When the Screen Swings Open: TSX Broadway and the 86,000-Pound Stage Doors of Times Square

Times Square, the slanted crossing where Broadway meets Seventh Avenue. The densest wall of moving images in the world surrounds the tourists on every side. Among them, the nine-storey LED face fronting 47th Street spends its nights indistinguishable from the other advertising surfaces: scrolling product logos, rotating brand colors, a single flat plane of light. But on the night of July 18, 2023, part of that screen slowly pushed forward and split. A pair of LED doors weighing 86,000 pounds swung open on hydraulic hinges, taking about fifteen seconds to part. What appeared from inside was not footage but a single human being, holding a guitar. Post Malone. It was the moment a stage, thrust out over the street thirty feet above the ground, showed itself from inside the screen.

The building was originally called TSX Broadway. It was renamed "The Square" upon completion in 2024, but the apparatus of screen and stage still operates under the TSX brand. 1568 Broadway, a 46-storey mixed-use tower. Development was by L&L Holding (with Fortress Investment Group as investment partner), exterior design by Perkins Eastman, architect of record Mancini Duffy, while the interiors of the historic Palace Theatre — opened in 1913 and held within the building — were entrusted to Platt Byard Dovell White.

The construction of this building contains a scene that anticipates the apparatus's theme. To build the tower, the auditorium of the Palace Theatre was not demolished but lifted, intact, by about thirty feet (9.1 metres). The jacking operation began in January 2022 and was completed on April 5 of that year, resettling the 1913 theatre in midair. A theatre at street level floats thirty feet into the air; later, a stage juts out over the street at exactly thirty feet — the theme of "the lifted theatre" repeats twice, once in architecture and once on the screen.

The Screen as Apparatus

The LED surface was first lit in January 2023. Installation was by SNA Displays, a specialist in large-scale outdoor LED, whose EMPIRE Exterior product line is deployed across five elements: the main screen, the stage marquee, the stage doors themselves, a large mid-building face, and a "crown" that extends above the roofline. The luminous surface, curving around the tower's southeast corner, totals roughly 18,000 square feet.

The numbers on the main screen say a great deal about the apparatus's character. Pixel pitch of 8 millimetres, resolution of 3,480 × 7,440, some 25.9 million pixels in all. It is the highest-resolution screen in the history of Times Square. To claim the title of "finest screen" in a district of advertising carries a clear implication. A coarse LED can only ever be a billboard viewed from afar; the finer the pixels, the more a screen can withstand close viewing — a person's facial expression, the detail of a body on stage. The groundwork in resolution has been laid for the apparatus to shift its role from "billboard" to "stage backdrop."

And the core of the apparatus is that this screen physically opens. A 4,000-square-foot stage projects out over the street, thirty feet above the ground, facing Duffy Square. What ordinarily conceals it are the 86,000-pound LED doors, fabricated by the stage-machinery firm Show Canada Industries. When closed, the doors' surface runs seamlessly into the surrounding screen, looking like nothing more than a glowing wall. When they open, a sheet of the screen cracks forward, and physical space and human bodies rise up from within. It is the moment the plane of the image inverts into a vessel.

Four months after the Post Malone debut, on November 9, 2023, the same doors opened for Jung Kook of BTS. In a surprise performance for the album GOLDEN, the singer who appeared from inside the screen sang to the crowd gathered on the street and to more than 280,000 viewers watching the online stream. Here the apparatus's duality was established not as a one-off stunt but as a repeatable format for live events. Closed, the highest-resolution advertising surface; open, a stage in midair. The same surface opens and closes the mouth of its vessel over the course of a day.

Two Ways to Cut a Hole in the Surface

When you consider the Times Square district within the framework of "exhibition," you notice that there are two ways, different in character, of making an incision in the surface of the screen.

One is the Times Square Midnight Moment, which this journal has discussed in a separate essay. More than ninety-two advertising screens across Times Square switch in sync to a single artist's footage for three minutes every night, from 11:57 p.m. to midnight. Running since 2012, it is the world's largest and longest-running program of outdoor digital public art. This method does not physically open the screen's surface; it opens a gap — a ma (間) — in the time axis of the advertising schedule. Through twenty-three hours and fifty-seven minutes of commercial occupation, a different logic is threaded for just three minutes. The screen stays flat; only the kind of content flowing across it is exchanged (this mechanism, and its contrast with the London-born globally synchronised network, is treated in detail in "Three Minutes at 20:26").

