Before the Ball Dropped: Celebrating New Year's Eve in 19th Century New York City at Trinity Church

 On December 31, 1907 editor of the New York Times Alfred Ochs organized a New Year’s Eve celebration in front of his newspaper’s renowned headquarters at Times Square in midtown Manhattan.

Thousands gathered that frigid winter’s night to watch a ball drop down a specially designed flagpole at 11:59 p.m. to welcome in the new year of 1908.  

Millions of people from around the world have gathered at almost exactly that same spot every year for one-hundred and fifteen years to do almost exactly the same thing ever since.

Though the ball itself has been updated many times over the course of the last century in accordance with advances in lighting technology-- the original ball was made of wood and iron and was covered in incandescent filament “Edison”light bulbs, and the current ball that will be dropped to welcome in 2023 in front of an estimated 1.1 million people is made entirely from Waterford Crystal and is covered in  over 32,000 LED lights--the actual event of watching a ball drop from atop a large flagpole located in Times Square in  New York City to welcome in the new year, has remained largely unchanged since New Year’s Eve 1907.  

Even prior to that first seminal ball drop in 1907/08 New Yorkers had been gathering at Times Square to witness a spectacular fireworks show, paid for by Alfred Ochs and the New York Times, to welcome in the new year since 1904.  

However, before Times Square became the world’s Mecca of welcoming in the new year, New Yorker’s had, for over one-hundred years since the dawn of the 19th century at least (and maybe even way earlier) celebrated New Year’s Eve and the start of a new year in a much more serious, some would even say sentimental, but just as celebratory way--by ringing church bells from atop the belfry of Manhattan’s most well known and largest Episcopal 19th century church!

Before the dawn of the twentieth century, crowds numbering in the tens of thousands, would gather in front of Trinity Church on Broadway and Wall Street to listen to the church’s bells, “[R]inging out of the old year and ringing in of the new year at Trinity Church.” (https://trinitywallstreet.org/stories-news/new-years-old-new-york )

According to the same article, it is entirely possible that the ringing of church bells at Trinity Church to ring out the old year, and ring in the new year at exactly midnight on New Year’s Eve, had been an ongoing tradition in old New York City since at least 1698, when the first belfry was originally installed atop a large Episcopal Church located on the corner of Broadway and Wall Street!

Trinity Church

What is known to history for certain is that in the Trinity Church archives a record dating back to January 12, 1801 contains an accounting entry which states that, “Eight dollars be paid to persons who rang the bells in on New Year’s Day.”

If nothing else, the passage quoted above is historical proof that New Yorkers, at least from the dawn of the 19th century onward, welcomed in the New Year with the sound of Trinity’s church bells ringing.

However, even until the middle of the 1800’s most people in New York City still seemed to have celebrated the new year by going to church services and by calling on friends and family for formal dinners, in much the same way that many God-fearing New Yorker’s of the pre-industrial age would have celebrated Christmas Day or even Easter.  However, as the city’s population grew and as the Industrial Revolution began to take over Manhattan and make New York City more urbanized, and even blue-collar if you will, all of that was about to change sometime around the middle of the nineteenth century.

In the year 1846 a new Trinity Church, the third incarnation of such a building, containing a new and larger belfry was built on the site of the original church, which dated back to 1697.  

 This new church building, which opened on May 1, 1846 replaced the second Trinity Church built on the same site after the first building originally constructed in 1697 had been destroyed by the Great New York City fire of 1776 that many suspected of having been set by saboteurs who had been part of the retreating Continental Army during the American Revolution.  This third building, located in lower Manhattan at 75 Broadway, is the one that still stands to this very day.  From 1846 until 1869 Trinity Church was the tallest building in the United States and it was the tallest building in New York City until 1890 when construction of the New York World building was completed.

