altered beyond recognition, was completed in 1974.