TSX demonstrates the other method. Not time, but the surface itself is pierced. A sheet of the screen splits, and out of a luminous plane that had no depth, a physical stage and human bodies come forward. Where the Midnight Moment keeps the screen flat and swaps its contents, TSX pries the screen open into three dimensions and cedes the logic of the image to the logic of the body. If the former is a temporal ma, the latter is a spatial one. The same screens of Times Square are being incised, from two different directions, into the wall of commerce.

Whose Face Appears

The TSX apparatus has another opening, separate from the stage doors. Through a system called PixelStar, anyone can pay forty dollars to run their own video on this screen for fifteen seconds. The service launched on New Year's Eve; on its first day, people from 111 countries booked slots and cast their fifteen seconds onto one of Times Square's largest screens. A phenomenon even arose of Chinese VTubers and social-media users buying up the slots. Advertising inventory in Times Square ordinarily starts at around $500 for a fifteen-second spot run twenty times. Against that benchmark, the forty-dollar price carries the intent of opening the screen's surface to ordinary faces.

If the stage doors are an opening that "brings bodies out from inside the screen," PixelStar is an opening that "invites outside faces onto the screen's surface." The directions are opposite, but both are operations that turn a flat advertising plane into a place where a particular body comes into presence. The apparatus's design philosophy is consistent: to shift the screen from "something watched" to "something where someone appears."

A Tenkei Above the Street

Returning here to the paired concepts of ma (間) and tenkei (点景), the contours of this apparatus come into focus. Just as the Midnight Moment opens a three-minute ma in advertising time, the stage doors of TSX open a physical ma in the screen's surface. The 86,000-pound doors split to either side, and a fissure of depth opens in what had been a flat luminous plane. And what rises up in that opened place is a single body appearing on a stage thirty feet above the ground — a tenkei.

Like the figures or boats drawn into a landscape painting, which do not occupy the scenery but simply lend it meaning and bearing, the body that appears from inside the Times Square screen gives a temporary focal point to the most colossal wall of commercial screens in the world. Post Malone's guitar, Jung Kook's voice, or the face of a stranger who bought fifteen seconds for forty dollars. Each time the apparatus opens, a single point where a person exists is punched into the flat wall of images. When the doors close, the screen returns, as if nothing had happened, to being the highest-resolution advertising surface.

In a place where commercial screens saturate the district, any attempt to occupy a screen permanently with art is a losing proposition in both volume and cost. That is precisely why TSX is designed not to "occupy" the screen full-time with another use, but as an apparatus that opens. Ordinarily it runs the logic of commerce as the finest advertising surface; only when needed does it open a body-sized fissure in the surface. It opens briefly, then closes again. That rhythm of opening and closing is what separates this apparatus from a mere giant vision screen, and the reason the screen should be read as a vessel — a ki (器). The depth invisible while it is closed kindles, each time it opens, one more tenkei above the street.

Sources

1. fig.001POST MALONE - ENOUGH IS ENOUGH - LIVE AT TSX - Times Square, NYC - OFFICIAL VIDEO(2023-07)
2. fig.002Jung Kook Live at TSX, Times Square (BANGTANTV)(2023-11)
3. fig.003Artist Leo Villareal on Nov 2025 Midnight Moment "Pixel Dust" in Times Square(2025-11)
4. [4]Times Square Mega-Spectacular at TSX Broadway Sets Trends — SNA Displays
5. [5]Post Malone Inaugurates New TSX Stage in Times Square — SNA Displays(2023-07)
6. [6]TSX Broadway — Perkins Eastman
7. [7]The Square (TSX Broadway) — Wikipedia
8. [8]TSX Broadway’s LED Screen Turns On at 1568 Broadway in Times Square — New York YIMBY(2023-01)
9. [9]$40 will buy you 15 seconds of fame on one of Times Square’s largest billboards — Fast Company
10. [10]Times Square Arts — Midnight Moment

Operations Record

OPERATOR

Developed by L&L Holding; the screen-and-stage apparatus runs under the TSX brand (TSX Entertainment)

LOCATION

New York

MODEL

Operator commission — The operator programmes live events on the screen-door stage, alongside PixelStar, where anyone can buy a 15-second slot for $40

CADENCE

24/7 advertising by default; stage events are occasional (Post Malone in July 2023, Jung Kook in November), with PixelStar running continuously

SPEC

Main screen at 8 mm pitch, 3,480 × 7,440 px (c. 25.9 million pixels); 86,000-pound stage doors open onto a 4,000 sq ft stage 30 feet above the street

SINCE

2023-01

STATUS

Active

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