Reclassify Times Sq. & end the grift
New Yorkers used to complain you couldn’t walk through Times Square without running a gantlet of prostitutes or sex businesses. The modern variant is the growing horde of topless women showing off for, theoretically, donations.
Granted that bare-breasted, body-painted exhibitionists are a far cry from the degradation and danger of yore, they have added end-ofthe-line tawdriness to the cheap carnivality that has taken over the world’s most famous crossroads.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s vision of a vehicle-free, 30,000-square-foot pedestrian plaza has become a playground of grifters who see the 400,000 people who walk through daily, most tourists, many with kids, as prey for lowrent extortion.
Residents of the five boroughs, including tens of thousands of office workers, who find they have no choice but to join the throng have gotten used to the costumed characters — the Elmos, the Cookie Monsters, etc. — who entice children into having their pictures taken and then hit up parents for money.
The topless women are the latest of these earners. First, they were just a couple, then 20 and now 40 or more.
“It’s not a business, it’s a hustle,” a guy who works with the women candidly admitted in an interview with a Daily News reporter.
The First Amendment grants the right to wear a costume as a matter of free speech. New York’s courts have ruled that women cannot be legally barred from going topless in public. The law also permits panhandling on the streets that is not aggressive — “aggressive” and “on the streets” being the two most important terms in this sentence.
A Spider-Man or bare-breasted woman who stands for a photo and sticks a hand out is within bounds in Times Square. Many go further. They ask for specific sums of money and gather around a tourist family, badgering moms and dads for bucks.
Cops can and do make busts when the characters become so overbearing as to become frightening. While the NYPD should make still more arrests, few are the victims who want to spend vacation time in a police station or courthouse.
Still, a solution stares New York in the face. It’s in Father Duffy Square at the northern end of Times Square. Father Duffy is officially designated as parkland. The characters and topless women know that soliciting money in parks is strictly prohibited, so they generally go right to the very edge of Father Duffy and no further.
Times Square is no longer a vehicular transitway. It’s a giant public plaza. New York should reclassify it as a park. Bye-bye, Elmo. Bye-bye, bare-breasted women. Unless they want to stand there without making a cent. Yeah, right.