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Amina Srna: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm producer Amina Srna, filling in for Brian today. Welcome back, everyone. Now, we continue our WNYC Centennial Series, 100 Years of 100 Things. Today, we are up to thing number 53. It's 100 years of celebrating the New Year in Times Square, which includes looking at some of the changes in Times Square, especially the more recent ones. We're joined for this by Katie Thornton, a Peabody-winning journalist and public historian. You might remember her from the series Divided Dial on On the Media. Her most recent work is A History of Times Square for the podcast 99% Invisible that came out on Christmas Eve. Welcome back, Katie.

Katie Thornton: Hi, Amina. Thank you so much. Great to be here.

Amina Srna: And listeners, we want to hear from you. People travel all over and endure all kinds of weather and rules to celebrate New Year's in Times Square. If that's how you welcome the New Year, let us know about your experience, especially if you've been doing it over the years and can talk about how the experience has changed. Call or text at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Do you have, or have you heard stories from your family or friends of New Year's in Times Square before the '90s? How does it compare to recent celebrations? And if you live in Times Square, what's it like having this massive party in your backyard? Call or text at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Katie, celebrating New Year's in Times Square has been going on for longer than 100 years, right?

Katie Thornton: It has, yes. You know, the first sort of official New Year's Eve celebration in Times Square started in 1904, which for any Times Square buffs out there was a really big year for Times Square. That was the year that the subway came to the neighborhood. That was the year that it got the name Times Square because the New York Times moved into the neighborhood earlier in 1904 and petitioned the city for a name change, just like The Herald had done with Herald Square years prior. And so 1904 was really sort of the inaugural year for the New Year's celebration. The New York Times put on the festivities with a large display of fireworks and dynamite, much different from what we would see today.

Amina Srna: And I understand the ball drop started in 1907.

Katie Thornton: The ball drop. Yes, it did. It began in 1907. That was a result of the City perhaps rightfully stepping in and saying, "You know, I don't know if we want these fireworks and dynamite exploding over Times Square," and so they banned that a couple years in, and the ball drop took the place of the firework display for many, many years.

Amina Srna: Can you talk about the significance of the ball's one-minute descent starting at 11:59? There's a nautical origin, right?

Katie Thornton: There is. You know, it's such a given almost. It almost just seems like this timeless thing that almost seems like out of place or out of time or out of history, but it does have a very specific origin. The modern tradition of the ball drop started in the 1800s, and it did, as you said, have sort of nautical origins. It started in England, became very popular in sort of 1833. On the English Royal Observatory, there was this large pole on top of the building, and this ball would descend for a single minute. It was visible from the sea, and so a lot of different mariners would watch the ball from the ocean, watch it drop steadily for one minute, and at the bottom, it would be 13 hours sharp. And so all of these different mariners would set their navigation equipment to it in order to ensure everyone was sort of on the same page.

Amina Srna: That's fascinating. Has the basic celebration been roughly the same since the early 20th century in terms of the ball drop?

Katie Thornton: The ball drop has been pretty consistent. I mean, it went out for two years during World War II because of the blackouts. Then in 2020, we had the ball drop, although there wasn't a gathering of people in the area. It has changed a bit over time. It's ebbed and flowed in terms of popularity, but it's always been a really, really large gathering. It did, of course, unsurprisingly, transform quite a bit in the '90s as the neighborhood transformed. The New Year's Eve celebration actually had a lot to do with the neighborhood's change from the sort of old Times Square of the '60s, '70s, and '80s, up to the more present, more family-friendly Times Square that we have today.

Amina Srna: You started talking about this, but I think a lot of our listeners are aware of the changes to Times Square in the '90s that you've reported on, and that New Year's played a part in it-- Going from the Midnight Cowboy era, if people remember that movie with the famous line, "I'm walking here," to the Disney era of the Lion King. Can you give us a broad-brush history of the area, starting with where it got its name, and then we'll dig into how it became the tourist mecca of today.

Katie Thornton: Absolutely, yes. As we mentioned, Times Square really started to come into its own in the early 1900s. It was really sort of the coalescence of a handful of different things, a number of theaters-- You know, previously the neighborhood was called Long Acre Square. It was basically where the horses and the livery stables were that ran the rest of the city in Lower Manhattan. That was what the area was for much of the the late 18 and early 1900s. But toward the end of the 19th century, a few people opened theaters up in the sort of cheaper area of Long Acre Square. You know, theaters require a lot of space, it was growing in popularity in the late 1800s in New York City, and so these theater owners decided to open theaters up in a part of the city where the land was quite a bit cheaper.

