Metro

From bombs to ball drops, the history of New Year’s Eve in Times Square

If the malfunctioning “18” sign isn’t fixed by Sunday night, the Times Square New Year’s Eve celebrations could bomb out — and it wouldn’t be the first time!

On Dec. 31, 1904, when Big Apple revelers rang in the new year with a literal bang — a dynamite blast from the top of One Times Square, then newly owned by The New York Times — fiery ashes rained down on the crowd, eventually prompting the NYPD to ban explosives and pushing the paper to create a crowd-pleaser with less potential for disaster.

The publisher’s idea: Lower a massive glowing ball down a flagpole to kick off the champagne-fueled countdown instead.

The botched blast was just the first of many snafus and silly stunts that have plagued the big celebration over the years since, experts and historians say.

New Years Eve wasn’t always a blast in the Big Apple. Before Times Square hosted the confetti-flinging festivities, New Yorkers celebrated with a tame religious ceremony at Trinity Church in lower Manhattan.

But when the Times moved to what was then called Longacre Square, the paper’s publisher, Adolph Ochs, unleashed the splashy fireworks show — complete with the dynamite — to compete with the now-defunct New York Herald, which had opened Herald Square to much fanfare in 1902.

“It was a publicity stunt,” said Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance. “But people got nervous fireworks would burn something down.”

On Jan. 1, 1905, the Times’ front page blared, “A few minutes before 12 o’clock, a dynamite bomb was fired from the tower . . . First they showed white against the sky. The color changed and they burned red. It seemed almost as if the building were aflame.” And, despite the near-disaster, it added,

“Never was a New Year’s Eve more joyously celebrated.’’

But the dynamite, which was fired off again the following year, irked the police, which banned explosives in the Big Apple by 1907. That year, Ochs hired sign-making company Artkraft Strauss to build and lower a 700-pound wood-and-iron ball covered in 100 25-watt bulbs.

“It was the most cutting-edge technology at the time,” Tompkins said.

The original ball, which was 5 feet in diameter, dropped at a snail’s pace from a flagpole near Seventh Avenue and West 42nd Street for a modest crowd. But the audience soon grew.

“The subway had just opened and the celebration attracted a great cross-section of people,” said Lynne Sagalyn, author of “Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon.” “Dropping the ball helped to validate Times Square as a public space.”

In 1917, the celebration went dark due to a wartime coal shortage, but the ball was still lowered — and New Yorkers still partied with “tin horns and feather ticklers and confetti” at rooftop bars, Sagalyn said.

Only twice has the ball not dropped, in 1942 and 1943, when the tradition was suspended due to World War II security blackouts. Instead, the stroke of midnight was marked by a minute of silence.

The party was back in full swing by the 1950s. But the rest of the country didn’t tune in until “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” aired for the first time in 1972.

The ABC special covered the ball drop along with prerecorded musical acts — upstaging Guy Lombardo’s long-running but stuffier CBS show, which featured big-band music at the ritzy Waldorf-Astoria hotel.

Workers install a plate containing Waterford crystal triangles.Robert Miller

“It changed what New Year’s Eve looked like,” said Nick Juravich of the New-York Historical Society. “Before that, there was news coverage of the ball dropping — but there wasn’t one show and a countdown until Dick Clark.”

By 1977, as crime rates soared in the city, the number of people who gathered at the celebration plunged to roughly 50,000 — down from 1 million in 1950, according to Juravich. “People were scared. All you have to do is look at ‘Taxi Driver’ or ‘Midnight Cowboy’ to remember what Times Square was like back then,” said Sagalyn. “It was a civic embarrassment. And the fact that the ball dropped there, on a national stage, only intensified it.”

Gritty as it was, many young New Yorkers still flocked to the free New Year’s Eve street party. “It was much more of a New York scene,” said Juravich. “Groups of young people, who couldn’t get into bars, would hang out there.”

By 1979, booze was banned from the bash — and the streets of New York in general — under Mayor Ed Koch. Two years later, the sparkling sphere got a makeover to look like an apple, complete with red lights and a green stem, as part of the “I ♥ New York’’ ad campaign. As New York City’s image improved, the celebration began to draw more families and tourists in the 1990s.

The event’s biggest tech glitch occurred in 1996, when Countdown Entertainment, the company that lowers the ball, switched from a manual to a computerized system. Until then, the massive globe had been lowered by six men with cables — and the transition wasn’t smooth.

“It was going down fine and then, all of a sudden, it stopped for several seconds during the countdown. It was not ideal,” Juravich said. “Then people started cranking it and lowered it the rest of the way.”

In the 2000s, live performances — which organizers had previously thought would “get people too rowdy” — took center stage along with the ball, according to Tompkins, who said there’s been a “huge growth in entertainment in the past 15 years.”

In 2012, more TV viewers than ever — 22.6 million — tuned in to watch the sparkling ball drop.

Lady Gaga punched a button that triggered the ball’s descent and Drake, Pitbull and Justin Bieber performed.

Mariah Carey dropped the figurative ball four years later when she botched a live performance by lip-synching — and then blaming technical malfunctions.

“It just don’t get any better,” she grumbled sarcastically before stomping off stage.

If everything goes off without a hitch this year, the ball itself promises to be a show-stopper. The geodesic sphere is 12 feet in diameter and features 2,688 Waterford crystal triangles along with LED lights designed to “resemble butterflies flying peacefully above a meadow,” according to Countdown Entertainment

The company, which was still futzing with the “18” sign earlier this week after it failed to fully illuminate during a test run last week, declined to comment on how it’s looking right now.