Ringing in the New Year

Sounds like the 100th New Year’s Eve in Times Square went well — at least according to the Times, which was on hand to sketch a scene full of sawhorses, dropped balls, flashed abdomens and the occasional transvestite:

Last night, 100 years after the first organized New Year’s celebration in Times Square, close to 1 million people crowded Times Square to welcome 2005.

The weather was unusual. The temperature at midnight was 50 degrees, and there was no rain, sleet or snow, just showers of confetti.

At midnight, with blizzards of plastic rainbow confetti erupting from the tops of skyscrapers, police officers lit cigars and flipped open their cellphones to call loved ones. Couples kissed, and on the main stage, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Secretary of State Colin Powell, who pressed a button that dropped the ball, locked arms and swayed awkwardly to Frank Sinatra’s version of “New York, New York.”

The lines of police barriers overtook car lanes, becoming a maze that corralled an unexpectedly large number of revelers – one officer said there appeared to be more than 750,000 there to watch the ball drop.

Old-timers grumbled, recalling the years when sawhorses were fewer and when onlookers were allowed to flood Times Square without having to leave lanes open for satellite trucks and V.I.P.’s whom nobody recognized.

Or years when it was so cold that only the truly courageous proved themselves by enduring five hours crushed between barriers like ice cubes in a metal tray.

Cue hapless tourists:

Among those on hand was David Pepsny, a carpenter, who found himself crushed into a crowd that had mushroomed suddenly at Eighth Avenue and 49th Street about 5 p.m.

After an 11-hour drive from his hometown, Ashland, Ohio, Mr. Pepsny and two friends had arrived in what they thought was New York City. Actually, they were in Jersey City, but just a short while later, they reached their destination, the Ramada Inn at Kennedy Airport.

“Our hotel lady was kind of laughing at us,” Mr. Pepsny said.

. . .

Another Ohioan, Nate Thobaben, a West Point cadet, lifted his shirt and flashed his abdomen at young women nearby.

Mr. Thobaben, 19, said he was only trying to cool off.

“It’s really warm, but then again I’m from Ohio and we already got 10 inches of snow in one night,” he said.

Of course, it’s not a Times article without noting how the other half lives:

Ringing in the year in Times Square was not for everyone.

Miss Trixie, a transsexual who said she was an actress between jobs, was on Avenue of the Americas in Greenwich Village talking about how she had been sober for 49 days and was determined to make it 50. She said she was returning to Brooklyn as soon as she finished hustling for small change.

“Old people and old places,” she said about Times Square, a veneer of 5 o’clock shadow showing through her made-up face. “People and places you want to stay away from.

“My goal in 2005 is to be a productive citizen in society working for some establishment in New York City.”

She rattled the coins in her Taco Bell cup as people walked by.

On an E train to Parsons Boulevard, in Queens, with a few hours left in 2004, Gerardo Rivas, 29, pulled off his royal blue jacket and settled onto a bench seat.

Mr. Rivas, who moved to New York from Mexico four years ago, was going home to his apartment to spend New Year’s Eve with his wife and two children.

His youngest, a boy, was born in 2004. Mr. Rivas, who said he was grateful for his new life in the city, gave him an American name: Steve.

Mr. Rivas said he was also staying home to get a good night’s sleep before going to work in the morning. His goal in 2005 was to provide more for his family.

Then the train pulled away from 50th Street, pulling him toward the new year.

And with that, we give thanks for what we have and look forward to a happy, healthy and productive new year.

Dropping Balls

Once again, we will miss the New Year’s Eve festivities in Times Square — there’s absolutely nothing — nothing! — appealing about waiting seven hours in the cold without access to even a porta-potty much less alcohol! In lieu of that unfulfilled experience, there’s this helpful Times op-ed about the history of balls dropping. Fascinating stuff:

New York City’s annual ball drop is probably the greatest single moment of public timekeeping in the world. Yet the Times Square ball is not the world’s most important time ball – nor was it the first. It wasn’t even the first time ball in New York. Oh, and it isn’t even dropped right.

