When an Auld Acquaintance Was Brand-New

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City Lore

When an Auld Acquaintance Was Brand-New


By JIM RASENBERGER
Published: December 30, 2007


IF we could ride a great glimmering ball back to Times Square a century ago, we might see ourselves in the men and women who gathered there on New Year’s Eve of 1907.

Notwithstanding how they dressed or wore their hair, their lives were superficially similar to ours. They took the subway to work and lived in homes lighted by electricity. They talked on telephones, went to the movies and listened to music on their new Victrolas. They worried about their weight and wondered whether Christmas was becoming commercialized.

And on Dec. 31, 1907, for the first time, they did something that hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers will do on Monday night: They celebrated the passing of ’07 into ’08 by watching an illuminated sphere falling from the sky.

Of course, not everything is quite the same. The ball that will descend in Times Square in the final seconds of 2007 is a far more sophisticated vessel than the one that made its debut at the end of 1907. This year’s incarnation, which is brand-new, will weigh 1,200 pounds and sparkle with 9,576 light-emitting diodes gleaming through Waterford crystal; a hundred years ago, the ball weighed 700 pounds and was illuminated by 216 incandescent bulbs.

But that first “electric ball,” as The New York Times referred to it, was dazzling enough to the people who poured into Times Square to see it. After 10 p.m., when the theaters let out, men in silk hats and women in furs swelled the crowd further. “An acrobat could hardly have managed to fall down for a wager, so tightly did the people hold each other up,” The New York Evening Sun reported the next day.

Not so many years earlier, New Yorkers had celebrated the new year by visiting friends’ homes or gathering around Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan to hear the chimes ring harmoniously at midnight. All that changed with the new century. The chimes still rang at the old church downtown, but the action now was uptown, at the distinctly nonsectarian intersection of Broadway and 42nd Street.

And nothing about it was harmonious. A correspondent for The Chicago Daily Tribune judged the noise in Times Square that night to be more varied than in previous years, including “trombones that yowled like a cat in torture, a combination of cowbells and streetcar gongs, tin horns with a double register.” The New York Tribune described the full effect as a “terrifying reverberation.”

If New York seemed especially raucous that New Year’s Eve, it was no wonder. The country had just survived a blistering economic meltdown in October — “the flurry,” the papers called it — even as it absorbed one of its largest waves of immigrants. Many of the nearly 1.3 million people who arrived in America in 1907 had sluiced through Ellis Island, adding to the ranks and turmoil of the city.

The playwright Israel Zangwill would use the term “melting pot” in 1908 to describe America as a place “roaring” and “bubbling” with the uneasy but exhilarating chemistry of assimilation.

Times Square on New Year’s Eve was the melting pot in action. People of all classes and backgrounds rubbed elbows. Men and women pressed against one another with unusual familiarity. Along with blowing horns in one another’s ears and tossing confetti into one another’s eyes, boys and young men dashed through the crowd with ticklers, small feather dusters they used to brush women’s faces.

Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham had banned ticklers that New Year’s Eve, but they were widely deployed anyway. Some women came prepared, wearing heavy veils to protect themselves.

At 42nd Street, a group of young men, noting that 1908 was going to be a leap year, pulled a clothesline across the sidewalk. When young women approached, the young men raised the line a foot or two off the pavement. “Leap year, ladies!” they called. “Take the jump. Show what you can do for leap year!” Some women stepped demurely down onto the street to walk around. Others lifted their skirts to daring heights and jumped.


Females made plenty of their own mischief that night. Chains of young women linked arms and whipped through Times Square. At 46th Street and Broadway, a dozen young women encircled a well-dressed young man and refused to let him escape. He was finally rescued by a police officer, but not before the women kicked his silk hat down Broadway.

Even more shocking female behavior was exhibited in the restaurants on the Great White Way. “There were perhaps a dozen women smoking in the cafe at one time, a little before 12 o’clock,” The Times wrote of female patrons at Martin’s, one of Broadway’s swankier establishments. “They did it modestly for the most part, and it was very evident that many were beginners.”

So remarkable was the news of women lighting up that it was recorded in papers around the country and led to a short-lived New York law banning women from smoking in public.

Back outside on this evening, as midnight approached, the whistles of the ships on the rivers began to screech, and people along Broadway pushed into the crowd that already packed Times Square. “Tens of thousands stood watching the electric ball,” reported The Times. “And then — it fell.”

WHY this simple falling ball should have gone on to become the essential symbol of New Year’s Eve is a mystery. But with that first descent a hundred years ago, one of the most enduring rites of American life was launched, one that would be repeated every year since 1907, except for a few years during the blackouts of World War II. The ball grew bigger and brighter, and these days it begins to fall at 11:59 rather than at midnight, as it did in 1907. But for all the changes, the feeling among those watching remains pretty much the same.

“The great shout that went up drowned out the whistles for a minute,” The Times of a century ago reported. “The vocal power of the welcome rose above even the horns and the cowbells and the rattles. Above all else came the wild human hullabaloo of noise out of which could be dimly formed the words: ‘Hurrah for 1908.’”