Broadway will go dark for a moment on Tuesday, September 8 at 6:45 p.m., when the marquees of all 41 Broadway theatres dim simultaneously in memory of 13 artists and industry figures whose work helped shape the theatre—and, in several cases, American culture far beyond it.

The September Broadway in Memoriam tribute will honor Tim Curry, Clive Davis, Gina Ferrall, Josh Grisetti, Jeff Hamlin, Glen Hansard, Louise Lasser, Anna Louizos, Seth Marquette, Dolly Parton, Anne Russell, James Walsh and Harold Wheeler.

There is something particularly moving about the Broadway tradition of dimming the lights. Theatre is built on illumination—the marquee, the footlights, the spotlight—and so Broadway marks loss by taking that light away. For a few moments, Times Square becomes noticeably darker, acknowledging that someone who contributed to its brilliance is no longer here.

This September’s list crosses nearly every corner of the industry. Tim Curry, forever associated with his indelible Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show, was also a three-time Tony Award nominee whose Broadway career included Amadeus, My Favorite Year and Spamalot. Dolly Parton, whose songs, personality and unmistakable generosity made her one of America’s most beloved entertainers, also left her mark on Broadway through 9 to 5: The Musical and the theatrical projects that followed.

Clive Davis, Nancy Pelosi

Clive Davis, one of the towering figures of the recording industry, spent decades influencing the music that ultimately found its way onto stages as well as records. Glen Hansard, whose music helped give Once its singular heartbeat, became part of Broadway history when the intimate musical defied conventional Broadway expectations and captured the 2012 Tony Award for Best Musical.

Broadway will also remember the extraordinary orchestrator, composer, conductor and musical director Harold Wheeler, whose career stretched across decades and included work on The Wiz, Dreamgirls, The Full Monty, Hairspray and countless other productions. Wheeler’s contribution was often the kind audiences feel without necessarily knowing whose hand created it—the musical architecture beneath some of Broadway’s most memorable nights.

Anna Louizos and Ken Billington in The Producers Exhibit Photo credit Rebecca J Michelson

Theatre designer Anna Louizos gave physical form to stories through a career that included scenic and costume work and multiple Tony nominations.

Louise Lasser Photo Magda Katz

Louise Lasser, best known to much of America through television and film, also had roots on the New York stage. Gina Ferrall, Jeff Hamlin, Seth Marquette, Anne Russell and James Walsh will likewise be remembered for lives and careers connected to the Broadway community.

Josh Grisetti

For T2C, the inclusion of Josh Grisetti carries particular weight. Grisetti, who died at only 44, possessed the kind of talent that made an audience look twice: an actor with comic precision, musical intelligence and an individuality that could not be manufactured. His work ranged from the stage to television and film, but those who saw him in the theatre understood exactly what Broadway has lost.

The September ceremony is part of the relatively new Broadway in Memoriam initiative, established last year to create a more consistent and inclusive way of honoring members of the theatrical community. Rather than allowing recognition to depend upon sporadic individual marquee dimmings, the quarterly tradition gathers multiple members of the Broadway family into a shared remembrance.

The ceremony now takes place four times annually, on the second Tuesday of September, December, March and June, with all 41 Broadway theatres participating simultaneously. The committee can also designate a separate dimming for an individual whose contribution to Broadway is considered profoundly significant.

Members of the Broadway community may submit creative professionals who have worked on Broadway, as well as career professionals who devoted their lives to the industry, for future consideration. The next submission deadline is November 17, for the December 8, 2026 dimming. Information and submissions are available through Broadway in Memoriam.

Broadway is an unusual place. Shows disappear. Sets are struck. Costumes are packed away. Dressing rooms are emptied and another name eventually goes above the theatre door. An industry devoted to creating moments that vanish every night has always had a complicated relationship with permanence.

That is why September 8 matters.

At 6:45 p.m., Broadway will briefly extinguish the lights that ordinarily announce who is playing, what is opening and what audiences should see next.

For that moment, the darkness will say something else entirely:

We remember who was here.

Times Square has always been a feast for the senses. On September 9, it becomes a literal one. The Times Square Alliance brings back its annual Taste of Times Square, one of New York’s longest-running outdoor food festivals, turning Restaurant Row and the Broadway plazas into one enormous open-air dining room on Wednesday, September 9, from 4 to 8 p.m.

Presented by The Durst Organization, this year’s festival gathers close to 40 Times Square restaurants, offering a culinary trip around the world without requiring so much as a MetroCard swipe. Mexican, Caribbean, Cuban, Italian, Indian and American flavors will share the streets, proving once again that the neighborhood surrounding Broadway is considerably more interesting gastronomically than its old reputation suggests.

