History
One Times Square was originally completed in 1904 to serve as the new headquarters of The New York Times (which led to its owner Adolph Ochs successfully persuading the city to name the area Times Square). However, less than ten years after it moved to One Times Square, the Times moved its corporate headquarters to The New York Times Building on 229 West 43rd Street, in 1913. The Times retained a classified advertising branch office in the building until it sold the Times Tower in 1961. The Times is now headquartered in the New York Times Building on nearby Eighth Avenue.
To help advertise the new headquarters, the Times held a New Year's Eve event on December 31, 1903, welcoming the year of 1904 with a fireworks display set off from its roof at midnight. The event was a success, attracting 200,000 spectators, and was continued annually until 1907. For 1908, the display was replaced with what New York Times owner Adolph Ochs believed would be a more spectacular event—the lowering of a lit ball down the building's flagpole at midnight, influenced by the practice of lowering a time ball to mark a certain hour of the day. Even after the New York Times left the building, the "ball drop" is still held at the building to this day, attracting nearly a million spectators yearly, and celebrating its centennial in 2008.
In 1928, the famous electric news ticker display near the base of the building was first used to announce the results of the US presidential election of 1928. Spanning the base of the entire building, the sign was originally made of 14,800 lamps. The ticker was dark between 1975 and 1980, when Newsday sponsored the revival of the display. The ticker is now sponsored by Dow Jones, the parent of The Wall Street Journal.
During World War II in the early 1940s, the ball lowering was stopped for two years due to wartime blackouts and energy conservation. A celebration was still held, but the crowds observed a minute of silence for the wartime efforts.
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“The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)