A Marathon of Midnights in Times Square
By Christopher Reardon

Sometime back in the 80's, Peter Kohlmann and his wife decided to celebrate New Year's Eve with a couple hundred thousand strangers. Late in the evening, they made their way to Times Square, melted into the crowd and began to wait. Kohlmann, who was an aide to Mayor Edward I. Koch at the time, remembers little else about the event, but then there was only so much to remember.

"At midnight the ball came down, everyone cheered and 10 minutes later they went home," he recalled one day last month. "That's about all there was to it."

It's safe to say nobody will find this year's festivities so rudimentary, and Kohlmann is a primary reason. As the executive producer of "Times Square 2000, the Global Celebration at the Crossroads of the World," he is betting the farm to turn a familiar sight into a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle. The 26-hour extravaganza, estimated to cost at least $7 million, is arguably the most daunting event ever planned in New York City, a double wager in theatrical production and crowd control.

The cast and crew number nearly 1,000, and there is no rehearsal. The total audience clogging midtown is expected to reach 1.5 million, prompting one of the largest police details in the city's history. (More than 1 billion television viewers are anticipated.) What's more, the timing has made it necessary to prepare contingency plans for a winter storm or a global computer meltdown.

"You can't go to a textbook and figure this out," said Kohlmann, who serves as vice president for marketing and special events at the Times Square Business Improvement District. "You have to rely on intuition and sensitivity to what the crowd is going to be feeling."

Geoff Puckett, the creative producer for this year's gala, likens it to a pagan festival with high-tech trimmings. Starting at six in the morning, huge video screens mounted throughout the theater district will show distant crowds greeting the new year in each of the world's time zones. Dancers will perform on a central stage as multi-channel music fills the air and confetti showers the streets. Meanwhile, a cavalcade of giant puppets built by Michael Curry will try to evoke the splendor of the natural world and the epic span of civilization.

The climax comes at midnight, of course, but this year a new Waterford crystal ball, activated by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and a surprise guest, will descend the flagpole atop One Times Square. And unlike the first time Kohlmann rang in the new year there, the show will carry on until the Midway Islands follow the rest of the world into the 21st century.

"Times Square 2000" is not the biggest New Year's Eve celebration -- after all, four million revelers are expected to gather on the beaches in Rio de Janeiro -- but it is a telling one. Like Olympic ceremonies and Super Bowl halftime shows, it reflects a mass-media imperative to keep outdoing itself. At the same time it seeks to transcend its own tradition and, like Napoleon's coronation or the ticker-tape parade for the first men to walk on the moon, mark a singular historical moment.

Some New Yorkers are less enthusiastic about the event. "I suspect this is just going to be a wink and a nod and a flash and it's gone," said the historian Mike Wallace, who won a Pulitzer Prize this year for "Gotham, a History of New York City to 1898," which he wrote with Edwin G. Burrows. "It's an ersatz thing, a number clicking over."

The enormous festivals that marked the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the laying of the Atlantic Cable in 1858 sprang from a very different source, Wallace said. "In those cases there was a palpable sense of accomplishment, and you could see the city's tremendous economic engines revving up."

Burrows also anticipates a hollow ritual, but he marvels at its appeal. "It's amazing that people still do that in a media age," he said, "that there are still places where people like to gather." The real puzzle is where to fit them all. This year, streets will be [close]d as far north as Columbus Circle and as far south as Madison Square Garden. Latecomers who don't have a direct view will be able to watch the events unfold on the outsize video screens.

Such a spectacle was unthinkable a decade or two ago, when rowdy throngs choked the streets. But the police have since mastered the technique of shepherding spectators into neat pens, four per block, and keeping the emergency lanes clear. While the number of arrests has plummeted -- only four people were charged last year for disorderly conduct -- the average turnout has doubled to half a million, 85 percent of them out-of-towners.

Still, there is something incongruous and inhibiting about the idea of making merry in the presence of thousands of police officers. As Wallace and Burrows point out in "Gotham," New Year's Eve has historically been a time of plebeian revelry, when spontaneous packs known as "calithumpian bands" ran through the streets beating on pans and hollering into the night.

Letting people vent social tensions has been the impulse for many officially sanctioned spectacles as well, from Dionysian festivals in ancient Greece to Carnival in Rio. In many cases, participants were encouraged to flout cultural norms through cross-dressing, ritual madness or frenzied dancing. O F course, the observance of such customs was one factor that led area businesses and property owners, including The New York Times Company, to establish the Times Square Business Improvement District (BID) in 1992. With an annual budget of $8 million, the BID is a nonprofit organization that seeks to spruce up the neighborhood by deploying extra sanitation and security crews. It also produces annual events like Broadway on Broadway, a one-day musical showcase that takes place today at noon, and the New Year's Eve celebration.