That’s part of what makes Taste of Times Square so much fun. The Theatre District has quietly become a remarkable culinary crossroads in its own right. Within a handful of blocks, one can travel between cultures, continents and cooking traditions—and on September 9, those kitchens come outside.

The festival also returns to familiar territory this year, stretching along West 46th Street from Seventh to Ninth Avenues, including Restaurant Row, and onto the Broadway plazas between 45th and 47th Streets.

The concept remains wonderfully democratic. Rather than committing to one restaurant and one meal, guests can wander, taste and construct dinner one plate at a time. Most dishes will cost $5, with select offerings priced at $10. Visitors register a wristband with a credit or debit card at the event and use it to purchase tastes as they go.

Even better for those who plan ahead: advance purchases made through September 8 receive a 20 percent savings.

Of course, this is Times Square, so food alone isn’t enough. Live music and performances will accompany the evening, with entertainment representing several current Broadway productions, along with performers from the Broadway Dreams Foundation and Ellen’s Stardusters. Dinner, Broadway and several blocks of New York spectacle—all without having to choose between them.

Taste of Times Square has endured because it captures something essential about the neighborhood. Times Square may be internationally famous for its billboards and Broadway marquees, but behind all that neon is a community of restaurants, chefs, bartenders, theatre people and longtime New Yorkers who actually make the district function.

For four hours, they take over the streets. Taste of Times Square takes place Wednesday, September 9, from 4 to 8 p.m., along West 46th Street from Seventh to Ninth Avenues and the Broadway plazas between 45th and 47th Streets.

Taste of Times Square information and advance purchases

Come hungry. This is one night when wandering around Times Square without being able to decide where to eat is precisely the point.

Every night in September, just before midnight, Times Square will abandon reality for three minutes.

For September’s Midnight Moment, artist duo LIZN’BOW transforms the district’s monumental digital screens into Niñalandia, a wildly saturated alternative universe where flying grandmothers, unicorn cows and islands made of money replace the considerably less charming anxieties of the present.

Titled El Mundo es Niña, the work rejects our cultural fascination with dystopia in favor of what the artists call a “pro-pocalyptic” future—a world built not around impending collapse, but radical joy, imagination and human connection.

Against a magenta sky, a neon-green island fashioned from money rises into view. Liz’s abuela sails overhead on a flying bicycle. A dancing unicorn cow races across the landscape on a jet ski as strange and wonderful creatures converge for what feels somewhere between a celebration, a dream and a wonderfully deranged Saturday-morning cartoon.

Beneath the exuberance is a more serious proposition.

LIZN’BOW have created an expanding fictional universe informed by queer and Latinx futurisms, personal memory, pop culture, humor and nostalgia. Here, fantasy isn’t an escape from reality so much as an opportunity to redesign it. That distinction gives El Mundo es Niña its bite.

We are continually presented with visions of the future dominated by climate catastrophe, technological upheaval, isolation and fear. LIZN’BOW ask a far more interesting question: What if imagining disaster isn’t the only way to take the future seriously?

Their answer is Niñalandia, where kinship, mutual care, resilience and play become acts of rebellion against despair.

Times Square may be the perfect place for it. The Crossroads of the World already exists somewhere between reality and fantasy, its enormous screens constantly selling us versions of who we might become, what we might desire and what tomorrow supposedly requires.

For three minutes each night, those screens will sell nothing. Instead, they become a portal. El Mundo es Niña will be presented throughout September as part of Midnight Moment, Times Square’s nightly digital art program, appearing across participating electronic billboards from 11:57 p.m. to midnight.

In a neighborhood built on spectacle, LIZN’BOW are offering something surprisingly subversive: the possibility that joy itself might be a vision of the future.

Welcome to Manhattan.You have just driven through the Lincoln Tunnel. You have already paid the Port Authority toll for the privilege of crossing the Hudson River. You emerge in Midtown, travel the short distance necessary to get to the Manhattan Plaza parking garage on West 42nd Street, put the car away and go about your business.

Congratulations. New York may have already charged you for congestion pricing as well. It sounds almost like a mistake. It isn’t necessarily one.

Under the MTA’s Congestion Relief Zone rules, passenger vehicles entering Manhattan’s local streets and avenues at or below 60th Street are subject to the congestion toll. The West Side Highway and FDR Drive are excluded roadways, but only as long as drivers remain on them. Once a vehicle leaves an excluded roadway and enters the local street grid inside the zone, the toll applies.