A little history first. Public time-telling began in church. In 1335, the bells of the church of San Gottardo (then Beata Vergine) began tolling the hours in Milan, ringing once at 1 a.m. and culminating in 24 chimes at midnight. It was the first time church bells had been used to announce time regularly. The idea spread rapidly through Europe, and for the first time in history, large groups of people knew the time. The Milan clock could be off by as much as 1,000 seconds a day, but that wasn’t really a problem, because if nobody knew exactly what time it was, how could anyone really be late?

Measurement of time improved as the centuries passed, but even into the early 18th century most people had no need for precise time. (The minute hand shows up on watches, for example, around 1700). The bells tolled hourly and that was plenty.

Accuracy improved vastly during the industrial revolution and was honed at sea: ship captains needed extremely precise clocks to coordinate their celestial readings with the time those readings would occur at a known point – usually Greenwich, England (the city that later lent its name to Greenwich Mean Time, the world’s standard time). John Harrison, the famous clockmaker, developed a chronometer accurate and portable enough to do the job in 1761, and ultimately changed the world.

But once clocks were capable of precision time-telling, the question was, what to set them against? In the early 19th century, enter the time ball. Robert Wauchope, a Royal Navy captain, had an idea: a large signal in a harbor would, at a specific moment, indicate the exact time – sailors could view it through a telescope and set their chronometers precisely.

In 1829 the Admiralty gave it a shot, setting up the world’s first time ball in the harbor at Portsmouth, England. It worked so well that in 1833 they set one up at the Royal Observatory in Flamsteed House, on a Greenwich hilltop. The ball, which was visible to ships at anchor, would be dropped every day at 1 p.m. At 12:55 p.m., the red, wood-and-leather ball was raised halfway up a 15-foot mast atop the building; at 12:58 it went to the top; and on the hour the ball began to drop, the start of its downward motion signaling exactly 1 p.m.

The ball idea caught on. The United States Naval Observatory began dropping a noon time ball in Foggy Bottom in 1845 and kept it up until 1885, when the ball drop moved to the State, War and Navy Building (now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) next to the White House, where it kept dropping until 1936. Starting in 1877, the Navy telegraphed a daily signal to the Western Union Building in New York, atop which an automatic time ball then dropped. (Twelve minutes early, to account for the difference in longitude; we didn’t get time zones until the telegraph and railroads made them necessary, in the 1880s.)

Which brings us to the famous Times Square ball:

And as for New York, in December of 1904, this newspaper celebrated the move to its new Times Square building with a New Year’s Eve party, which thereafter grew year by year. When, in 1907, a ban on fireworks prompted The Times to find a new celebration finale, a time ball was brought in, and the tradition began.

The Times Square ball isn’t quite a true time ball. The eye can easily pick up motion, so precise time balls mark time by starting to move, not by stopping. The Times Square ball marks time with the end of its motion – hard to perceive and inexact, but presumably more fun for counting backward.

New York City Walk

Big props to Caleb Smith, who has walked every street in Manhattan:

Last summer, Caleb Smith, a thirty-four-year-old librarian at Columbia, came across an old Times story with the headline “NAVY OFFICER NEAR THE END OF 4-YEAR PROJECT OF WALKING IN EVERY STREET ON MANHATTAN.” The article, from December, 1954, was about an eccentric sixty-five-year-old named Thomas J. Keane, who, in the course of taking carefully planned weekend strolls, had managed to traverse some three thousand blocks and five hundred miles of Manhattan terrain. Smith, himself an inveterate walker, was then a little more than two years into his own all-encompassing Manhattan project—and, he estimated, about three-quarters of the way done. Why not pick up the pace and aim at finishing on the fiftieth anniversary of his predecessor’s achievement?

As big fans of such ambitious projects, this one is well worth noting.

