Quick answer
Times Square is the brightly lit crossroads where Broadway meets 7th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, renamed in 1904 for The New York Times. It hosts the New Year's Eve ball drop, which has run every year since 1907 except during World War II, and draws roughly 50 million visitors a year.
Full transcript
A square named for a newspaper
Before the signs, this was Longacre Square, named after the horse-and-carriage district of London. In 1904, Adolph Ochs moved The New York Times into a new tower here and persuaded the city to rename the neighborhood after his paper. Three weeks later the first electrified advertisement appeared on a bank corner. Broadway crosses 7th Avenue at a slant, so the plaza between 42nd and 47th Streets is shaped like a bowtie — the busiest pedestrian intersection in the world, nicknamed the Crossroads of the World and the heart of the Great White Way.
The ball
New Yorkers started gathering here for New Year's Eve in 1904, when a fireworks show drew more than 200,000 people. The city banned the fireworks two years later, so Ochs improvised: on December 31, 1907, an iron-and-wood ball with one hundred light bulbs dropped from the tower's flagpole at midnight. That ball weighed 700 pounds. The drop has happened every year since, except during the wartime dimout of 1942 and 1943, and today's crystal ball — 12.5 feet across and 12,350 pounds — descends for a million people in the square and a billion more watching from home.
Signs, tickets, and the right time to go
Times Square spent the 1960s through the 1980s as the city's grimiest block, then rebuilt itself around the signs it is now famous for; the Times Square Alliance has kept it clean since 1992. Go after dark, when the neon and LED walls are fully on, and walk up to Duffy Square to see the red TKTS steps, where same-day Broadway tickets are sold. Stand in the middle of the bowtie, turn in a slow circle, and let the light show do the rest.