Why Times Square Had a Completely Different Name Until One Newspaper Changed Everything

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The most famous intersection in the world wasn’t always called Times Square. For nearly thirty years before the neon lights, the theater marquees, and the million-person New Year’s crowd, this stretch of Midtown Manhattan was called Longacre Square — and it smelled like horses.

The Horse Capital of New York

Before the automobile, getting anywhere in New York City meant horses. By the 1870s, the blocks around what is now 42nd Street and Broadway had become the nerve center of the city’s carriage industry.

Stables lined every side street. Blacksmiths worked through the night. Harness makers, coachbuilders, and wheelwrights set up shop between Sixth and Eighth Avenues.

Over 150 carriage companies operated within a few blocks. The square that would later host a million revelers every New Year’s Eve once echoed with the clang of horseshoes. The area was functional, loud, and thoroughly unglamorous.

The Newspaper That Put Its Name on the Map

In 1904, publisher Adolph Ochs moved the New York Times into a gleaming new skyscraper at the south end of the square — the Times Tower, then the second-tallest building in the city.

Ochs had ambition that extended well beyond newspapers. He lobbied the mayor, organized local business owners, and campaigned until the city agreed: Longacre Square would be renamed Times Square.

It was, by any measure, one of the most successful acts of corporate branding in urban history. A single newspaper put its name on what would become the most photographed corner on earth.

The New Year’s Tradition Nobody Knew Was an Ad

To celebrate both the new tower and the renamed square, the Times organized a fireworks show on New Year’s Eve 1904. Around 200,000 people showed up.

Three years later, when city authorities banned the fireworks, Ochs came up with something better — a 700-pound illuminated ball that would descend a flagpole at midnight.

That first ball drop, on December 31, 1907, set a tradition that’s still running 118 years later. Most of the crowd in Times Square on New Year’s Eve has no idea they’re honoring a newspaper’s publicity stunt.

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When the Carriages Left, the Theaters Moved In

Within a decade of Times Square getting its name, the horse carriage trade had collapsed. The automobile arrived, and the entire industry that had defined Longacre Square simply vanished.

What replaced it was theater. The first Broadway theaters had already begun appearing in the 1890s. As the stables cleared out, the showmen moved in.

By the 1920s, over 80 theaters clustered around the square. Electric signs transformed the night sky. The area earned the nickname “The Great White Way” — and the horse-carriage era was almost entirely forgotten. New York has a habit of erasing its own history and building straight over it.

A Corner That Never Stops Reinventing Itself

Times Square has never stayed the same for long. That’s what makes it distinctly New York.

The 1970s brought a version of the square the city spent two decades trying to reverse. By the late 1990s, the transformation was underway again — and the square emerged into what visitors see today.

What’s remarkable isn’t any single era but the pattern itself. In a single century, Times Square has been a horse market, a theater district, and a global landmark. Not many places on earth can claim that kind of range. For context on just how dramatically New York reshapes itself, the story of Hell’s Kitchen’s stubborn name tells a different but equally New York story.

What You’re Actually Standing On

Visitors to Times Square today are standing on layer after layer of erased history. Below the TKTS booth are the foundations of buildings that once sold harnesses. Beneath the theater marquees are streets that once carried hay wagons.

The ball drop tradition was invented to replace banned fireworks, which were themselves invented to celebrate a newspaper’s new headquarters, which was built on what had been a carriage stable district for thirty years.

None of it is obvious. That’s part of what makes this intersection endlessly interesting to anyone willing to look past the screens.

Stand here at night, look up at the lights, and try to imagine 150 carriage stables in every direction. The city that exists now only makes sense when you know what it replaced.

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