[Actresses Millette Alexander and Louise King, and nightclub entertainer Ted Lewis, stand outside a giant mailbox stamp selling booth in Times Square, New York City, while Assistant Postmaster Aquiline F. Weierich dispenses stamps from inside booth] / World Telegram & Sun photo by Phyllis Twachtman.

Formerly named Longacre Square, it was renamed in April 1904 after the New York Times moved its headquarters to the Times Building, now called One Times Square. It's nicknames include 'The Crossroads of the World' and 'The Great White Way', and reportedly 'The Tenderloin' because it was supposedly the most desirable location in Manhatten in the 1920s. The 1929 stock market crash took its toll on the area, with many businesses moving out of the area to be replaced with seedier forms of entertainment, including pornographic "peep shows". In the 1990s led by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, New York City began a slow but steady cleaning up Times Square - the process was referred to as the 'Disneyfication'. On New Year's Eve, close to a million people congregrate to celebrate the 'Dropping of the Ball'. Famous for its electric, neon and illuminated signs including Coca-Cola, Toshiba and the curved NASDAQ sign, the location has been used in numerous films, including Vanilla Sky when it is depicted as eerily quiet, and a post-apocalyptic version in I Am Legend.

The New York World-Telegram, later known as the New York World-Telegram and The Sun, was a New York City newspaper from 1931 to 1967. The Library of Congress collection includes about 1 million photographs that the New York World-Telegram & Sun Newspaper assembled mostly 1890 and 1967, the year in which the newspaper closed. This newspaper photo morgue is typical of the files that newspapers maintain of images that either were published or were believed to have some future publication potential. Such files were periodically "weeded" by newspaper staff members. Much of the photography used by newspapers is "quick copy," and many images have been cropped, retouched, or highlighted for publication. Some images were taken by the newspaper's staff photographers while others came from wire press services, studios, or amateur photographers.