Eventually, in the early 1900s, they had a lot of success. That was really compounded with the subway coming to Times Square, and with the paper of record sort of giving their vote of confidence to the neighborhood by moving in in 1904. But for the first couple of decades of the 1900s, Times Square was really a glamorous place. It was where there was theater, it was where there was fancy restaurants, there was fine eating and dining eating and drinking establishments. There were rooftop restaurants where people would gather from from all over. It was really a classy and exciting destination that mostly stayed [crosstalk]-- Excuse me.

Amina Srna: Sorry, go ahead.

Katie Thornton: You know, it mostly stayed the same throughout the '20s. Even though Prohibition came in in 1920, that of course did change how things operated, but Times Square remained a place where there was a lot of speakeasies. It still remained a pretty thriving destination even through Prohibition.

Amina Srna: We are getting some callers and texters already. Skipping a little bit in the timeline here, a listener texts, "I went to Times Square once in the early '70s. It was--" [laughs] Sorry to laugh. "It was a horrible experience. Cold, some rowdy violence, someone got knifed. I've never been back." So, listeners, do you have stories from the Times Square ball drop that you can share? 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Or have you lived or worked in Times Square as it's changed? We want to weigh in on the transformation your neighborhood. 212-433-9692. You briefly just talked about Prohibition. Do you want to move along the timeline and tell us what happened during The Depression, what was its effect on Times Square?

Katie Thornton: Certainly. Well, like many neighborhoods, most neighborhoods, The Depression had an enormous effect on Times Square, but it was sort of compounded in Times Square because Times Square was really a neighborhood that was built for celebration, and it was a neighborhood that was built for theaters. You know, theaters are very large buildings, they're difficult to repurpose. During The Depression, a lot of people went out a lot less. For those who could afford to go out, they were often seeing movies, things that were cheaper than live theater, and so a lot of the theaters in Times Square really struggled through this period. Some of them turned into movie houses, but others sort of went empty. Others ended up being filled later on with cheap entertainment, things like shooting galleries and sort of carnival-type activities, arcades, and this was sort of a far cry-- You know, by the end of The Depression and into even the post-war era, this was a far cry from what Times Square had been just a couple of decades earlier.

Amina Srna: Another listener, Helen from Hell's Kitchen, texts, "Everyone over a certain age knows to do a grocery shop and hurry home early on New Year's Eve. We also carry a Con Edison bill with address to show NYPD to get past blue barriers to get home." Katie, there's the iconic celebrations for the end of World War II, but Times Square started a slide after the war, right? Someone you interviewed, I think, called it the Coney Island era. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Katie Thornton: Yes, that's right. Lynne Sagalyn, who is an absolute expert, Times Square historian, has written several books about the evolution of the neighborhood over the decades, and is just a fantastic person to talk with about this. I was fortunate enough to interview her in this most recent episode of 99% Invisible. She talks about how in the post-war era, it was really sort of-- Yes, she describes it as a Coney Island Times Square. The term at the time was "Honky Tonk." It was these sort of shooting galleries, the arcade games-- the penny arcade games. There was a lot of Western films, you know, really drawing in especially a lot of young men.

Times Square in the post-war era, it was certainly still very busy, but for a handful of folks in New York, a large handful of folks in New York, they were sort of saddened to see it fall from its glamorous era, sort of peak tourist destination into something that they regarded as a little bit less classy. It really became more of a center of entertainment for the masses, including for working class people. And for some elites in New York, that was not what they wanted from their premier tourist destination. But we should note, it was still very popular. I mean, at mid-century, the ball drop for example, there was about an estimated million people who attended Times Square for New Year's Eve in the middle of the century. I mean, that is an enormous crowd, and without a lot of the barricades and controls that shape the Times Square celebration today. Much more on the chaos side of organized chaos than the organized side that we have today.

Amina Srna: Listeners, if you're just joining us, this is the Brian Lehrer Show. I'm Amina Srna filling in for Brian. Today, it's thing 53 in our Centennial Series, 100 Years of 100 Things. Today, 100 years of celebrating the New Year in Times Square with Katie Thornton. Katie, we have a few people calling in, so let's go to Camille in Manhattan. Hi, Camille.

Camille: Hey, how're you doing? Thanks for taking my call.

Amina Srna: Thanks for calling.

