Merely mentioning the name conjures a kaleidoscope of images:

Times Square.

It is rivers of neon and seas of tourists. It is sidewalk hustlers and curbside holy men. Depending on your age and where you're coming from, physically and metaphysically, it may mean a street hooker or a Virgin megastore, smoke from a Camel sign or steam from a Cup Noodles ad, New Year's Eve with Guy Lombardo or with Dick Clark, a Broadway tout or Mickey Mouse, legitimate theaters or illegitimate sex parlors, a state-of-the-art Jumbotron or an old-fashioned news ribbon overhead, 42nd Street with "The Lion King" indoors or with a three-card monte lyin' king outdoors.

Through the decades, Times Square has been exotic, erotic, neurotic and sometimes just plain idiotic. But the one thing Times Square has never been, not once in all the years, is dull.

New Yorkers insist on calling it the Crossroads of the World. Of course, New Yorkers like to think of their city as the center of the cosmos, so it is hardly surprising that they attach mere global import to the dot on the hometown map where Broadway and 42nd Street collide. For once, however, the New York penchant for overstatement happens to be fact.

Piccadilly Circus in London may make some think of faded empire. Piazza Venezia in Rome has vastness. L'Etoile in Paris evokes Gitanes, fedoras and Bogie driving Ingrid Bergman past L'Arc de Triomphe.

But Times Square is, without a doubt, the most recognized intersection on the planet, never more so than in the final seconds of a dying year. Hundreds of thousands of people huddle there in the late-December cold while tens of millions more sit in front of their television sets, watching a glittering ball inch its way down the pole atop a tower called One Times Square. By now, some are willing to believe there would not be a new year, a new century, a new millennium without this communal gathering in the heart of New York.

It wasn't always like that.

At the last turn of the century, the area was a humble place called Long Acre Square. The name was changed in 1904 when The New York Times moved there from Park Row, in lower Manhattan. Strictly speaking, Times Square is where Broadway, Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street meet. But the cachet of the Times Square name attracted people to the surrounding blocks, and the square became a neighborhood.

In short order, Times Square became the heart of the city. By World War I, dozens of theaters had planted themselves there. During one Broadway season before the stock-market crash of 1929, a record 264 shows were produced in 76 theaters, including the sumptuous New Amsterdam on 42nd Street, where Flo Ziegfeld staged his Follies. The area was home to Tin Pan Alley, vaudeville houses and posh hotels. It was where New Yorkers by the thousands gathered for news, like updates on the 1919 World Series (though it wasn't until later that they really learned the score: the Series was fixed).

For decades to come, Times Square would provide the country with some of its more enduring images, from the finger-snap pace of the crowds outside Jack Dempsey's restaurant to the strangers exultantly embracing on V-E Day. All it took was an overhead shot of the neon-bathed square to tell moviegoers that they were entering a world of sophistication, perhaps even intrigue, far removed from their own lives. They could imagine themselves dancing at the Astor Hotel, with its triumphal arches and fountains, or walking beneath the curlicue canopy of the Paramount Theater, temple of the bobbysoxers. No matter how distant, they knew of Lindy's and its cheesecake, not to mention the Latin Quarter and its different kind of cheesecake.

With the Great Depression, Times Square started to hit the skids, slowly at first, then with a rush. By the 1970's, it had become synonymous with sleazy arcades and tawdry sex shows, a dangerous place best avoided at all costs. The menace and sheer creepiness of the place, almost a vision of hell, was memorably captured by Martin Scorsese in his 1976 film, "Taxi Driver." As for architecture, history found itself brusquely shoved aside. The Paramount Theater was sacrificed for office space, while the Astor Hotel gave way in the 1960's to a 52-story corporate filing cabinet called One Astor Plaza. The Times moved around the corner and the terra cotta facade of the old building was replaced with faceless white marble.

Every few years, civic leaders would scream that something had to be done, and they would haul out one more new plan to scrub the area clean. But nothing ever came of it. The slide seemed irreversible.

Until, almost by miracle, a real-estate boom in the 90's remade the face of Times Square. Sex shops were swept out, and Disney and Warner Brothers stormed in. With jewel-like fidelity (and a low-interest government loan), Disney restored the long-abandoned New Amsterdam, where mushrooms grew on the orchestra floor. In an unconscious echo of the 1919 Series, many hundreds of people filled the concrete islands of the square to catch a championship basketball game on a giant television screen overhead. As the century ended, the old Times building was being flanked by taller cousins, homes for other media empires.

Not everyone loved the sanitized newcomers. Mall-style stores were alien, even offensive, to many New Yorkers. But who was prepared to argue that dope dealers and pimps were preferable to wide-eyed tourists and baby carriages?

Through the years, Times Square has evolved and is still evolving. And yet some things never change: At the dawn of a new century, it remains the place to gather, whether to watch a televised space shot or protest a war or celebrate triumph over tyranny. It is far more than a neighborhood. It is America's town square.