On New Year’s Eve, an estimated one million people will gather in New York’s Times Square, while another one billion will watch the event on television. At 6pm a massive Waterford Crystal ‘time ball’ will be raised on a pole on the One Times Square building. A few seconds before midnight it will begin its 77-foot (23-metre) descent to the bottom. We asked Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance, about the Square’s origins:
Tim Tompkins (Standard American accent): It was the creation of the New City subway system and the opening of the subway line in 1904, along with the building of the New York Times headquarters. Times Square is named after the world-famous newspaper, The New York Times, not actually after some notion of time related to New Year’s Eve, which a lot of people think!
Until 1904, the area was in fact known as “Longacre Square”. We asked Tim Tompkins to describe the most important moments in Times Square’s history:
Tim Tompkins: One was the very first New Year’s Eve celebration. In the tradition of Times Square, it was essentially a publicity stunt, but it was a publicity stunt for The New York Times announcing the opening of its building. And, for America, a tradition that’s now over 100 years old is a very, very old tradition! So the creation of that celebration around New Year’s became very important, not only for New York City, but for the entire world. I’d say a second important event for Times Square was the end of World War Two. Times Square was always a place where the news was transmitted instantly, literally on these signs on the edge of the New York Times building, and so it was there that hundreds of thousands of people gathered and learned that World War Two had ended, and there was a picture snapped of a sailor kissing a nurse and that came to symbolise the joy of ending the war and entering into a time of peace.
BOUNCING BACK
After the war Times Square went into decline and, by the 1970s it had become a dangerous place. It has, however, bounced back in recent years and it is about to undergo major renovation:
Tim Tompkins: What happened a couple of years ago, is that the Mayor closed down one of the two streets that crosses and makes Times Square, which is Broadway. He closed it down to vehicular traffic and made it available for people to walk. So it’s more like a European piazza: the problem is it’s a very ugly piazza! It’s literally asphalt of the street painted – the phrase we use is it’s kind of like “putting lipstick on a pig!” – fundamentally, it’s a very ugly space. So we look at the great public spaces in the world and we say, “What can we do to make this a public space that New York can be proud of?” And so it’s... really comes down to different kinds of stone or pavers, and taking what had been just this rough, ugly streetbed, and making it into a piazza.
Aprende más sobre la ciudad de Nueva York: Times Square: New Year's Eve