by Molly McGuire

Created on: November 19, 2009

Times Square is the quintessential spot to celebrate New Year's Eve. Around the globe, people watch, and in New York thousands gather, waiting for the famous ball to drop at the stroke of midnight to usher in the New Year. Revelers come from all over the world to join the party, taking home memories that will last a lifetime.

How did the celebration in Times Square come to be such a famous New Year's Eve traditions? It all began in 1904, the era of the great industrialists, of Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. The city was teeming with new industry, and one of the important players was Alfred Ochs, owner of the New York Times, a leader in the pack of more than a dozen newspapers thriving in the city in the early 1900s. Ochs had recently relocated the paper's headquarters in the newly built Times Tower, a tall building wedged on a small triangle of land at the intersection of 42nd Street, Broadway, and 7th Avenue called Longacre Square. According to reports of the time, the Times Tower was the second tallest building in New York, and it had three subterranean basements to house the paper's state of the art printing presses.

Ochs used his considerable influence to convince city leaders to rename the property Times Square, after his notable publication. Then he decided to put on a gala New Year's Eve bash that was unforgettable. Beginning with an afternoon street festival, it ended with a crescendo of fireworks amid noise-makers that was so loud the celebration could be heard thirty miles north in Croton-On-Hudson. The festivities were so amazing that the following year the people abandoned the longtime celebration at Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, to Times Square, where it has remained for more than a century.

The first year New York celebrated in Times Square, the curbs were lined with horse drawn cabs, and an automobile was an exciting sight. To mark the official New Years, they set off bombs and huge crowds gathered to gawk at the city's tallest building. The great throng sent up a shout of delight. The city stopped the use of fireworks two years later, so Ochs commissioned a giant illuminated iron and wooden ball weighing seven hundred pounds that dropped from a flagpole at the stroke of midnight to mark the passing of the year. Times Square sign maker Artkraft Strauss made and lowered the famous ball throughout most of the 20th Century.

By 1906, Ochs and his crew arranged a more spectacular production, replete with an exciting electric display to herald the

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