A Theater District crossroads
1501 Broadway in New York City marks the Times Tower site, built 1903 to 1904 for The New York Times, which gave Times Square its name on April 8, 1904, replacing the old Longacre Square. The building's rooftop has hosted the New Year's Eve ball drop since 1907, a tradition that began after the city banned fireworks downtown.
A carriage district became a theater district
Times Square today is one of the busiest intersections in the world, a plaza lit day and night by digital billboards. Around 50 million people visit it each year. Before any of that, this ground had a plainer name and a plainer business. In the 1870s, it was called Longacre Square, after a carriage district in London, and it served the same trade, and William H. Vanderbilt ran the American Horse Exchange here, selling and trading horses and carriages. As the city grew uptown, the square's reputation shifted. Theaters and red-light businesses moved north from the Bowery, and by the 1890s the area had earned a rough nickname: the Thieves Lair. In 1895, theater producer Oscar Hammerstein I built the Olympia Theatre on the square, a complex with three stages meant to revive interest in opera and music. It was the first theater built here, and it opened the door for the Theater District that followed.
The Times tower gave Longacre Square a new name
Between 1903 and 1904, builders raised a new skyscraper at the junction of Broadway and 42nd Street, designed by Cyrus L. W. Eidlitz in a neo-Gothic style, built for Adolph S. Ochs, owner of The New York Times, who wanted a headquarters at the city's new crossroads. Ochs persuaded Mayor George B. McClellan to put a subway station under the building and to rename the square after his paper. On April 8, 1904, Longacre Square became Times Square. Three weeks later, the first electrified advertisement lit up a bank on the corner of 46th Street. The Times moved into its tower in January 1905, bringing both a name and a light show that never really stopped.
A banned fireworks show became the ball drop
Fireworks had marked the first New Year's celebration here in 1904, when Ochs drew 200,000 people to watch the new tower lit up. City officials banned fireworks downtown for safety reasons, so in 1907 Ochs replaced them with something new: a lit ball lowered down a flagpole on the tower's roof. The first ball was iron and wood, studded with 100 light bulbs, and weighed 700 pounds, built by chief electrician Walter F. Palmer and metalworker Jacob Starr. The drop caught on fast and never stopped, through wars, blackouts, and the tower changing hands.
The paper left but its name stayed behind
The paper outgrew its tower within a decade and moved its offices and presses one block west, to 229 West 43rd Street, in 1913. The old building stood anyway, its name stuck to the square for good. Theaters kept arriving through the 1910s and 1920s, following the Olympia's lead, and the district grew into the heart of Broadway. The crossroads drew crowds for elections and World Series scores the same way it now draws them for midnight on December 31.
A photographed kiss marked the war's end
On August 14, 1945, word came that Japan had surrendered and World War II was over. More than 200,000 people flooded into Times Square to celebrate. Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt caught a sailor kissing a nurse in the crowd, a photograph that became one of the most reproduced images of the century. Decades later, researchers still argue over who the two people in the picture actually were, narrowing it to two possible couples but never settling it. The woman later said the moment wasn't a shared kiss at all. She described a stranger grabbing and kissing her without warning.
A newspaper tower became a billboard skin
The old Times Tower changed hands and names over the years, becoming the Allied Chemical Building in the 1960s before settling into its current identity, One Times Square. By the 1990s, the building's interior mattered less than its skin. Owners covered the tower in digital billboards, turning blank walls into some of the most valuable advertising space on earth. The ball drop kept its home on the roof the whole time, a tradition older than the skyscraper's second life as a sign.
LED bulbs made the ball a year-round sight
In 2007, on the ball's hundredth anniversary, the old incandescent bulbs gave way to LEDs, letting the ball shift color and shine brighter than ever. It now sits on permanent display atop One Times Square year-round, not just for one night in December. Musicians have used the square as a backdrop for their own reinventions, too. Prince debuted material from Sign o' the Times amid this kind of spectacle before changing his name entirely. Today the square anchors the Theater District, with Broadway marquees lighting the same streets Hammerstein's Olympia once had to itself.
Digital billboards now cover the buildings where carriage traders and vaudeville producers once worked.
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