Native New Yorkers were a tad confused today when they learned that Broadway was shut down between 42nd Street and 47th Street over the long weekend. A new traffic pattern was put in place and a huge number of lawn chairs were placed to give Times Square tourists a place to sit.

The Great White Way is on the fast track to becoming a pedestrian mall.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced experimental plans to close part of Broadway to vehicles.

But as CBS 2 HD has discovered, not everyone is on board.

“This midtown traffic mess is one of those problems everyone always talks about and you always say there’s nothing you can do about it, well, we’re going to try and do something about it,” Bloomberg said on Thursday.

The mayor announced an ambitious plan to actually close blocks of Broadway for pedestrians.

“We expect both travel times and safety to improve and in some cases substantially,” Bloomberg added.

The mayor’s plan, according to published reports, would be to close Broadway from 42nd to 47th streets and put chairs, benches and cafe tables where taxis and trucks usually go. The mayor’s vision would resemble last summer’s Broadway Boulevard Project below 42nd Street, which is still in effect.

See the full article at WCBS.

Broadway’s Spidey senses are tingling.

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the hyped stage musical directed by Julie Taymor (The Lion King) with music and lyrics courtesy of U2‘s Bono and The Edge, will kick off what its producers hope will be an amazing run along the Great White Way beginning with previews on Jan. 16, 2010, and a Feb. 18, 2010, opening night.

The $40 million effort, reportedly the most expensive Broadway production ever, will make its debut in the Hilton Theatre, the only venue big enough to allow the superhero room to spin his way around the sprawling skyscraper sets while duking it out with various bad guys.

See the full article at Yahoo News.

Seriously — if you are dumb enough to park your Lamborghini Gallardo right off of Broadway in Times Square, you deserve every bad thing that will happen to that beautiful car. Italian designers worked tirelessly to create a piece of machinery that could travel at high speeds without thinking twice about it. It’s probably not the ideal vehicle to be traveling at 15 MPH in big city traffic. Idiot. May Geico have mercy on your soul!

The mystery has been solved. Leave it to enterprising New Yorkers to figure out a new and probably illegal way (if you count copyrights) to make money. The cartoon characters each hold a bag of some sort and if a tourist wants to take a picture with them then they ask for “donations”. Pure genius. Now I’m wondering if these guys are all coordinated together…

Has anyone traveling through the Times Square area run across on of the creepy Elmo characters? I know there are at least two of them in the area, maybe more. And they’re not quite real Elmo characters either — they’re a little “off”. I just can’t figure out what they’re trying to accomplish…