Times Square

Times Square is the destination for Travis Bickle and Betsy’s first date, and the urban stage on which Travis’s imagined romance meets the discomfort of an actual encounter. Broadway’s crowds, cinemas, and street life frame a brief passage from apparent closeness to rejection, making the area more than a point on their route: it exposes the distance between Travis’s intentions and Betsy’s experience of him.

Broadway and the Date

After Travis calls Betsy at the campaign office on April 27 and she agrees to meet him the following evening, they walk down Broadway toward Times Square. The spring setting is rendered through warm dust, an orange sun reflected against dark glass buildings, and a thin silver moon. Travis gives Betsy a record, which she receives with evident enthusiasm. He reads the moment as confirmation of a special connection and tries to draw physically closer as they walk along the avenue.

The movement through the city gives Travis room to imagine the date as something almost unreal and grand. Yet the same public route keeps the pair among crowds and street activity rather than in the private setting he hopes to reach. When he suggests that Betsy play the record for him on her stereo, her expression changes; the ease he had taken for intimacy begins to falter.

Cinemas Near Forty-Second Street

At Broadway and Forty-Second Street, Travis offers to carry the record and takes Betsy to a cinema nearby. The Apollo is showing a reissue of Lost Weekend, while another theater advertises Swedish Marriage Manual. Travis chooses the latter because he wants Betsy to understand that he considers himself serious, not merely interested in amusement. The tickets cost five dollars each.

His choice makes the mismatch between intention and effect especially visible. Travis treats the film as evidence of his respectable purpose, but Betsy’s reaction remains uneasy. Around them, the busy corner is crowded with people Travis describes as habitual eccentrics and degenerates, some staring at the pair. He notices Betsy as clean and composed amid what he regards as surrounding grime, and interprets her as determined to remain separate from it. That contrast belongs partly to his own judgment: the narrative shows him measuring the street and Betsy through his private categories even as she makes her own decision.

The Date Breaks Down

When Betsy turns toward the corner of Broadway and Forty-Second Street, Travis runs after her, offering to see a different film and insisting that he would be content with any of the nearby choices. His willingness to change the plan does not repair the encounter. Betsy stops, looks at him sternly, and tells him that although he is a good person, she wants to end the date and go home.

The public setting sharpens the reversal. Travis has approached the evening as a developing romance, but the crowded streets do not soften Betsy’s refusal or let him turn the outing into the private connection he imagined. Times Square and its nearby cinema corner thus mark the point where his expectations of closeness give way to an unmistakable separation.

A City of Routes and Projection

The date sits within Travis’s wider experience of New York City as a place traversed by taxi and organized through movement between districts. He describes working in the cinema quarter before tiring of its customers, and elsewhere takes his cab through neighborhoods he regards as dangerous in order to test his readiness to use his guns. Those later patrols are not described as taking place in Times Square; they establish, instead, the broader contrast between the city as a workplace and the city as a landscape onto which Travis projects his fantasies of danger and significance.

At Times Square, that projection takes a more intimate form. Broadway’s lights, theaters, and crowds provide the setting for Travis to imagine that a shared walk and a carefully chosen date can secure a bond. Betsy’s departure interrupts that imagined story. The location’s significance lies in this concrete reversal: in the middle of the city’s movement and spectacle, Travis cannot make his account of the evening coincide with hers.