New Year’s Eve At Times Square: A History Lesson

Here’s a brand spanking new RCA TK30 above the entrance to the Hotel Astor in Times Square in 1946 shooting the merry makers below. Since the mid 1800s, Trinity Church was the gathering point, but the celebration moved to Times Square in 1904 as part of a promotion of the New York Times to celebrate their new building and headquarters.

New York in 1904 was a city on the verge of tremendous changes – and, not surprisingly, many of those changes had their genesis in the bustling energy and thronged streets of Times Square. Two innovations that would completely transform the Crossroads of the World debuted in 1904: the opening of the city’s first subway line, and the first-ever celebration of New Year’s Eve in Times Square.

The NY Times building was the focus of an unprecedented New Year’s Eve celebration. Alfred Ochs, owner of The Times, spared no expense to ensure a party for the ages. An all-day street festival culminated in a fireworks display set off from the base of the tower, and at midnight the joyful sound of cheering, rattles and noisemakers from the over 200,000 attendees could be heard, it was said, from as far away as Croton-on-Hudson, thirty miles north along the Hudson River.

The New York Times’ description of the occasion paints a rapturous picture: “From base to dome the giant structure was alight – a torch to usher in the newborn year…”

The night was such a rousing success that Times Square instantly replaced Lower Manhattan’s Trinity Church as “the” place in New York City to ring in the New Year. Before long, this party of parties would capture the imagination of the nation, and the world.
Two years later, the city banned the fireworks display – but Ochs was undaunted. He arranged to have a large, illuminated seven-hundred-pound iron and wood ball lowered from the tower flagpole precisely at midnight to signal the end of 1907 and the beginning of 1908. The rest as they say, is history.

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