Therein lies one of the stranger realities of congestion pricing for drivers emerging from the Lincoln Tunnel. There is no magical highway corridor carrying you directly from the tunnel into the Manhattan Plaza garage. The Lincoln Tunnel feeds vehicles into Midtown’s street network. So even if your destination is only blocks away—even if the entire purpose of your trip after emerging from the tunnel is simply to put the car into a garage—you have entered the Congestion Relief Zone.

The current peak congestion toll for a passenger vehicle with E-ZPass is $9. The MTA does provide qualifying drivers entering through the Lincoln Tunnel a crossing credit during peak periods, which reduces the additional congestion charge rather than eliminating it. Overnight, the passenger-vehicle congestion toll drops to $2.25.

Technically, the MTA can therefore say the system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. But West 42nd Street presents another, considerably more troubling question.

In October 2025, CBS New York reported complaints from Manhattan residents who said they were being charged congestion tolls when leaving their own parking garage on West 42nd Street. These weren’t drivers entering Manhattan from New Jersey. They already lived inside the Congestion Relief Zone. According to residents interviewed by CBS, cameras near the garage were sometimes treating vehicles pulling out as though they were entering the zone. CBS presented one resident’s disputed charges to the MTA; the agency acknowledged one of the cited charges was incorrect, and the resident received a refund.

Now we have reached the genuinely interesting question. How can you “enter” a congestion zone when you were already inside it? The MTA itself says that merely traveling within the Congestion Relief Zone does not incur a congestion toll. Its FAQ gives the example of beginning a trip on Chambers Street and crossing West Street into Battery Park City: because the trip began within the zone and remained there, there is no toll.

A car parked overnight in a West 42nd Street garage is already inside the zone. Its driver is already inside the zone. The garage is already inside the zone. Pulling out of the garage cannot logically constitute entering something in which both car and driver already exist.

That distinction matters because congestion pricing isn’t collected by someone sitting in a booth who can look at the situation and say, “Obviously this person is leaving a garage.” It depends upon cameras, license-plate recognition and E-ZPass technology interpreting vehicle movements.

Machines are wonderfully literal creatures. They don’t know that you live upstairs. They don’t know that you parked there yesterday. They don’t know that you’ve traveled twenty feet rather than twenty miles. They know what the system tells them your vehicle has done.

That makes the Manhattan Plaza situation a fascinating case study in what happens when a large public policy collides with the peculiar geography of New York City.

The Congestion Relief Zone was created to discourage unnecessary vehicle trips into Manhattan’s most congested streets while raising money for public transportation. Supporters can point to evidence that it has reduced vehicle entries: six months after implementation, officials reported roughly 67,000 fewer vehicles entering the zone per day compared with the previous year.

Fine, a successful policy can still produce absurd results at its edges. West 42nd Street appears to be one of those edges. A New Jersey driver can pay to enter through the Lincoln Tunnel, emerge into Manhattan and almost immediately park—yet still legitimately trigger congestion pricing because those few blocks count as entering the local street grid.

Meanwhile, a Manhattan resident can begin the day with a car already parked inside the Congestion Relief Zone, pull out of a garage and, according to documented complaints, sometimes find a congestion charge waiting.

One driver has barely gone anywhere. The other hasn’t entered anything. Yet the meter may be running.

There is also a larger issue here about transparency. When automated systems determine when money is taken from millions of people, the burden shouldn’t fall entirely upon drivers to discover incorrect charges buried inside an E-ZPass statement and then fight to have them reversed.

If a camera can mistakenly interpret leaving a garage as entering a toll zone, how readily can the person receiving the bill determine exactly where and why the charge occurred? More importantly, how many people actually check?

Nine dollars is simultaneously enough money to matter and little enough money that many people won’t spend an afternoon fighting over it. Multiply that psychology across hundreds of thousands of transactions and accuracy becomes more than a technological issue. It becomes a question of public trust.

Congestion pricing can be debated endlessly. Some New Yorkers consider it transformative. Others consider it another tax imposed upon drivers. Both arguments have occupied enough newspaper columns to pave Seventh Avenue.

This particular question doesn’t require choosing a political side. If the government is going to charge someone for entering a zone, it should be able to establish that the person actually entered it.

If you’re coming out of the Lincoln Tunnel simply trying to put your car into a garage a few blocks away, perhaps New York could at least allow you enough time to say hello before presenting the next bill.

Apparently in Midtown these days, you don’t actually have to get anywhere. You just have to arrive.

