1/1/00: From Bali to Broadway –
A flittering party for Times Square
By Robert D. McFadden
Two thousand years after Christ’s obscure birth in a dusty town in Judea, the world’s six billion people – most of them non-Christian and many of them preoccupied with terrorism, computers, diets, bank accounts, politics and the perils of the future – rode their turning blue planet across time’s invisible line today and, by common consent, looked into the dawn of a new millennium.
What they saw first was a party. It was garish, glittering and global, and millions, setting religious considerations and personal concerns aside, joined in the festivities to celebrate the conjunction of a new year, a new century and a new thousand-year cycle of history. They also put aside the inconvenient fact that the millennium, technically, is still a year off. It hardly mattered. In Times Square and across the United States, in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, in cities and towns all over the world, bells pealed, crowds shrieked and surged, skyrockets soared into the night, fireworks burst into supernovas, “Auld Lang Syne” rang out, lights pulsed, loved ones and friends embraced, and the music and Champagne flowed.
On a rainbow day whose moods ran the spectrum from tensions and prayers to euphoria and irresistible hyperbole, what most were calling Christianity’s Third Millennium arrived in 24 stages as the earth revolved through the time zones and midnight elapsed again and again in an around-the-clock, around-the-world series of golden moments that began at the international date line in the Pacific and raced westward across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas.
In New York, a vast crowd of revelers – the guesses ran as high as an improbable two million – packed Times Square and much of Midtown Manhattan for the biggest public event ever held in the city – a 26-hour, $7 million marathon of music, fireworks, confetti and deafening voices as a 1,070-pound crystal ball descended at midnight and the crowds roared berserkly, while the police sweated out an enormous potential for trouble.
And there were lavish celebrations in Washington, London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Jerusalem, Moscow, Cape Town, New Delhi, Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires and hundreds of other cities. There were parties, concerts, dances, torchlight parades and televised extravaganzas that brought the worldwide show to billions more at home, and back to the crowds in Times Square over giant video screens – a case of celebrators watching celebrators.
To a Martian Earthwatcher (tuning in with delicate ear and Cyclopean eye), it might have appeared that the inhabitants of the third world from the Sun had suddenly lost their senses or gone to war again. But it was only humanity on the threshold of a new age, exercising its primal urge to celebrate.
There had been an avalanche of happy millennial overkill in recent days – claims of the last-game, last-meal, first-baby kind – and yesterday it was the turn of world leaders in government, religion, science and other fields, who spoke of the millennium’s meaning in more serious tones.
“Today, we celebrate more than the changing of the calendar,” President Clinton, extending millennium greetings to the world, said in an address to diplomats and children from 100 nations. “We celebrate the opportunity we have to make this a true changing of the times, a gateway to greater peace and freedom, to prosperity and harmony.”
In Moscow, Boris Yeltsin, who has been plagued with heart and other problems for most of his eight years as Russia’s president, unexpectedly announced his resignation. “Russia must enter the next millennium with new politicians, with new personalities and with new smart, strong and energetic people,” he said. “And we who have been in power for many years must go.”
At the Vatican, Pope John Paul II, fulfilling his dream to lead the Roman Catholic Church across the threshold of 2000, gave his blessing to a vast crowd in St. Peter’s Square, reiterated his calls for an end to war and poverty, and thanked God for “the events of this year, this century and this millennium.”
There were millions around the world who had no reason to be festive, people like Tom Nganga, 40, who lives in Kangemi, a vast slum of Nairobi, Kenya. “We as Kenyans and people of Kangemi are very, very angry as we celebrate this millennium,” he said. “People are very poor. People have nothing to eat. We have nothing to celebrate.”
While the millennium celebrations drew millions, there were relatively few casualties. In the Philippines, two people were killed by stray gunfire and a 5-year-old boy died after a firecracker exploded in his face. At least 200 other Filipinos were injured by fireworks. In Paris, 70 people were hurt in crowds.
After years of concern over Y2K computer problems that had cost billions of dollars to fix, there were no immediate reports of computer-related disasters anywhere in the world, no plane crashes, major power failures, nuclear plant shutdowns or collapses of banking, business, government or health care systems.
But elevators, intercity trains and subways in many American cities and in other countries as well were halted briefly over the witching hour, and some airlines canceled flights for the day, just to be safe. Many airports were all but deserted, with wary travelers staying put. Experts said it might take days for some computer problems to develop, in part because many businesses and government agencies were closed for the holiday weekend.
There had also been fears that terrorists, publicity seekers or the insane might set off explosions or mount chemical or biological attacks as millions gathered to celebrate, while vast audiences watched on television. No specific threats had been reported, although some suspects had been seized recently. Still, there were no immediate reports of trouble, and law enforcement authorities seemed ready for almost anything.
The millennium, an idea with overtones ranging from Biblical to commercial, had swelled recently into a coercive miniculture as the countdown ticked away and a flood of books, articles, television specials and studied commentaries by academic, political and religious leaders reflected upon the last thousand years of human achievements and missteps, and speculated on the next thousand.
