{"id":362140,"date":"2026-10-01T20:15:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-01T20:15:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/362140\/"},"modified":"2026-10-01T20:15:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T20:15:10","slug":"times-squares-ball-drop-tower-fills-with-immersive-spaces","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/362140\/","title":{"rendered":"Times Square\u2019s Ball-Drop Tower Fills With Immersive Spaces"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: One Times Square, Library of Congress\n <\/p>\n

Every December 31, hundreds of thousands of people gather for hours in the cold to stare at One Times Square and wait for a glittering ball to slide down its flagpole. On every other day of the year, tens of thousands more who work in the neighborhood\u2019s theaters and hotels, at the New York Times, Reuters, Olive Garden, or any of the other area\u2019s many employers, walk back and forth in front of the 25-story tower. Yet I suspect that if you asked any one of them to close their eyes and describe that narrow wedge of a building, they\u2019d be stumped. For much of the last century, the structure marking Manhattan\u2019s most celebrated pinch point at the southern edge of Times Square<\/a> has lurked, vacant and invisible, behind a patchwork of brilliant screens. Now, finally, Jamestown, which has owned it for nearly three decades, has hit on a strategy for making the square footage earn its keep: Create an indoor simulacrum of the outdoor simulacrum that is Times Square.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n One Times Square on a regular day.
\n Photo: Charly Triballeau\/AFP\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n

For decades, One Times Square has suffered from a basic problem: Its cramped triangular floorplates function poorly as office space \u2014 by the time you\u2019ve packed in the requisite elevators, stairways, air ducts, plumbing, and insulation, you\u2019re left with scant room to maneuver. Billboards attached to the exterior generate plenty of revenue and add to the square\u2019s famous radiance, but they keep the interiors cryptlike. And so Jamestown has filled it with play spaces<\/a> rather than workspaces. Among the new attractions is a four-story, full-immersion, sugary overload called iCandy Experience. The neighborhood already had a Sugar Factory, Hershey\u2019s Chocolate World, and M&M\u2019s New York, all destinations conceived to make children (and sweet-toothed adults) overexcited even before they\u2019ve so much as crinkled a wrapper. The latest Experience tries to outdo all precedents by letting kids scamper around a toy-size city, complete with fire truck, construction site, creepy crypt, subway platform, and other urban wonders \u2014 plus bin after bin of treats, all waiting to be scooped out by little fists. My teeth ached and my pulse raced just walking into this everyday Halloween.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n ICandy offers four floors of candy-themed experiences set in New York environments \u2014 along with troughs of candy.
\n Photo: One Times Square\n <\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the two-level in-and-out wedding venue<\/a>, which is a cross between City Hall and Las Vegas: For $600 (higher than the $25 fee at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau on Worth Street, but still a relative bargain), couples can march through a facility decorated in bureaucratic basic, exchange vows in a Valentine\u2019s-red chapel, pose on a balcony with the electroluminescent heart of midtown at their shoulders, and even have their photos broadcast on a multistory screen. The upshot is that you can get married in the heart of New York, New York, and make it look like you got married at Vegas\u2019s New York\u2013New York Hotel & Casino.<\/p>\n

Within this awkward relic of several other ages, New York\u2019s past gets fetishized, chopped up, and whirled together into digestible entertainment. One Times Square does have a genuinely rich story. Built in 1904 as the headquarters for the New York Times, then the city\u2019s fourth most widely read newspaper, the skinny, stone-faced Italianate tower announced its arrival with a display of New Year\u2019s Eve fireworks. When those were banned from midtown Manhattan a few years later, the Times publisher Adolph Ochs replaced them with a ball drop, an echo of the devices used to synchronize clocks at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, and, more immediately, at the Western Union building on lower Broadway. The Times soon outgrew its home, which by then had begun to earn its status as a platform for display. The newsroom and operations moved to the paper\u2019s annex on West 43rd Street; the electric news crawl, known as the \u201czipper,\u201d wrapped One Times Square starting in 1928.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n The square\u2019s namesake, the New York Times Building, in 1948.
\n Photo: Bettmann Archive\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n

\"Tower <\/p>\n

\n Full-length view of the Allied Chemical Tower reduced to its steel framework during renovation, around 1960.
\n Photo: Hulton Archive\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n

\"Allied <\/p>\n

\n The Allied Chemical Tower in 1965.
\n Photo: F. Roy Kemp\/BIPs\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n