There are certain New York losses you eventually stop expecting to be reversed. The Automat, Schrafft’s, The 21 Club, Lord & Taylor. Restaurants, stores and gathering places disappear, another piece of glass-and-steel anonymity takes their place, and New Yorkers learn to walk past the ghosts. But every once in a while, New York gives something back. The news of the hour is Carnegie Deli is coming home.

Nearly ten years after the legendary delicatessen served its final mountainous pastrami sandwich at 854 Seventh Avenue on New Year’s Eve 2016, the red-and-yellow Carnegie Deli signage has suddenly reappeared on Seventh Avenue. The company confirmed this week that Carnegie is returning to Midtown this fall, on the same block where the original became one of New York’s great culinary institutions.

For those of us who remember the real Carnegie Deli, this is not simply another restaurant opening. This is cause for celebration. Getting this kind of Jewish deli food in Manhattan—the kind made without apology, restraint or concern for whether your cardiologist approves—has become increasingly difficult. Yes, Katz’s remains downtown, enormously famous and perpetually packed, but it has also become a tourist pilgrimage unto itself. Carnegie belonged to Midtown. It belonged to Broadway. It belonged to the strange ecosystem of actors, comedians, producers, musicians, tourists and New Yorkers who understood that sometimes dinner should arrive between two pieces of rye bread and be approximately the height of a small child.

Founded in 1937 near Carnegie Hall, the deli eventually came under the ownership of Milton Parker and Leo Steiner in 1976 and grew from neighborhood institution into international legend. Parker became known as the “Corned Beef and Pastrami Maven,” while the restaurant became almost as famous for the celebrities squeezed around its tables as for the absurdly oversized sandwiches arriving on them. Today, the Carnegie Deli brand remains in the Parker family, owned by Parker’s daughter Marian Harper and granddaughter Sarri Harper.

The menu was unapologetically New York: pastrami, corned beef, enormous combination sandwiches, potato knishes, matzo ball soup, pickles and cheesecake dense enough to make dessert feel like a commitment.

Then there were those walls. Photographs of entertainers covered seemingly every available inch, turning the restaurant into an unofficial archive of show business. Mel Brooks, Robin Williams, Stevie Wonder and generations of performers passed through. Carnegie wasn’t simply adjacent to the entertainment world. It became part of it.

Woody Allen immortalized the deli in 1984’s Broadway Danny Rose, making it part of the movie’s particular love letter to New York show-business eccentrics. A decade later, Adam Sandler worked Carnegie into “The Chanukah Song,” ensuring that even people who had never wrestled one of its sandwiches into submission knew the name.

Then came December 31, 2016. After nearly eight decades, the original Carnegie Deli closed. People stood in line for hours during its final days, determined to get one last sandwich before another piece of old New York disappeared. The brand itself didn’t die—it continued selling its food nationally, maintained a presence at Madison Square Garden and periodically resurfaced through pop-ups and collaborations—but that wasn’t the same thing. Carnegie currently still serves pastrami, corned beef and knishes at its Madison Square Garden stands.

A deli isn’t merely its pastrami….it’s the room. It’s somebody waiting impatiently for your table. It’s the mustard. It’s the pickle arriving before you’ve decided what you want. It’s the person sitting six inches away from you whose entire conversation you now know despite never having met them. It’s a waiter who has absolutely no intention of treating your indecision as a spiritual journey. It’s New York.

Increasingly, those places have vanished. That is why Carnegie’s return matters beyond nostalgia. New York has spent years watching distinctive institutions disappear while interchangeable establishments multiply. We preserve facades, rename neighborhoods, manufacture “experiences” and then wonder why the city sometimes feels less like itself. You cannot manufacture history. Carnegie already has it.

The new location is expected on Seventh Avenue around West 54th Street, essentially returning the deli to its old neighborhood. A precise opening date has not yet been announced, and questions remain about exactly what form the new Carnegie will take. The company itself has made the important part unmistakable: Carnegie Deli is coming back to Midtown. There is something wonderfully New York about that.

We spend so much time writing obituaries for the city we remember that we sometimes forget New York has always possessed an extraordinary capacity for resurrection. Buildings disappear. Restaurants close. Neighborhoods change beyond recognition. Then suddenly somebody hangs an old familiar sign over Seventh Avenue and thousands of people collectively think: Wait. Is that what I think it is? Yes. The pastrami is coming back. The corned beef is coming back. Hopefully the cheesecake is coming back.

Somewhere in Midtown, thousands of cardiologists have just felt an unexplained disturbance in the universe.

Welcome home, Carnegie. We’ve been hungry.