Who Makes the Ball Drop on New Year's Eve? [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

During a recent lunch with my friend Jen, we got to talking about the holidays and other matters when she casually mentioned that in the early days of the last century, her great uncle, Jacob Starr, invented the ball that drops every year in Times Square. Jen knew some, but not all, of the details around Starr, a relative of whom she is understandably quite proud.

My family's New Year's Eve tradition was to go to a kid-friendly movie (The Sound of Music comes to mind) and upon returning home have dinner and later watch the ball drop to welcome the new year. These days billions of people around the world watch the spectacle on television and thousands brave the cold in Times Square to watch in person. While I've marvelled at the Times Square ball, I've never wondered about how it was made and by whom.

Who was the Jacob Starr who had such an outsized influence on our culture and the urban landscape of New York City? 

It didn’t take much more than a quick on-line search to find out more about this gifted man.

The New York Times started the modern-day tradition of dropping a ball on a pole to mark the beginning of the new year. Fireworks displays had already been drawing crowds to Times Square but a ban of such pyrotechnics in 1907 put an end to that practice.

To continue to attract visitors to Times Square, New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs commissioned Jewish-Ukrainian immigrant and metalworker Jacob Starr to create an illuminated iron and wood ball to be lowered from the flagpole of the Times Tower. The first ball-drop in Times Square took place at the turn of the year from 1907 to 1908. It was a huge success.

Jacob Starr was quite a remarkable person and it’s understandable that my friend Jen would be proud to be his relative. He came to the United States from the Ukraine--a dangerous place for Jews--in 1897 and in 1903 went to work at a small New York sign company founded by Benjamin Strauss. While occupied with menial tasks during the day, he attended Cooper Union, the highly competitive tuition-free college in lower Manhattan that offers a world-class education in art, architecture and engineering. Starr graduated with a degree in electrical engineering. Starr, along with his partner Strauss came to be known as the “lamplighters of Broadway” for the many spectacular signs atop buildings in the Great White Way. Jacob Strauss owned the company since 1931 until his death. The Artkraft archive resides at the New York Public Library and makes for fascinating reading. Artkraft designed and built some of the most memorable signs in New York City--the fizzing Coca Cola sign, the painted Camel cigarette sign that blew smoke rings, and hundreds of glittering billboards, theater marquees and illuminated signs that symbolize New York City to visitors from around the world. The neon landscape of Times Square is almost entirely the handiwork of the Artkraft Strauss Sign Corporation.

This year, when you join the billions of people who count down the final seconds of 2024 while watching the famous Ball-drop, remember that it was created by a Jewish immigrant with humble beginnings whose genius found its full expression in the USA.

--sdl

Comments

[Cindy Hochman]

Great article. But I believe Year's has an apostrophe in it (New Year's Eve).

[Angela Ball]

Stacey, I am so happy to now know about Jacob Starr. Thank you for a fascinating article!