New Beginning

Times Square Ball (Anthony Quintano / Wikimedia Commons)

"Every December, the eyes of the world are drawn to New York City, where a glittering crystal ball in Midtown Manhattan marks a communal chance for a new beginning."
Michael Gold, The New York Times

New Year's Day

Times Square subway station

"The essential trend of New Year's Day in Manhattan is philosophical and psychological. The average New Yorker wakes up with the positive feeling that a squadron of tiny air planes is racing around a course roughly marked off by the back of the head and the pit of the stomach; he concocts a mixture calculated to tone down the constant droning of the motors of the said air planes, and then he ponders on the strange custom that sends an ordinarily civilized population into bacchanalian hysteria on the night of December 31 of each year."
L.S.B. Shapiro, The Montreal Gazette

New Year's Eve in Times Square

New Year's Eve Centennial Ball

"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."

Catherine Price, 101 Places Not to See Before You Die

New Year's Day in New York

New Year's Eve Centennial Ball

"New Year's Day in New York is one of the best days of our western year. It is an Independence day on which we rejoice to acknowledge our mutual dependence on one another -- a sort of universal birthday, and everybody's fête."
Putnam's Monthly, Volume 9

New York on New Year's Eve

"Nothing beats New York on New Year's Eve."
Stan Harris (Robert DeNiro), New Year's Eve

New Year's Day

42nd Street Subway Station

"New Year's Day in New York is not the less one of the cheerfullest and most humanising celebrations extant among a noble, but perverse people, who have repudiated the greater part of the traditional observances to which Europeans pin a reverent and affectionate faith.  I wish --abating the plethoric eating and drinking-- that it were always New Year's Day in New York, and in the whole of this magnificent empire of Democracy turned crazy."
George Augustus Henry Sala, My Diary in America in the Midst of War

New Year's Eve

"The overrated free calendar year begins and ends with a gathering of thousand of non-New Yorkers, most of whose primary motivation in life is to get on television. All the good sidelines spots in Times Square are long gone by dusk. Add the extra buzz kills of high security, crushing crowds, brutal cold, and a ban on booze, and that's all the excuse you need to say at home with the remote control, marveling at how much younger Dick Clark looks now than he did in his '50s heyday."
Frommer's New York City for Free & Dirt Cheap