The Times Square Ball - by Jeffrey Rubel
1904 was a big year for The New York Times.
That year, Adolph Ochs — who bought the paper eight years earlier in 1896 — decided to move the paper’s headquarters to the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway. In honor of the paper’s new home (and in part because Ochs convinced the city to build a new subway station there that needed a distinctive name), the City of New York renamed the intersection: What was once Long Acre Square was now Times Square.
The building was set to open on January 1, 1905, so to celebrate, Ochs organized a party. A big party.
On the morning of December 31st, 1904, the paper ran a front page advertisement inviting people to Times Square to “usher in the New Year” and “celebrate the removal of the New York Times to its new building.”
Hundreds of thousands of people showed up.
And it was raucous. The Times reported that “every known device for making noise was pressed into service. There were horns of all shapes and sizes — horns which wailed with an almost human note and horns which carried an ear-shattering volume of sound.”
At the party’s center: A fireworks display. When the clock struck midnight, one bout of dynamite exploded. Then another, and another, and another. The new building appeared to catch fire. At first, the explosions were white. Then red. Every floor of the new building seemed to burn.
The next morning, the Times described the sight:
“No more beautiful picture was ever limned in fire on the curtain of midnight. From the four corners of the skyscraper, lambent flames played. From base to dome, the giant structure was alight — a torch to usher in the new born, a funeral pyre for the old which pierced the very heavens.”
The event was such a hit that Ochs continued to host a New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square every year. Three years later, for New Year’s Eve 1908, Ochs wanted to go even bigger: He hired sign designer Artfraft Strauss to build a giant ball five feet in diameter, made of iron and wood and lit by hundreds of lightbulbs. The ball was hoisted on the building’s 70 foot flagpole. Ten seconds before midnight, the ball began to drop. When it hit the roof, the ball completed a circuit that lit giant signs and triggered a fireworks display.
The ball drop was born — in celebration of a new building and a new year.
For more New Year’s Eve fun, see past posts on the song “Auld Lang Syne” and the Spanish tradition of eating twelve grapes.
The original coverage of the party — from the Times on January 1, 1905 — can be found here.
Many subsequent Times articles have discussed the event, too: an article on the renaming of Long Acre Square; an article on the history of the ball drop; an article on ball drop technology; and, an article on ball design.
ncG1vNJzZmiilZuzs7HYq6ybnZxjwLau0q2YnKNemLyue89oq6GdXam2rrHSZqqqrZGnsm6uwKWj