Times Square New Year's Eve ball drop: often imitated but never duplicated

Among the most mystifying of American traditions is one of the most famous: the New Year’s Eve ball drop in New York City’s Times Square. Every year, thousands gather to be cordoned in by police, deprived of bodily movement by hordes of tourists and TV crews and crowded by the drunk, the cold and the painfully full of bladder. It is all for one purpose: to gaze up at a well-lit ball as it slowly descends during the last minute of the year.

At the fateful moment when the ball stops, people cheer and kiss and fireworks explode behind skyscrapers, more or less invisible to those blighted souls shuffling around on the ground.

And yet, it could be worse. In the century since the tradition began – initiated by those notorious rabble-rousers at the New York Times; more on them below – the rest of the US has risen up and created strange variations on an already strange tradition.

Some at least retain the use of a spherical object. To celebrate Florida’s citrus industry and love of fluorescence, Miami drops a neon, sunglass-donning representation of an orange, “La Gran Naranja”, from the side of a hotel. Atlanta, Georgia drops a peach in a ceremony which this year will feature Sugar Ray and the “unrivaled lyrical prowess” of Ludacris. Plymouth, Wisconsin, drops an 80lb wedge of cheese. Boise, Idaho, drops a humungous potato. It’s all in honor of the dominant local industries.

Which is where things start to get weird. Some such local-produce-inspired ceremonies make sense: Memphis, Tennessee, lowers a guitar; New Orleans, Louisiana, a pot of gumbo; Las Cruces, Arizona, a 15ft illuminated chile pepper. But Vincennes, Indiana, after hoisting a giant replica watermelon 75ft, then drops 15 actual watermelons on to a platform below, splattering revelers.

Then there are the fish. Eastport, Maine, hosts “The Great Sardine and Maple Leaf Drop”, at which an 8ft sculpture of a fish is lowered. Lake Clinton, Ohio, drops a 20ft walleye. Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, lowers a dead carp named “Lucky” on to a throne then plants a tree over the fish after its burial, all as part of a “Carp Fest” ceremony with (surely) accidental pagan overtones.

Then there are mammals and marsupials. Princess Anne, Maryland, sends a stuffed muskrat named Marshall P Muskrat, in bowtie and top hat, sailing down a zipline through the town. Tallapoosa, Georgia – which was known in the early 1800s as Possum Snout – lowers a stuffed possum named Spencer, encaged in an oblong wreath of holiday lights, from one of the city’s oldest buildings.

Brasstown, in North Carolina, has for most of the past 20 years put a live specimen of America’s only native marsupial in a tinsel-covered box, which it has then lowered and released back into the wild. This year, however, the town will have to use either a dead possum or a stew, due to challenges from the animal protection group Peta.

At least one town opts not for anthropomorphized creatures but an actual person. Key West, Florida, lowers a glowing red slipper carrying a drag queen from the top of a bar. Gary Marion, aka Sushi, has volunteered his services for 17 years.

Then there’s Pennsylvania. Towns in the Keystone state drop beavers; a 100lb Peep; a wooden cow; a giant pickle named Mrs Pickle; a stuffed goat; a steel mushroom; a 100lb stick of bologna; a rhombicuboctahedron; a cigar and a piece of coal that turns into a diamond. Other towns raise a bottle of Yuengling and another cigar, this one held by a lion.

It’s easy to see how the tradition spiraled into absurdity by way of the the proud and happy idiosyncrasies of small-town America, but the whole dropping thing can be traced to the mind of one man: Adolph Ochs, publisher of the New York Times at the turn of the 20th century.

Booming explosions were not enough for Ochs, who brought fireworks to Times Square to celebrate the opening of the newspaper’s new offices. Ochs liked what he saw in devices used by 19th-century mariners to calibrate their chronometers – objects called time balls, which were lowered from observatories at preset hours so navigators could synchronize their tools.

Ochs hired a sign designer to build a ball of iron, wood and 100 light bulbs, which a crew lowered from the flagpole of One Times Square on New Year’s Eve 1907. Americans have been timing their resolutions and inebriated renditions of Auld Lang Syne by the thing ever since.