See the website, New York City Walk.

The Hip-Hop Church

Kurtis Blow is rapping for Jesus:

A pioneering rap star is taking hip-hop from the projects to the pulpit.

Kurtis Blow is one of the founders of “The Hip-Hop Church” at two Harlem parishes, which features rousing services fueled by gospel-inspired rap tunes.

“The kids need to learn about God, but even the ones who already know God don’t like the church, because church is boring,” Blow told The Post.

“What we do isn’t boring — it’s energetic, it’s uplifting, it’s spiritual — and the kids can relate to it. We speak the word of God in a language they can understand — rap.”

. . .

Below the altar, Blow mans a DJ booth, rapping and scratching along to artists including 3 Shades of Faith Introducing Prophecy; The Hip-Hop Church Band; guest rappers and break dancers.

In between the beat-driven numbers, the Revs. Stephen Pogue and Darren Ferguson lead the congregation in prayer and deliver inspiring sermons. This February, Blow, 45, will begin studying at the New York School of Ministry to become a full-fledged man of the cloth.

You may be aware that MC Hammer is already an ordained minister; Blow notes the rap-religion symbiosis:

“The younger people really love it because it’s rap, but the adults also like it because there’s a lot of ‘old school’ which they grew up with. The fact is that hip-hop can save the church and the church can save hip-hop,” he said. [emphasis added]

The Blow services are held Fridays at the Abyssinian Baptist Church on West 138th Street and Greater Hood Memorial AME Zion Church on West 146th Street. Other services are offered at the Trinity Episcopal Church of Morrisania in the South Bronx.

“Bowling for Palestine”

“Bowling for Palestine” is how the Daily News and the Post (see also “PIN-HEAD ARAFAT’S TERROR ‘$TRIKE'”) are describing the revelation that Yasser Arafat had $1.3 million invested in the company that owns Greenwich Village’s Bowlmor Lanes:

The news, first reported in Bloomberg Markets Magazine, hit some Bowlmor patrons like a 15-pound ball taking down the headpin.

“If I had known, I wouldn’t have come, but I promised the kids,” said financier Steve Saslow, 55, with his 4-year-old and 8-year-old in tow.

It apparently also came as a surprise to Bowlmor’s owners, a company called Strike Holdings, which runs the bowling alley called Strike in New Hyde Park, L.I., as well as lanes in Maryland and Florida.

The firm said it was “shocked” to learn Arafat was behind the investment – and planned to return the money and sever any ties to the Palestinians.

“This information was never disclosed to us previously, and had we known the source of these funds, which represents approximately 2% of our company’s equity, we never would have accepted them,” spokeswoman Marcia Horowitz said.

“We do not endorse their values, and we do not want to be affiliated with them in any way.”

Bowlmor has been around since 1938, but it was sold in 1997 to entrepreneur Tom Shannon.

Shannon happened to attend business school with Arafat’s U.S. investment manager, Zeid Masri, who decided to park some Palestinian Authority cash in Bowlmor.

The $1.3 million, funneled through a company called Onyx Funds, was just a small piece of a $799 million fortune that Arafat invested in companies across the Middle East and the U.S.

Masri figured the stake would be a moneymaker, but it looks like a gutter ball for the Palestinian Authority, since Strike has not paid any dividends on the investment.

Nevertheless, with its disco atmosphere, $9 games and prime location, Bowlmor has become the top-grossing alley in the city – a popular spot for office parties and young singletons.

Its Web site also advertises it as a hot spot for bar mitzvahs, complete with a kosher caterer and a special room for candlelighting ceremonies.

Oh, the irony! Love that irony!

But of course there are also those who are able to disengage the personal from the political:

Sam Rubin, 30, an Israeli-born NYU student walking into Bowlmor yesterday, said the Arafat link would not stop him from tossing a couple of games.

“I’m glad Arafat’s dead, but I like to separate … politics and bowling,” he said.