Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll look at what has happened to the ball that dropped in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. We’ll also find out about two art installations in the Flatiron district.
As retirement ceremonies go, this one was unusual.
There were speeches, of course, but the person who probably knows the retiree best used the word “antiquated.”
“It’s time,” he said.
There was a red carpet and the drum section of a marching band. But no one presented the retiree with a gold watch, golf clubs or a fancy fishing rod. And it’s a safe bet that the retiree will not be drawing a pension.
The retiree was the ball that fell in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
It was decommissioned after a final descent at One Times Square, having resided there since just before New Year’s Eve 2008. The ball had been resting comfortably where it had landed on New Year’s Eve: at the foot of a 139-foot pole, behind the digits “2025.”
But the ball had to go up one last time to come back down. There was a crowd chant of “5, 4, 3, 2, 1” from the reporters and photographers standing in the cold on the top of the building. Once the ball shinnied to the top, there was another — “10, 9, 8, 7.” It knew what to do. There was no “Auld Lang Syne” this time — no one sang. No one drank Champagne, either.
Michael Phillips — the president of Jamestown, the real estate firm that owns One Times Square — said that a replacement was in the works. The ball that was retired on Wednesday is only 17 or so. Joe Calvano, the owner of AMA Electric Sign, the company that maintains the ball, was the one who described it as “antiquated.”
Lighting technology has changed, he said, just as technology had changed when this ball took the place of its predecessor. This one has nearly 2,700 Wedgwood Crystal triangles bolted to nearly 700 light-emitting diode modules. It can generate 16 million colors — 15,999,999 more than the first one, in 1907.
It used to be that the balls from New Year’s Eves past went into a dusty room in the subbasement after they had fallen for the last time. Soon they will go on display upstairs. One Times Square, originally built in 1904 for The New York Times, is being remodeled to bring immersive, technology-driven displays to a structure that took shape when Cy Young was pitching the first perfect game in baseball and Giacomo Puccini had just premiered “Madama Butterfly.” Phillips said there would be space in a “time travel history experience,” which will fill four floors and open in the fall.
That will make up for not giving the ball a retirement gift. “We’re doing better,” Phillips said. “We’re giving it immortality.”
The ball will be joined by predecessors from generations past, including one that has been in Jamestown’s office. That ball slid down the pole from the mid-1950s until the mid-1990s. Its looks changed over the years, thanks to face-lifts: The ball was remade as an apple in the 1980s, after INY caught on. It was reskinned, with rhinestones, in the 1990s.
Phillips said he remembered the one that was retired on Wednesday. “It was Waterford, it was really dimensional, lightwise, and for the time it was revolutionary,” he said.
But he was not in Times Square on New Year’s Eve in 2008, when the ball made its first appearance. “I was home in bed, watching it on TV,” he said. That was during the financial crisis, at the time the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. “People were pretty freaked out about the future of the world, looking into 2009,” he said. “The debut of the new ball was quite significant despite the overshadowing.”
Weather
Expect an increasingly cloudy sky and wind with a high near 33. Tonight a cloudy sky will gradually give way to a partly cloudy sky with a low near 28. There is a 20 percent chance of snow.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Monday (Martin Luther King’s Birthday).
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New art installations in the Flatiron district. No video this time.
James Mettham does not expect history to repeat itself.
He is the president of the Flatiron NoMad Partnership, and he was talking about “Winer Glow,” a “celebration of light, art and storytelling” with two outdoor art installations that are to be unveiled today in the Flatiron district.
Memories of Flatiron NoMad’s last installation hung over the conversation.
Last spring, when Flatiron NoMad coordinated the installation of an interactive New York-to-Dublin setup called the Portal, the video feed had to be turned off for a few days. Videos had circulated of an OnlyFans model lifting her shirt in New York, of people in Dublin holding up swastikas, and of the World Trade Center burning on Sept. 11, 2001.
The new installations do not have video, only lights and audio. One of the installations — Spectrum, by mirari, a computer graphics studio in Montreal — looks like a series of rings on posts, each a few feet from the next. The rings pulse with light, relaying a representation of the sound waves of the words people say.
Gonzalo Soldi, mirari’s creative director, said the idea was for people who do not know each other “to see the frequencies” of the human voice.
“We are more and more in a world where we don’t communicate with strangers,” Soldi said. “We do it through Facebook, and we have conversations through social media but not in space. Communication is people vibrating together, so in this case it’s two people who, through the distance of the rings, are in a conversation.”
The other installation, “The Diamonds,” by Perséides Studio, also from Montreal, has three structures that passers-by can spin like illuminated tops.
Mettham said that the two pieces are “more tactile” than Portal was. “You’re supposed to touch them,” he said. “You’re supposed to interact not only with them but with somebody else 10 feet away from you who’s playing with them.”
That sets them apart from Portal. “Portal was a one-of-a-kind moment and experience and one that we thought we came very prepared for,” Mettham said. “We learned a lot very quickly, as everyone knows.”
He said that “the easy route” would have been to say that Portal was “this thing we learned our lesson from and we’re going to retreat from public art installations.”
But, working with QDSinternational, a nonprofit in Montreal that distributes “participatory installations,” Flatiron NoMad decided to go ahead with “Winter Glow.”
“We’re not connecting directly in real time with another public space,” Mettham said. “There are differences between what Portal was and what these two pieces are. That was reflective of the spaces in New York City and Dublin. These pieces are unique but are more aligned with the type of interactive public art pieces that we’re used to showcasing.”
And it’s winter, so no one is going to pull up a shirt or a blouse, right? “You said it,” Mettham said. “These pieces don’t lend themselves to that type of experience.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Tasty Contraband
Dear Diary:
We were waiting to get into a comedy show in Brooklyn on a Thursday night. Members of the venue’s security staff were checking bags.
“No drinks,” they hollered. “No food. No cookies.”
Pieces of fruit were confiscated. Some people had their chocolate taken away.
After clearing security and heading for the entrance, we saw a box filled to the brim with delicious contraband: apples, bananas, oranges and, to top it all off, a large vacuum-sealed package of cooked octopus.
— Betty Tsang
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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