Broadway, Central Park

I wouldn't advocate living on Broadway in any neighborhood and Central Park is no exception. It's a really busy avenue and this part is particularly bad because of all of the businesses and tourists circling the southern part of the park. It's loud and crazy and getting through the people is a feat that should merit a gold medal. It's just not a great stretch.
The east corner of the block at 57th is taken up by a couple of big old buildings with new businesses. The corner building is a commercial space building with a weird health, fast-food chain called Pax on the ground floor. I'm all about healthy fast food, but I don't get Pax. It seems like a cafeteria and I find it sort of depressing. The building next door used to house the NAACP. I'm not sure what's there now but the building is pretty cool looking in an old timey way. The building across the street is the Newsweek building. It used to be the General Motors building but it became covered in windows and now houses the news. I don't like the window. I think it makes the space look like a hospital and it's so big that it's kind of scary looking now.
The building at 58th has got to be one of the ugliest in all of New York. It looks like a cross between a prison and a silo. Man, what an eye sore in an otherwise decently attractive stretch. It was never a pretty building but it didn't look this bad until a few years ago. It's now the Museum of Arts and Design (that looks like a torture chamber) but it used to be a hotel where Actor's Equity was founded. I always tell people to take a look at this building in order to see what shouldn't happen to our city. The remodeling commission wouldn't even schedule a hearing despite neighborhood protest. And, this slab is what we got. The buildings across the street are nothing special in form or function, themselves, so the entire block leading up to Columbus Circle takes a sharp turn towards Scarytown. Once you get to Columbus Circle, Broadway is cut off by the park and takes a detour into another west side neighborhood. So, that's it for Broadway's run here and it's nothing special. I think this neighborhood is kind of a crazy one to live in, anyway, and the aesthetic doesn't help.