Camille: I'm really happy that you're airing this piece. I'm a New Yorker, raised in the city. I was a teenager back in the 1980s, and I used to work at this place called Colony Records at 49th and Broadway. I'm sure many listeners remember the store. You know, we don't have record stores like that anymore. My take on the change in Times Square is that it's a reflection of what New York has become, very unfortunately. Because for people like me that were raised in the city, we remember the crime, we remember everything that was going on, not just in Times Square, but in other neighborhoods also, yet we were fine. We were New Yorkers. Then in the '90s, towards the end of the '90s, this whole change came about, and people essentially-- people in the finance industry and the IT industry started moving in with money, displacing all the New Yorkers, and everything has become now like-- You know, you have all these restaurants, bars, squeaky clean, shiny places, and this is not New York anymore. I'm sure other listeners can relate to that. Thank you very much.

Amina Srna: Thank you so much for that history, that personal history. Katie, how bad, if that's the right word, did it get by the 1970s? I see that you wrote that only 50,000 people attended the New Year celebration in the 1970s versus the million these days. Was that because of the crime and the sex industry?

Katie Thornton: Yes. First of all, Camille, thank you so much for that perspective. I think it's easy for people to sort of write off this era of Times Square as something that was unfortunate, that was undesirable, in quotes. It's really hard to pinpoint exactly why the attendance had dropped so significantly by the late '70s. That year does appear to be a bit of an aberration, but certainly, attendance at the New Year's Eve celebration had dropped by the late '70s, and it does coincide with the sex trade becoming much more prominent within Times Square. There was a series of Supreme Court cases in the 1970s that essentially allowed a lot of the sex trade to become legalized, so there was a lot of adult bookstores, there were peep shows, things like this going on in back rooms in Times Square for quite a while, you know, probably before the '60s really.

But by the '70s, the Supreme Court cases changed the definition of obscenity, and it allowed a lot of the sex industry, the sex trade, to take place out in the open. You know, you had these large theaters that were showing hardcore pornographic films, you had theaters that were promoting "live sex acts" on stage. You had just really a wide spread, a wide variety of commercial sex available. It is true that there was crime that went hand in hand with some of this industry, as well as the drug trade. It was a lot of petty crime. Of course, there certainly was violent crime, as one of the texters earlier alluded to, but there have definitely been some reports that some of the crime of this era has been a bit overblown, a bit sensationalized.

That said, I spoke with many people in this era, especially women, who didn't necessarily feel safe in the neighborhood at this time. But I think it's important to remember that Times Square, it was just a neighborhood. It was a place where people made their living, it was a place where people made their life. They went out, they fell in love, they screwed around, they went on dates, they went home. It was really just a place that a lot of people found love and a lot of people found excitement. I mean, it has never-- Times Square maybe has been down at times, but it's never been out. It's always been a destination. It's always been a beloved place for a lot of people, including people who even didn't necessarily frequent the neighborhood, but as one of my interviewees said in this most recent story, just sort of appreciated knowing that it was there.

Amina Srna: We have a couple more personal histories on the line. Let's go to Stephanie in Maine. Hi, Stephanie, you're on WNYC.

Stephanie: Hi. I live in Maine now, but I go back and forth. I grew up in Queens. My father started a Tai Chi school there, which is still there today, in 1973, so I've seen a lot of changes over the years. It used to be, when he started the school, people would come and challenge him to fights. I won't get into that too much, but it was definitely a different time in the '70s. I started going to the school and teaching there, and so then I got an apartment above. Then I had to move a couple of blocks away, and I used to have to zigzag on my way home to avoid confrontations with people. But then it slowly changed in the '90s, and pretty soon I could just walk straight home. I just want to say that the first time that I moved there, of course, we would see the ball drop here and there, but one time I was busy doing something else, and all of a sudden I heard a really loud thunder. I thought it was like a big storm or an earthquake or something, and then I remembered, "Oh, no, that's everyone cheering because the ball just dropped."

Amina Srna: Oh, wow.

Stephanie: So, that's my memory.

Amina Srna: Thank you so much for sharing and for calling in all the way from Maine. Stephanie there mentioned the '90s. We have at least one more story here from a listener calling in to talk about the '80s and early '90s. Let's go to Elena in Ellenville, New York. Hi, Elena, you're on WNYC.

Elena: Hi there. Thanks so much for taking my call. My memory is, I grew up in Manhattan in the '80s and '90s, and I can relate to the caller who was talking about Times Square through its more gritty phase, being just another place. I went to Macy's a lot as a kid, getting dragged around by my mom, and it was just sort of like another area of the city. But for me, what really blossomed with Times Square was when I was in my 20s and 30s and I started biking around the city for transportation, I really just fell in love with biking through Times Square. It ended up having-- You know, it has protected bike lanes, and now we have these pedestrian spaces, but for me, it took on a whole different character. When I would bike, I would commute back uptown through Times Square at night and just feel like the tourists have it in the day, but I still had it late night, and I think that's one of the best things about it today.

