Times Building, Times Square. Times Building, Times Square

In 1857 Elisha Otis introduced the safety elevator, allowing easy passenger access to upper floors. A crucial development was also the use of a steel frame instead of stone or brick. An early development in this area was five floors high Oriel Chambers in Liverpool, England. While its height is not considered very impressive today, the world's first skyscraper was the ten-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago, built in 1884–1885. Most early skyscrapers emerged in the land-strapped areas of Chicago and New York City toward the end of the 19th century. In a building like these, a steel frame supported the entire weight of the walls, instead of walls carrying the weight called "Chicago skeleton" construction. 1889 marks the first all-steel framed skyscraper in Chicago, while Louis Sullivan's Wainwright Building in St. Louis, Missouri, 1891, was the first steel-framed building with vertical bands to emphasize the height of the building and is therefore considered by some to be the first true skyscraper. After an early competition between Chicago and New York City for the world's tallest building, New York took the lead by 1895 with the completion of the American Surety Building, leaving New York with the title of the world's tallest building for many years. New York City developers competed among themselves, with successively taller buildings claiming the title of "world's tallest" in the 1920s and early 1930s, culminating with the completion of the Chrysler Building in 1930 and the Empire State Building in 1931, the world's tallest building for forty years.

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.