The tower\u2019s fortunes waxed and waned until Allied Chemical bought it in 1963, stripped off the textured brick and terra-cotta fa\u00e7ade, and replaced it with jet-age sleek white panels. But a cosmetic Chemical peel didn\u2019t solve the question of how to use the space;\u00a0the company set aside a chunk of it for a three-floor public showroom of industrial innovations<\/a>. Eventually, the interior fell largely vacant and the exterior acquired a second skin of billboards, effectively converting it into a scaffolding for ads. One of New York\u2019s most celebrated office buildings turned into a Hollywood-backlot version of itself.<\/p>\n

In its latest incarnation, designed by the firm S9, the curtain wall has darkened and the electronic billboards brightened, so that the tower resembles a TV mount, more apparatus than architecture. That\u2019s apt because the technological stroke that\u2019s allowed Jamestown to revive One Times Square\u2019s interiors is the evolution of digital screens that can slink along curving walls and respond to touch. The result is Times Travel, a purportedly immersive journey through the history of Times Square and the New Year\u2019s Eve Ball that culminates in a view of the IRL city. It\u2019s a backward-looking highish-tech version of Allied Chemical\u2019s futuristic exhibition. (The building also contains one genuine urban innovation: a whole floor of free public bathrooms.)<\/p>\n

An immersive \u201ctaxi ride\u201d through the decades winds up in today\u2019s Times Square.<\/p>\n

The glass-walled catwalk with the missing floor gets visitors simultaneously in and above Times Square. <\/p>\n

Visitors board a virtual dirigible flight through Depression-era Manhattan.<\/p>\n

And just above is the real New Year\u2019s Eve ball, poised for its next appearance on screens around the world. (A premium $155 ticket will get you within range for a close-up photo.)<\/p>\n

\n Photographs by One Times Square\/Carrington Spires, One Times Square, Alexi Rosenfeld\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n

Once past the lobby, ticket holders file along a snaking path, passing a gauntlet of screens, then take an elevator up to a series of rooms filled with \u2026 more screens. Along the way, photos of Ye Olde Manhattan are sprinkled amid \u201chistorical\u201d recreations that were produced a few years before the advent of AI hyperrealism and so look quaintly cartoonish. Crowds in an anachronistic fashion mashup of 1950s fedoras, 1940s newsboy caps, and 1960s pillbox hats celebrate some undefined New Year\u2019s Eve of yore. Take a seat and a cabbie doing an impression of a chatty Travis Bickle speeds you through various decades and phases of brightness, from dim antiquity through Judy Garland at the Palace Theater and the XXX days (a digital hooker in hot pants makes an onscreen cameo), all the way up to the ultra-high-res dazzle of the all-glass present. Pass into one screening chamber and behold an animated loop of construction workers clambering, helmet- and harness-free, atop the steel skeleton of the building you\u2019re standing in. Recorded actors voice the avatars in a range of immigrant accents \u2014 Irish, German, Jamaican \u2014 so sketchy they border on thespian malpractice. After that, visitors file out and gain even more virtual altitude, boarding a dirigible that skims an ancient version of the skyline.<\/p>\n

The whole sequence of make-believe is the $44-a-pop drumroll before the main show. You emerge onto a deck with a view that looks so uncannily realistic that it takes a minute to recognize that it\u2019s \u2026 real. The 17th-floor roof terrace, with a canopy above, a cutout in the concrete slab and catwalks all around, can\u2019t compete with other observation decks for sheer loftiness. Its selling point is that it gets you into the city at Batman level, rather than far above it. From here, you can read the matrix of streets and skyscrapers \u2014 Art Deco ziggurats, mansard-roofed Beaux-Arts palais, mid-century glass-skinned blocks \u2014 as a vivid simulation, especially since you\u2019re looking at them through clear glass walls. For extra kicks, one of the paths around the edge is see-through, too, so you can look past your shoes onto the heads of passers-by 200 feet below.\u00a0And just above is the real New Year\u2019s Eve ball, poised for its next appearance on screens around the world.<\/p>\n

At the end of all that immersiveness, exiting out onto the physical street to join the crowds of shuffling tourists and fend off sullen Elmos makes Times Square feel like the soul of authenticity. The transition back to reality makes me wonder who would bother making the journey to Manhattan only to opt for a Times Square\u2013in-a-bottle attraction. But that ticketed microcosm fabricated out of sugar and pixels does weirdly distill the spirit of a place that seems constantly to be mocking itself for profit. The ethos of these few blocks, with all their overpriced swag and made-in-China Americana, is cheesiness. Jamestown has simply brought it all indoors. So what if it\u2019s knockoffs all the way down?<\/p>\n

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