Times Square’s year-end ball ready
No charges for driver who crashed into party
NEW YORK — Workers put the finishing touches Saturday on a dazzling new Waterford Crystal ball that will drop in Times Square to signal the start of the new year and then remain on display as a tourist attraction.
The new ball — 12 feet in diameter, weighing nearly 12,000 pounds and covered with 2,668 Waterford Crystal triangles — has a new, permanent home on the roof of One Times Square.
“Now it is going to be up there shining throughout the year,” said Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance. “I really believe it’s going to be the next Empire State Building.”
The project of creating a permanent perch for the ball took a year to complete and cost about $5 million, said Jeffrey Straus, president of Countdown Entertainment, which is co-producing the event.
Because of the massive sphere’s weight and size, engineers had to build an entire new roof structure and reinforce the steel columns going down to the 16th floor, Straus said. The ball will drop from a 141-foot mast that was also specially made and is taller than the mast used previously.
Organizers said they will test the ball on Tuesday and light it
WOODMERE
WOODMERE (AP) — A man who drove his sport utility vehicle into a Hanukkah party in a crash that hurt 14 people on Long Island won’t face charges in the accident, which police said may have been caused by a stuck floor mat.
Thursday’s crash into the Chanukah Wonderland building, where the Orthodox Chabad community was celebrating the Jewish Festival of Lights, injured 14 people, including the driver, 76-year-old psychologist Theodore Saretsky.
Saretsky, of Atlantic Beach, was discharged from a hospital on Friday. Two children remained hospitalized in critical but stable condition Friday in Nassau University Medical Center, spokeswoman Linda Cianciulli said.
Nassau County investigators the following day. On Jan. 6, the ball will be raised midway up the mast, where it will stay until the next new year’s celebration.
Straus said the bigger, brighter ball will remain in place all year atop the building to celebrate other holidays including Valentine’s Day, the Fourth of July and Halloween.
For its New Year’s Eve debut, workers used special tools to install the new crystal triangles on the ball and spent four weeks getting the structure
are looking at the possibility that the vehicle’s floor mat was stuck between the gas pedal and brake when Saretsky lost control of the car, police spokesman John Mullaney said. ready.
The crystal triangles, with cuts on both sides to maximize light refraction, feature a new “Let There Be Joy” design, depicting an angel with uplifted arms. The triangles were fabricated in Ireland. More than 32,000 LEDs will be used to illuminate the ball.
“God knows we need some joy coming into this new year,” Waterford spokesman Peter R. Cheyney said. “That’s the truth.”
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