Amina Srna: Thank you so much for sharing that, Elena. Katie, do you want to tell us a little bit about what drove the changes in the 1990s? Was it property owners, businesses, politicians, residents, all of the above?

Katie Thornton: Yes, all of the above, especially property owners, businesses, and politicians. You know, oftentimes when we talk about the changes in Times Square, we end up talking about the '90s, but the changes really began much, much earlier. Every mayor since the '30s really has said they're going to "Clean up Times Square," but a lot of the changes that ended up playing out in the '90s began much earlier. In the early 1980s, there was a plan announced, a joint plan by the city and the state to use eminent domain to clear out a significant portion of Times Square. It was a very controversial plan. It was to be the first time in the city's history that they used eminent domain in order to basically claim commercial properties with the explicit plan of turning it into other commercial properties. You know, with the intent of getting more "desirable businesses" into the area.

There was a ton of lawsuits that lasted about a decade, but in 1990, they did succeed in claiming a large portion of the neighborhood of Times Square through eminent domain and taking out an estimated multiple hundred businesses in the area. Around the time that the city and state succeeded with this plan, the real estate market sort of dropped out. There was a major recession in the real estate market, some of their planned tenants who were going to move into Times Square ended up pulling out. And so not only did you have this sort of history, this neighborhood in the '80s that was loved by many but despised by by several, including many with a lot of power, but you also had a degree of vacancy then after much of this area was claimed through eminent domain, and new people were not immediately moving in.

And so one of the things that happens in this sort of interim period, in the early '90s, before Giuliani, who we think of as having a very large role in the "cleanup" of Times Square, there was a group that was formed called the Times Square Business Improvement District, now the Times Square Alliance. People are probably quite familiar with it. They're very visible. They have the red jackets and ambassadors out, helping people, answering questions, things like this, putting on live events, doing really a slew of things around the neighborhood. That is a group called a Business Improvement District. It is an urban planning tool, a sort of public/private partnership-- the private part of a public/private partnership.

Business Improvement Districts, you know, there are 76, I believe, in New York City right now. Times Square was among the earliest, probably the first 20 or so. This group formed in the early 1990s, in 1992, and they're essentially a group of business and property owners who get together and decide to assess themselves an additional fee, almost like a tax every year. That tax then comes back to them, and they can spend it in ways that they see fit in the neighborhood. It's a very widespread tool now. It's received a lot of criticism, which we can talk about as well. But what this group did in the '90s, sort of led by Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who was about to become the publisher of The New York Times at the time, he rallied a lot of the remaining business owners in the neighborhood, some of big Broadway theaters, The New York Times, other companies, to inaugurate this Business Improvement District where they would assess-- they would give themselves an extra tax essentially every year.

Then they began to spend it on things like public events, and more lighting, things like this, and one of the big things they did was revamp New Year's Eve. This was a long-standing tradition in Times Square, and they gave it a brand new face in the early '90s, still working with the city, who has a huge role in making the celebration happen, but they really sort of organized it. They welcomed in live music, and they made it a sort of family-friendly, controlled event. They swept the streets so that businesses could open at 8:00 AM the next morning, and they had fireworks, they had confetti. They really made it something that it had not been before. In this way, they sort of helped bring people back into Times Square who might have been avoiding Times Square through the New Year's Eve celebration.

Amina Srna: Yes, I see you've talked before about the insane amount of confetti that year, the jumbotron, the crowd control, really how New Year's Eve in 1992 going into 1993 was really kind of next-level. We have actually a clip from Dick Clark on his New Year's Rockin' Eve show on ABC from that year. Let's take a listen.

[playing a clip from Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve]

[crowd cheering]

Dick Clark: Look at the confetti in Times Square. This is a brand new deal.

[crowd cheering and music playing in the background]

Dick Clark: The Business Improvement District has dropped 500 balloons here. Messages of goodwill--

Amina Srna: The Business Improvement District getting a shout out there, Katie. Besides the entertainment aspect, there was a big police presence, and it was a pretty safe event, right?

Katie Thornton: Yes, it was. It was a very controlled event, certainly, and-- You know, it grew in the years to come, and the police presence at the event really sort of foreshadowed and went in tandem with a growing police presence and security presence within the neighborhood writ large. Business Improvement Districts, one of the things that they have often been critiqued for is that they often hire private security who often work hand in hand with the police. But these private security have been known at times to sort of just serve to displace people, move people out of the parameters of the Business Improvement District, and sometimes have violent interactions just with people who are utilizing public space, hanging out in public space. Certainly, the policing, yes, it did help make for a safer event, but it was a major, and rightfully so, a controversial part of the changes in the neighborhood at the time.

