In just a few hours, a ritual will be repeated — a ritual that began with The New York Times: New Year’s Eve in Times Square.
It’s different now. There was no ball drop the first year, as 1904 gave way to 1905. The Times shot fireworks from the roof of its new building, in the triangle between Broadway and Seventh Avenue. The newspaper switched on a display of flashing electric lights the next year, and, according to a front-page article, “the hysterical crowd below became, if possible, still more hysterical.”
For 1907, The Times put a pole atop the building and began the tradition of the ball drop.
This time around, there will be a reminder that The Times played a role in making New Year’s Eve what it is, just as the news organization reports on the events that make the world what it is.
With The Times set to celebrate its 175th anniversary in 2026, the publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, will begin a yearlong look at the importance of its independent reporting. He will appear on a webcast on Wednesday from the Times Square Alliance, the business improvement district for the area, which is now an organizer of New Year’s Eve in Times Square. A video highlighting The Times’s reporting and its history with New Year’s Eve will also be shown.
The night of that first celebration, The Times was moving to Times Square. It was still printing newspapers on Park Row in Lower Manhattan. The issue of Jan. 1, 1905 — with an image of The Times’s tower and the numerals “1905” at the top — was the last to come off the presses there.
When they shut down, 15 trucks rolled up Broadway, loaded with machinery that had to be reassembled in the Times Square building in time for the next night’s press run, for the paper’s 17,160th issue.
The new building had been “the focus of an unprecedented New Year’s Eve celebration,” according to the Times Square Alliance. The Times’s publisher, Adolph Ochs, “spared no expense to ensure a party for the ages.”
After an all-day street festival, some 200,000 people oohed and aahed at the fireworks. And then the movers went to work.
“Days and nights had been devoted to the preparation,” The Times said. Some of the linotype machines — the clattering, unwieldy machines that set the type in those days — were disassembled as soon as the last sentence of copy for Jan. 1 was set. The desks from the newsroom were also packed and loaded for the ride to Times Square, along with the reporters’ typewriters.
The linotypes were put back together, the typewriters were put on the desks, The Times came out on schedule on Jan. 2 — and eventually the paper moved around the corner, to a building on West 43rd Street. It sold the tower in Times Square in the 1960s.
The original New Year’s Eve ball no longer exists, and the building, now known as One Times Square, has undergone a $550 million makeover. Jamestown, the real estate firm that owns it, made a replica of the ball for a display there.
The one that will drop on Wednesday night is new, with 5,280 crystals and LED light “pucks,” nearly twice as many as on the ball that was retired in January.
James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post Tonight’s Ball Drop Is a Celebration of Both the New Year and Times History appeared first on New York Times.
