When the Times Square Alliance announced plans to bring food and beverage concessions to the slightly controversial pedestrian plaza, the world held its breath. What ever would NY Post columnist Steve "He Who Yells At Cloud" Cuozzo think? Cuozzo loves nothing more than going on a cantankerous rant about the pedestrian plazas, which he originally derided as "block after block of prison-yard asphalt devoid of meaningful landscaping, furniture or other amenities, crowded mainly with Big Mac-chomping tourists." But now that there's furniture and plans for amenities and landscaping, would Cuozzo change his tune? Ha:
The desperate-sounding food-service scheme makes clear that—despite vapid polls purporting to show New Yorkers "support" the plazas—the full extent of the disaster has become too obvious to ignore. They're as ugly as sin, drenched in a primitive blue paint job that the DOT claims is "suggesting a river flowing" when "suggesting a river of blue vomit" is more like it.
The barren plazas with cheap chairs and tables offer nothing to locals—except smokers denied other places to indulge their habit and willing to put up with day-trippers gobbling junk food out of paper bags... Maybe Danish meatballs would be more appropriate—Mayor Bloomberg's ruinous redesign of Times Square, like the metastazing bike lanes around town, was inspired by sleepy Copenhagen, the capital city of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan's imagination.
Enjoy the entire cartoon here, and be sure to stay tuned for Cuozzo's next column detailing why Sadik-Khan can't be DOT Commissioner because she was actually born in Kenya!