Planning for the millennial gala began in 1994, when the BID invited suggestions for how to mark the occasion. The winning idea came from a Belgian student and four Americans -- a mother, a molecular biologist, a software programmer and a news producer -- who each proposed a marathon of midnights using live video links to other time zones.

Turning that rough concept into a viable production has not been easy, though. While offering a ready-made rhythmic structure, with hourly highs and intermediate lows, it also left some gaping holes to fill. The size of the audience and the location, a famously busy thoroughfare, didn't make things any simpler.

"This is, without a doubt, one of the most bizarre venues I've ever worked in," said Puckett, 41, whose résumé lists numerous Superbowls, Olympics and Disney productions.

The job of solving these quandaries fell to Kohlmann, who can seem an unlikely impresario for such a splashy event. Tall and trim at age 46, he is more deliberate than Dionysian. But his cautious reserve plays well with the city officials, building owners and business managers whose consent he needs to go ahead with the show.

His track record also inspires their confidence. In 1986 he served as Mayor Koch's liaison with the planners of the three-day celebration of the Statue of Liberty's centennial, which drew two million people. A year later he led the city's bicentennial salute to the Constitution, then orchestrated Earth Day in 1990, which drew 750,000 to Central Park, and a ticker-tape parade for Gulf war veterans in 1991. In 1992 he joined the newly formed Times Square BID, which had just taken over the annual New Year's Eve celebration from the owners of One Times Square.

Kohlmann set out to restore some cultural cachet to the event, whose television ratings were in free fall. To make it "more telegenic and more exciting," he brought in Treb Heining, 45, a California balloon and confetti artist who had worked on the Gulf war parade. Then he added a light show, refurbished the ball (which had been in use since 1907) and started offering a free video feed to broadcasters around the world. "Almost every year we've introduced a new element," he said. "But we don't want to stray too far from the tradition. I've always felt this thing is about the crowd, the ball and the space."

Even so, the millennium clearly called for something special. Casting about for reliable talent, he assembled a team that was comfortable straddling the line between art and entertainment. After ruling out costly celebrities and dangerous stunts, they held a series of brainstorming sessions to drum up scenarios for the event. Eventually, Puckett said, they agreed on a sequence of hourly themes, one for each time zone, and sets of images evoking indigenous "animals, architecture, metaphors, colors, textures and moods."

Last year Puckett tried out a prototype of Father Time that was roughly the size of a city bus; nine puppeteers raised it aloft with long fiberglass poles and paraded through the 12-foot-wide emergency lane. There was plenty for photographers to capture. But this year, with video broadcasts coming and going for 24 hours straight, "Times Square 2000" plans to go to the extreme; where the audience see all.

With 21 cameras, David Stern, the video producer, will edit two shows at once: one for broadcasters and the Internet, and one for the video screens around Times Square. The prospect of all that improvising thrills him. "That's what I do for a living," he said. "I watch a lot of monitors and I make split-second decisions. It's live editing, and it's a lot of fun."

Lately Puckett has been compiling a script with split-second timing references that will be synchronized with the atomic clock in Colorado. But he emphasized that it would be a story told through images, not words. There will be no host and no singers. The musical score, which will play over a wireless, 16-channel system, includes many vocal tracks, but few are in English.

One advantage of visual pageantry is its appeal to international viewers, but Puckett said it was primarily an esthetic choice harking back to customs that predate the information age.

"The concept of festival is a lost art in America," said Puckett, whose research took him to see ceremonial bonfires in Valencia, Spain, ice-sculpture contests in Alaska and other quirky rituals. "We wanted to get off the beaten path."

Some time zones will occasion more fanfare than others. One of the louder flourishes will come at 6 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, when midnight arrives in 41 countries in Africa and Europe. Puckett plans to set the mood and modulate the energy level of the crowd by shifting attention from the stage to the street or the video screens, or cutting from one song to another. "You want them to feel they've experienced it all," he said, "without sending them into a complete frenzy."

"There was a lot of concern last year that the music might make the audience more active," he said. "But in fact they were less inclined to do their own thing. The music brought people together around a shared experience."

Periodically, Heining and his rooftop crew will give the audience things to do, like catch confetti. Along with 3,000 to 4,000 pounds of brightly colored tissue paper, he said, they will scatter foam or paper maple leaves and butterflies over the crowd as mementos.

"We're trying to make New Year's Eve a little gentler," said Kohlmann. "It's an important marketing tool, a way to project the image of Times Square as a fun and exciting place." A short while later, in his corner office overlooking Times Square, Kohlmann reached to his bookshelf and pulled down a biography of P. T. Barnum. Leafing through it, he confessed an affinity with the legendary showman. But while he shares Barnum's desire to regale the masses, he is not a man who speaks in superlatives. Rather than promising the greatest show on earth, he opts for the soft sell of elliptical understatement.

"We're not claiming to be anything more than a Times Square New Year's Eve."