101 Places Not to See Before You Die - Catherine Price [21]
This doesn’t deter visitors—with up to one thousand guests per night, Organ Pipe leads the national parks in the number of backcountry stays. Granted, most of those visitors have entered the United States illegally through the park’s thirty-one-mile border with Mexico (park rangers advise what to do if you come across people in distress asking for food and water). But if they’re willing to deal with the desert’s 116-degree summer heat, venomous snakes, spiders, scorpions, centipedes, and, of course, drug traffickers, perhaps it’s only fair to let them stay the night.
Chapter 27
Times Square on New Year’s Eve
There are only two circumstances where a dropping ball can qualify as a noteworthy event: male adolescence and New Year’s Eve in Times Square. Having had no personal experience with the first, I will instead skip to the second and say that if you value your sanity, your extremities, and your bladder, you should find a different place to celebrate the new year.
The tradition goes back to 1904, when Adolph S. Ochs, owner of the New York Times, threw a party on New Year’s Eve to celebrate the opening of the newspaper’s headquarters at what is now One Times Square. With an all-day street festival and a thrilling fireworks display, Ochs’s party was so successful that it quickly became New York’s premier New Year’s Eve party.
The New Year’s ball didn’t come into play till 1907, however, when Ochs commissioned a 700-pound iron-and-wood ball with one hundred 25-watt lightbulbs to be lowered from the tower’s flagpole to celebrate 1908. Since then it’s been replaced several times—1920 introduced a 400-pound ball made of wrought iron; 1955 saw the debut of a 150-pound aluminum sphere. In 1980, red lightbulbs and a stem turned the ball into an apple for the “I Love New York” marketing campaign, and the millennium celebration was graced by a ball made from Waterford Crystal. In 2009, the co-organizers of the celebration unveiled the latest ball: twelve feet in diameter, it’s covered in crystals and more than thirty-two thousand LEDs. At around six tons, it puts previous balls to shame.
But even a six-ton ball is not enough to justify spending your New Year’s Eve in the Square. Back in the good old days, drunken revelers packed themselves behind wooden barriers, partied their hearts out, and then hopped back on the Long Island Railroad. Nowadays the event is heavily guarded by the NYPD, with each partygoer treated as a possible member of Al Qaeda. Backpacks and large bags are forbidden, and every would-be reveler has to pass through a metal detector before being allowed into the Square.
Once inside (and get there early, since people start arriving by midday), you’re stuck: in order to control the crowd and prevent people from pressing to the front, the police herd visitors into metal pens, which they’re not allowed to leave until the clock strikes twelve. If you do desert your fellow livestock partygoers, don’t expect to get back to your original spot—by midnight, the streets are packed to Penn Station, eight blocks away.
And trust me when I say you’ll have plenty of reasons to leave. First, it’s freezing. January in New York is cold, and midnight in January in New York is even colder. The event organizers recommend dressing in heavy layers, but I’d go a step further and suggest wearing everything you own.
It’d be nice if you could warm up with a cup of soup, but don’t get your hopes up: food vendors aren’t allowed in the Square on New Year’s Eve. So unless you packed your pockets with Clif Bars or feel like paying a cover charge at a restaurant (and thus losing your place in the pen), you’re going to be ringing in the new year on an empty stomach.
You’re also going to be celebrating it sober—at the world’s most famous New Year’s party, no alcohol is allowed. Some people choose to booze it up ahead