Most urbanites when they want to set up camp, leave the city for a rendezvous in nature.

Not these guys (links to pics). Last night they set up tents in Times Square, and didn’t get booted by the cops until this morning:

Folks from all over the world stopped and talked to us to find out what we were doing. Some bought us supplies (we’d made a pact not to leave our traffic island until morning) and two even brought pizza. Many hung out for a while and left us their names and addresses. A few are pictured below.

We spun stories about being there to be first in line for Jessica Simpson tickets (one group almost joined us) or claimed to be photographers for North Face taking product photos in the urban landscape (the cops seemed to buy that one.) But people just seemed to love the idea that someone was actually camping out in the middle of times square for the heck of it.

Would you do this? I’m betting their tale makes it to the New York Times, which would result in some fantastic publicity for one of the campers, Zack Klein, who is a partner in some very profitable (though tacky, perhaps) web ventures.

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