Travel Time at One Times Square
By LOIS WEISS
In August, The Ball Drop Building's owner, Jamestown, opened the immersive "Times Travel," a multi-sensory, multi-floor journey through the history of Times Square and the New Year's Eve Ball.
The 45-minute excursion inside One Times Square focuses on both the building's history and its architectural elements and there are great views along the way.
While perfect for tourists touring the Great White Way, local New Yorkers might want to skip this adventure and either upgrade to bring home a real crystal from the actual New Year's Eve ball or merely take a walk on the glass skyway that wraps the building and has a perfect view of the June sunsets known as "Manhattanhenge."
Informally known as the "Ball Drop Building," One Times Square has been completely redesigned inside with different floors for different experiences that include the ICandy adventure, a floor of bathrooms and even actual wedding ceremonies.
Visitors to the new Times Traveler experience walk through electronic confetti, watch iron workers work on the steel beams, ride in a taxi through Times Square during an earlier era when it had a well-known wild side, soar in a helium balloon around the city and finally enter Eternal Midnight, a permanent New Year's Eve celebration with a live band and dancers.
Getting visitors into the celebratory mood, they first walk through a corridor lined with what resembles electronic confetti that opens in a room with a five-foot tall -- but fake -- dark rock embedded with crystals that ties the building into the bedrock of Manhattan.
The building's connection to Manhattan's bedrock of crystal quartz is reinforced with an energy, the exhibit claims, that extends from the foundation up to the New Year's Eve Ball.
But alas, the large rock embedded with crystal is merely a reproduction of what someone thinks it should look like.
Interactive elements include a floor that vibrates with energy from the "bedrock" and a central wall with 5,000 images. The experience then invites visitors to travel back in time.
In a nearby room, iron workers are erecting the skeleton of the building before visitors are transported to a dirigible for a swooping ride over the city and Times Square. The few steps here vibrate but those in a large group may miss out on the very light foot massage.
A "taxi" ride through the seedy Times Square of the past includes an interaction with a lady of the evening.
Today's tourists are more likely to have that encounter with Minnie Mouse.
Finally, visitors are brought into a double height room for a live band, confetti drops and a fun recreation of New Year's Eve where visitors can celebrate and even write wishes on real confetti that will be dropped with the tons of paper that shower Times Square every year at midnight.
Multiple New Year's Eve balls from past years are alsl on display and can be touched and there are also interactive displays.
There is also an opporunity to purchase one of the newer, oval and round Waterford crystals that come from the most recent balls.
A few years ago, Jamestown gave them away in a one day PR stunt but later saw them peddled on EBay, so now they are for sale.
The One Times Square website lays it all out to help you plan your next adventure. https://onetimessquare.com/
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