The first New Year's Eve celebration in Times Square New Year's Eve took place in 1904.
In 1904, the city decided to throw a New Year's Eve party at One Times Square to commemorate the opening of both the New York Times office building and the city’s first subway line.
Prior to 1904, the New Year's Eve celebration was held at Trinity Church, where revelers would throw bricks in the air to celebrate the New Year.
The first ball dropped on New Year's Eve in Times Square in 1907.
In 1907, the first New Year's Eve ball was dropped from the flagpole at One Times Square.
The iron-and-wood ball was five feet in diameter, weighed 700 pounds, and was adorned with one hundred 25-watt bulbs — measly compared with today's ball.
The ball today is very different than the one used in 1907.
Today, the ball measures 12 feet in diameter and weighs 11,875 pounds. It's covered with 2,688 Waterford Crystal triangles of different sizes and lit with 32,256 Philips Luxeon Rebel LED light bulbs.
The Times Square Alliance plans for the 6-hour event all year long.
Planning for the event starts almost immediately following the prior year’s celebration, Tompkins told us.
About 500 people work on all aspects of the event, not including police officers protecting revelers and the New York City sanitation workers who conduct cleanup.
The confetti is tested before New Year's Eve.
Tompkins told us that they do a test run of the confetti every year on December 29 at 11:00 am from the eighth floor windows of the Times Square Alliance office.
At the live event, the confetti is released by machine from multiple rooftops, but during the test run Tompkins, Straus, and a few other colleagues toss the confetti themselves.
This year the city also celebrated "Good Riddance Day" on December 28.
Inspired by a Latin American tradition in which New Year’s revelers stuffed dolls with objects representing bad memories before setting them on fire, on December 28 more than 2,000 participants wrote their worst memories from 2013 on slips of paper which were carted away and destroyed by Cintas Document Management.
Each year the televised event seems to get more extravagant.
Before the ball drops, there are a series of live music performances and celebrity guest appearances.
Last year Taylor Swift, Carly Rae Jepsen, and PSY performed; this year's lineup includes Miley Cyrus, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, and Blondie, among others.
The whole event runs for six hours.
Revelers can stream the events online with the Times Square Ball app.
Revelers can stream the live event to any Apple or Android mobile device with the Times Square Ball app.
They can also upload their photos onto the app for a chance to have them displayed on the massive Toshiba screen right below the ball.
People around the world can watch the festivities on TV.
Each year, ABC televises the "Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin’ Eve" program.
The program, which still takes the name of its original host of 40 years, will be hosted by Ryan Seacrest and Jenny McCarthy this year. Fergie will be hosting on the West Coast.
Approximately 1 million people will crowd into Times Square for the event.
About 1 million people will fill city streets from Times Square all the way up to Central Park.
People attending the live event are divided into small groups by "party pens," said Straus.
"But what's great is that by the end of the night, you've met everyone in your pen," he said. "You meet the person from Kenya or Japan or California or Colorado, and you've all become friends by the end of the night."
Police officers start letting revelers into the pens before 6:00pm.
Once revelers enter into the pens they’re not allowed to leave and return — even for the restroom.
We asked Straus how people manage that.
“I’ve been doing this for 18 years now, and once the ball goes up at 6, you’re so caught up in the energy and excitement and all the activity going on that by the time midnight rolls around, it’s all gone by so fast,” he says.
There's lots of live music to entertain revelers before the countdown.
“What people don’t see watching on TV at home is that not only are we showcasing all these artists, we’re also rehearsing them," said Straus.
"Revelers are getting performances from 6:00 on from the top artists in the country," said Straus. "There’s so much to see and experience that it goes really quickly.”
At 11:59, the ball is activated and the countdown begins.
At 11:59pm, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Sonia Sotomayor will lead the countdown and push the Waterford crystal button that activates the descent of the New Year's Eve ball.
Glowing, it descends the 70-foot flagpole on top of One Times Square in sixty seconds.
At the stroke of midnight, the ball erupts in a bright display of different colored lights.
Once the ball hits the bottom of the pole at midnight, the number 2014 — the new year — lights up and Times Square is flooded with confetti.
Each numeral in "2014" is seven feet tall and lit by 529 custom Philips LED flood lights that use just 9 watts each. The number 14 is adorned with thirteen multicultural good luck charms to bring good fortune to everyone entering the New Year.
The countdown to the New Year always ends with a kiss at midnight.
Kissing at midnight is a beloved tradition, and hundreds of thousands of revelers in Times Square uphold that tradition.
Nivea, one of the sponsors of the event, hosts an annual Kiss Of The Year contest, in which they present the winning couple with the opportunity to kiss onstage.
More than a ton of confetti is dropped on Times Square.
All of the confetti is handmade by “confetti engineers,” as Straus calls them.
Some of the confetti pieces contain messages in all different languages, says Straus, and visitors can submit messages for the "wishfetti" that is let loose at midnight.
Cleanup after the celebration takes place in a matter of hours.
It's so thorough that New Yorkers and tourists venturing out on January 1 will have a very hard time finding evidence of the event having ever taken place. By 5:00 or 6:00 a.m., cleanup is complete, says Straus.
“It’s all the New York City Sanitation Department,” he says. “The city is really the best partner we have.”