This new Trinity Church built in 1846 contained a belfry that housed bells capable of producing a full octave, or a range of eight musical notes to the best of my understanding, which enabled the bells of Trinity Church to be capable of ringing out entire songs during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Just prior to the onset of the American Civil War, ringing in the New Year at Trinity Church in lower Manhattan was in full swing and an article the New York Herald (the New York Times rival newspaper by the way) described the scene on New Year’s Eve 1860 at Trinity Church thus:

“There were numerous watchers in and about old Trinity at the mystic hour (midnight)...lingering there to hear the first thrilling peal of the clattering bells in the iron tongued farewell to the dying year..and presently it came…giving the world to know that there would be one quarter of an hour ‘ere the year 1860 would be drawn into the ever moving stream of ages.”

However, it would be wrong for us to think that our fellow Americans from over 160 years ago thought of New Year’s Eve as only a somber, prayerful time that should be dedicated solely to God and reflection and not to partying.  The same article in the New York Herald goes on to state:

“As the cold gusts of midnight sighed through the leafless trees and over the cold graves of the forgotten dead, their floated in from the high church tower the stirring music of eight church bells…making the air redolent with the music of harmony.  This was followed by ‘Hail Columbia’ and ‘Yankee Doodle’.

Hail Columbia?  Yankee Doodle?  These are certainly not songs in the Christian canon of hymns.  Clearly, Americans in the early republic thought not only of New Year’s Eve as a time to party, but it would appear from the historical record, as if Americans in general and New Yorker’s in particular, thought of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day as patriotic holidays somewhat akin to Independence Day, or more accurately still, to modern day American interpretations of Memorial Day and Labor Day.

Within fifteen years, by 1875, it was reported in The New York Times regarding the Trinity Church New Year’s Eve celebration which had begun way back when in 1698 as a simple ringing of bells to welcome in the first of January that, “An immense throng could be seen choking Broadway for blocks and extremely far down into Wall Street.”

It would appear that by the 1870’s due to the City’s rapid and unprecedented growth that New Year’s Eve, as even Dick Clark (or Ryan Seacrest for that matter!) would have recognized it, had been born outside of Trinity Church in lower Manhattan.

But within a decade--by the late 1880’s as New Year’s Eve crowds in the environs around Trinity Church grew ever larger, more riotous and drunken--things began to take a turn for the worse.

In 1876 according to https://trinitywallsteet.org the New York Times had described the crowds gathered around Trinity Church as, “[T]housands of men, women and children representing all classes of New York society…quietly enjoying the glorious night and the ringing of the bells.”  But within a decade, by 1885, the same newspaper told of crowds that, “Blocked the sidewalks…straggled through the streets and shoved and pushed each other recklessly.”  The 1885 edition of the New Year’s Day New York Times also made reference to a, “Horrible din…largely caused by cheap tin horns.”

Finally, by 1893 the New Year’s Eve celebrations to ring in the new year in front of Trinity Church were canceled altogether by the church’s rector the Reverend Dr. Morgan Dix, who deemed that the partying had become too out of control and unchristian to continue.  For the first time in one-hundred and ninety-five years the peeling of the bells starting at midnight on New Year’s Eve was heard no more.

As it turned out, though the bells remained silent to welcome in the New Year of 1894, a raucous and uproarious crowd numbering in the thousands gathered in front of Trinity Church nonetheless.  It would seem that when the crowd learned that the bells were not to be rung at midnight, possibly fueled by both anger and whiskey, many of them marched to the Revered Dix’s nearby home to demand answers.

The Reverend Dr. Morgan Dix wrote the next night in his diary that, “People gathered at my house wild about the subject.”  The Times reported that, “Some ragamuffins decided to bring the party to the Reverend’s house on New Year’s Eve.”

There was such an uproar over the canceling of the ringing of the bells at Trinity Church to welcome in the New Year that the Reverend eventually relented and allowed the bells to be rung to usher in 1895 and all subsequent years, “as long as the crowds did not become too disorderly,” in the Reverend’s words.  Having over 400 New York City police officers in attendance from 1895 onwards probably helped keep things under control as well as the Reverend Dix’s admonition.

It wasn’t until the early twentieth century, beginning in 1904 when the first New Year’s Eve celebration at Times Square, a fireworks show was held promptly at midnight, that the tradition of gathering at Trinity Church to hear the church bells ring to welcome in the New Year slowly began to die out.

By the time the first ball dropped in 1908 the bells of Trinity Church could hardly be heard at all on New Year’s Eve…