Times Square is the focal point of New Years Eve in the City and throughout the country. This year the New Years Eve celebration in Times Square is celebrating its 100th anniversary; in 1907, the inaugural event commemorated the opening of the new headquarters of The New York Times. The newspaper’s owner, German Jewish immigrant Alfred Ochs, had successfully lobbied the city to rename Longacre Square, the district surrounding his paper’s new home, in honor of the famous publication. The impressive Times Tower, built on a small triangle of land at the intersection of 7th Avenue, Broadway and 42nd Street, was at the time Manhattan’s second-tallest building.

The New York Times remenisces on that New Years Eve a century ago: “And on Dec. 31, 1907, for the first time, they did something that hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers will do on Monday night: They celebrated the passing of ’07 into ’08 by watching an illuminated sphere falling from the sky. But that first “electric ball,” as The New York Times referred to it, was dazzling enough to the people who poured into Times Square to see it. After 10 p.m., when the theaters let out, men in silk hats and women in furs swelled the crowd further. “An acrobat could hardly have managed to fall down for a wager, so tightly did the people hold each other up,” The New York Evening Sun reported the next day.”

360vr Studio has some fantastic panoramic images of Times Square on New Years Eve 2006-07, but keep in mind that these QuicktimeVR panoramic images can load slowly on older computers.