On 31 December 1992, armchair revelers tuned to CBS for the annual New Year’s Eve festivities, broadcast live from New York. The Cheers actor and emcee for the night Jay Thomas volleyed hosting duties to Fame actor Nia Peeples, who stood atop a building in nearby Times Square.
“[It’s] Times Square … some of the men are women and some of the women are men so be careful who you pet out there,” Thomas gruffly warned Peeples, with more than a dose of transphobia and disdain for sex workers.
Crude as his comments were, he voiced what many housebound Americans – who knew Times Square as the site of open-air drug markets, a haven for johns and sex workers, and the home of boldly advertised peep shows and “live sex acts” – were undoubtedly thinking: is it safe?
It was a question that had plagued Times Square and its New Year’s Eve party for decades. Though the evening brought an estimated 1 million celebrants to the five-block hub in the postwar boom years, that number had dropped by 95% to a mere 50,000 in the late 1970s. Attendance had increased in the 1980s, but it was still nowhere near that of the heyday.
But this year would be different. The event had new organizers with tricks up their sleeves. After the one-minute countdown ran out and the ball dropped – previously the extent of the festivities – the entire neighborhood was transformed in a brand new, eight-minute grand finale, complete with a hand-orchestrated, 3,500lb confetti drop. On this unseasonably warm night, a blizzard of colorful paper fluttered down over the merrymakers, turning all of Times Square into the glinting inside of a snow globe, and softening the streets’ rough edges under a blanket of festive paper. Gazing out over the country’s crossroads, Peeples says quietly – off camera and in a moment of what sounds like genuine awe – “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Classic on-air exaggeration? Possibly. But while the celebration had historically been a chaotic if beloved, boozy mess, the early 90s debut was meticulous and spectacular. The confetti was such a hit that many thought it was a longstanding tradition. Some people – including Treb Heining, the man behind that first confetti launch, and who still coordinates the colorful carousal – came to see it as representative of Times Square’s budding makeover. “Up until that point,” he’d later say of Times Square’s early confetti days, “it had just been a drunken brawl.”
The annual event was actually a major campaign for the fledgling Times Square Business Improvement District: a quiet, behind-the-scenes entity that helped do away with the old Times Square, and which still co-produces the event. By transforming the biggest night of the year – and wielding their surprisingly far-reaching and undemocratic municipal power – the Times Square Business Improvement District made New Year’s Eve a crucial part of the old Times Square’s demise.
For years, high art and low entertainment coexisted in Times Square. But by the 1970s, anxiety about the area reached a fever pitch. Fears of smut and vice collided with racist and classist panic about those who lived, worked and hung out in the area. By the 1990s, public perception of the neighborhood, which was home to several gay erotic theaters, was further colored by the Aids epidemic and corresponding homophobia.
In March 1992, the owners of 1 Times Square, atop which the new year ball has dropped since 1907, filed for bankruptcy – one of many, as a glacial-paced redevelopment effort had recently bulldozed many businesses and left others shuttered. As newspapers asked if New Year’s Eve would continue, some of the area’s business leaders were desperate not to lose one of the public’s few “positive” Times Square touchstones. “Our overarching concern,” said Gretchen Dykstra, head of a newly formed consortium of business leaders in the area called the Times Square Business Improvement District, told the New York Times, “is that the New Year’s Eve ball lowering, which has a historic and dramatic accent on Times Square, can continue to be the powerful image.”
The kickoff to 1993 needed to not just happen, it needed to blow minds, and Dykstra’s organization was ready to make that happen. So they called Heining – the confetti master with a sense of wonder that seems straight from a made-for-TV-movie about the holiday. They also added hundreds of 5ft-tall balloons, a laser light show, and a 900-sq-ft Jumbotron that displayed a bouncing-ball sing-along of Auld Lang Syne. They cracked down on alcohol consumption, rallied greater police presence, and reduced unruly foot traffic by sectioning off the celebration area into neat catchments (with attendees seeking permission to visit the bathroom). By the next day, all evidence of the extravaganza was erased from the streets thanks to the group’s cleanup crew.
The effect was metamorphic. The next year, the event drew thousands more tourists and teenagers. Whereas police had reported hundreds of robberies at previous years’ celebrations, the dawn of 1994 had only one reported pickpocketing. To ring in 1995, Mayor Rudy Giuliani brought his family out to showboat the area’s security. Later that year, in a moment often seen as a turning point in Times Square’s transformation, Disney moved into the Amsterdam Theater. But few knew that this transformation was driven, in part, by the commandeering of New Year’s Eve.
But who is the Times Square Business Improvement District? Business improvement districts (BIDs) such as Times Square’s – which still operates today, and is one of 70 such BIDs in New York City alone – are quasi-governmental bodies with little-known but far-reaching power. Once established, they can implement a “fee” – essentially a private tax – on every business in the area. The fee is typically spent on services traditionally offered by a municipal government, like waste collection, public safety and marketing. But BIDs are not democratic like a city government; they are unelected bodies which, according to New York City law, must be majority-controlled by property owners, whose voting power can be weighted according to the value of their property. BIDs are, in essence, pay-to-play local governments made up primarily of the area’s richest, who can change neighborhoods at a pace much faster than the democratic process. Not long after Times Square’s was founded in 1992, the BID zeroed in on New Year’s Eve as the vital gear in a meshing redevelopment plan that was increasingly backed by the city and state.
But there were many casualties in the neighborhood’s antiseptic reformation. Despite its reputation, old Times Square was first and foremost a neighborhood. It was a place where thousands of people made a living, went out, made friends, fell in love, testified on the corners (proclaiming either the power of their product or the power of Jesus), learned the dance of city life. You could catch a high-end musical, an art show, a questionable film and a street corner drama all in a few blocks. After the creation of the business improvement district and aggressive new zoning and redevelopment plans, rents increased, businesses shuttered, more buildings were bulldozed. The “Disneyfication” of the area – which the BID would help shape with marketing campaigns – left little room for Times Square’s colorful past.
Today the Times Square Business Improvement District (now Times Square Alliance) is still going strong – quietly, competently, if undemocratically overseeing Times Square, and co-producing the New Year’s Eve spectacular as their showpiece. The group has done some undeniable good: they’ve conducted years of recovery outreach, job training, street cleanup, and public art installations. But thanks in part to New Year’s Eve and the Alliance that puts it on, a part of New York was lost forever, swept away like the thousands of pounds of confetti that disappear by 8am at the hands of a nearly unseen force that can transform a cityscape with expert – and perhaps terrifying – efficiency.