Amina Srna: We've got some great callers calling in. Let's go to Peter in Tampa with a perspective of growing up in the New Jersey suburbs. Hi, Peter, you're on WNYC.

Peter: Yes. I think a lot of people-- I grew up in the suburbs, and like a lot of people, I grew up-- Anyway, let me just put it this way, take a walk on the wild side. It was kind of like, we knew that Times Square was the place to go to take a walk on the wild side, like the first sample of this or that. I don't want to go into details, but it was like you're hanging out with your friend-- You've got a friend who's maybe got his driver's license, and so, you know-- I'm maybe a year younger, and he's like, "Let's go to Times Square," and it was just like-- I don't want to go into details, but it was the chance to get your first taste of this or that, you know?

Amina Srna: Interesting. Peter, thank you so much for sharing. Let's go to David in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Hi, David, you're on WNYC.

David: Hi. My memories-- I should maybe apologize to your previous caller who said he worked at Colony Records in the Times Square area. I was one of the first employees for Virgin Atlantic Airways. We started it in the West Village, and then in the late '80s, Virgin Megastores put a huge record store into the Bertelsmann Building in Times Square. And I remember being told by a New York brand that we were crazy, because even New Yorkers don't go to Times Square. So I think we maybe helped in the gentrification of the place just a little bit. The airline put a huge clock on the front of the record store as well, which became a bit of a tourist attraction, so it did turn around certainly in the early '90s with people like our retail presence going in there, I think.

Amina Srna: David, thank you so much for sharing that story. Katie, I want to squeeze in one more caller in our last few minutes. Let's go to Betty in Manhattan, who is a filmmaker. Hi, Betty, you're on WNYC.

Betty: Hey, hi. New York in the 1980s was Times Square. Artists gravitated from what would have been Soho or way downtown to Times Square because it offered a kind of secret history. There was porn, there were clubs, there were friends who were artists working in bars. Tin Pan Alley was a famous location that I added into my movie called Variety, which is a kind of cult underground film, and it was fascinating to explore a world. In my film, a woman follows a man who attends a cinema where she works as a ticket taker in a freestanding booth, which you don't see anymore, and the idea of the illicit, the sexual-- the world there was full of intrigue and underground spaces.

Many artists used Times Square as a location, Nan Goldin photographed there, a well-known photographer, and we resented the change to the '90s-- the exploration of a place that had many places that were open to all kinds of experiences that were off the beaten track, so to speak. And finally, artists in the 1980 decided to have a huge art show called the Times Square Show, presenting work that really was about that area, and we write a lot about today, the '80s as a sort of incredible time, which was a free for all. There was no commercialism in that way, and today, sadly for me, it looks like Disneyland, so I miss the '80s, and it's still the topic of a lot of artwork and exploration by a certain generation who really adored it.

Amina Srna: Thank you, Betty, for sharing that perspective. Katie, I heard you starting to chime in there. Anything come to mind while listening to those callers?

Katie Thornton: Well, absolutely. Thank you so much to everybody who's called in. I love hearing these perspectives. And Betty, to your point, I mean, there is a deep sadness that remains about the loss of old Times Square. Sure, there were the sort of pitfalls, the downsides that we've discussed already, but as you mentioned, it was a huge place for art, it was a place for artistic exploration, for personal exploration, for sexual exploration. There's an incredible book by Samuel Delany called Times Square Red, Times Square Blue that really documents the change in the neighborhood from both a sort of academic and urban planning standpoint, as well as his own personal experience within the neighborhood. As somebody who spends a lot of time in the neighborhood, cannot recommend that book highly enough.

It's interesting also, Betty, that you mention Disneyland. I mean, Disney played a very significant role in the change in the neighborhood. There was an agreement starting in, I believe 1993, a year or so after the Business Improvement District began, Disney agreed to move into the neighborhood and to have eventually a large Disney store and a theater where their-- as one of the people I spoke with said-- Sharon Zukin, who I spoke with for the piece said, "Another place where their IP could sort of live on," and it was quite literally, in a lot of ways-- to a lot of New Yorkers, it looked like an urban Disneyland, and quite literally, Disney played a massive role in the transformation of the neighborhood.

Amina Srna: That is all the time we have for today. That's thing 53 in our Centennial Series, 100 Years of 100 Things. Thank you, Katie Thornton, for this history of Times Square and its New Year's celebrations, and Happy New Year.

Katie Thornton: Happy New Year. Thanks so much for talking with me.

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