NEW YORK -- In Times Square, people once smoked just about anything. Now you can't even light up a cigarette.
After banning cars from Times Square last year to turn the street over to pedestrians, the city now plans to outlaw smoking in the new plazas.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced plans Wednesday to forbid smoking in all city parks, beaches and pedestrian plazas. The list of 1,700 parks and 14 miles of beach includes Central Park, the Coney Island beach and boardwalk, and the new pedestrian plazas in Times Square.
Bloomberg has been aggressive in restricting public smoking, citing the danger to non-smokers of secondhand smoke. Smoking already is forbidden at playgrounds, outdoor sports events and concerts, and in bars and restaurants. The city would not be the first to stub out cigarettes at beaches and parks: Chicago and Los Angeles already have such bans in place.
"When you breathe secondhand tobacco smoke, you're inhaling a bouquet of ... toxins and carcinogens," Bloomberg said, announcing the plan with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. The bill goes before the council today. With the ban, "when New Yorkers and visitors ... go to the parks and beaches for fresh air, there will actually be fresh air for them to breathe," the mayor said.
There's not much green space or waterfront in Times Square, which is crisscrossed by traffic and 350,000 pedestrians daily. Once both disdained and celebrated for its peep shows, X-rated movies, scam artists and other purveyors of vice, the "Crossroads of the World" is now heavily populated with tourists visiting family-friendly Broadway shows, theme restaurants and corporate flagship stores such as M&M's World and Toys R Us.
If you want to light up, keep moving. Smoking on the sidewalk will be OK, but step into the pedestrian plaza and you'd be in a no-smoking zone -- and risking a $50 ticket, mayoral spokeswoman Jessica Scaperotti says.
The ban would mean cleaner streets as well as cleaner air, says Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance, a business owners group.
"We won't have to pick up what is at the very least hundreds of thousands and probably millions of cigarette butts in the course of the year," he says. The Alliance employs more than 50 sanitation workers to help keep the neighborhood clean. "The time-honored tradition of throwing your cigarette butts to the curb is alive and well in Times Square."
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