Purists still insist that the millennium will not start until January 1, 2001, and they have a point. Centuries and millennia have always ended with the last day of the “zeros” year. But it is all a muddle, because the calendar, at best, is arbitrary. There were problems from ancient times based on inaccuracies in measuring the year’s duration and its uneven division into days, weeks and months. By 1582, the spring equinox was 10 days early, and the days were dropped when the Gregorian calendar replaced the old Julian version. While Pope Gregory’s calendar uses the birth of Christ in 1 B.C. as a starting date, many scholars now suggest that the year was probably closer to 4 B.C.
In any case, as Voltaire noted, history is the lie that historians agree upon, and the tide of popular opinion – always impatient for early results – swept nearly everyone along in recent months. And with the climax of the celebrations, and especially when the nines rolled into zeros at midnight and humanity went ballistic, purists’ talk of technicalities was the last thing anyone wanted to hear.
For doomsayers who had prophecied conflagrations, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other end-of-the-world scenarios (and kept a weather eye out for U.F.O. rescue ships), the new millennium was something of a nonevent, although the anxiety prompted by all the wild predictions of chaos was real enough.
The Book of Revelations, Chapter 20, speaks of a resurrection of the dead and a Judgment Day, of sinners cast into a lake of fire and Christ reigning for a thousand years. But if it was not the Second Coming of Jesus as foretold in the Bible, there was still a year to go, or this was the wrong millennium.
And if, as some said, even the idea of a Third Christian Millennium was a Western conceit in a world where Christians are a minority, and one that overlooked other calendars calling this 1420 (Muslim) or 5760 (Jewish), it was also true that the world had long ago come by economic and social necessity to agree upon the Western calendar for trade, travel and other common purposes.
The millennium, if nothing else, was a celebration of history, marking human survival after a deadly century of wars, genocide and revolution that saw the end of colonialism, fascism and communism, as well as the achievements of the past thousand years – printing and widespread literacy; the exploration of the last frontiers on earth; the first ventures into outer space, the inner mind and the microscopic universe, and the flowering of democratic government, and of art, literature, science, technology and communications into undreamed eminences.
The world on this Millennium Day was still beset with terrible problems – with grinding poverty that afflicted a third of its 6 billion inhabitants, with ethnic and national strife, with the continuing curse of racial and religious bigotries, and with the exclusion of millions from adequate health care, education, jobs and even such basic needs as shelter and clean water, not to mention freedoms of speech and political association.
But with a few exceptions – notably threats of terrorism and limited wars in the Balkans, Chechnya and other regions – it was a world largely at peace, with the apocalyptic threat of nuclear annihilation receding and new understandings growing between old enemies in the Middle East, Ireland, South Africa and other long-troubled areas.
And it was a world on the threshold of a new era – one that offered visions of astounding strides in science and technology and seemed to hold out anew the ancient promises of universal peace and prosperity, although the only certainty seemed to be that the world a thousand years from now would be unrecognizable.
As December 31, 1999 gave way to January 1, 2000, in each time zone at midnight, with atomic clocks marking it to a millisecond, celebrators went ecstatic. It began in Fiji and the Kiribati and Marshall Islands in the Western Pacific (it was 7 a.m. E.S.T. yesterday) and moved westward, hour by hour, as the earth turned and 23 more midnights fell across Australia, Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas and back across the Pacific, ending in Samoa at 6 a.m. E.S.T. today.
Islanders in Kiribati welcomed the millennium with the mournful sounds of a conch shell and with traditional chants and dancing on the beach of a normally uninhabited coral atoll, dubbed Millennium Island.
In Japan, which has absorbed many of the trappings of the Western world while preserving its own cultural and religious traditions, bells tolled in a Buddhist ritual to dispel evils as thousands flocked to temples and shrines. In Tokyo, people went to parties and crowds swarmed to bayside events, including rock concerts and lavish fireworks.
In China, torchbearers in Imperial-era costumes lighted signal fires on the watchtowers of the Great Wall, which snakes 3,000 miles from the Gobi Desert to the North China Sea, and President Jiang Zemin lighted an eternal flame to greet the new millennium and pledged a “great rejuvenation” by reuniting with Taiwan. Over Hong Kong Harbor there were brilliant fireworks displays, and parties abounded, a prelude to the Chinese New Year, the Year of the Dragon, which starts February 5.
The festivities for most of India’s one billion people were muted by comparison with those in wealthier nations, but hundreds of thousands danced, drank and ate at open-air stalls in New Delhi and partygoers were out in force in other cities, celebrating the peaceful end of an eight-day hostage crisis on an Indian Airlines jet hours before midnight.
Iran and its Persian Gulf neighbors largely ignored the new millennium, which fell during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, a time for prayer and reflection.
In Israel, where religious tension is high at the best of times, security was heavy as three religions and some doomsday cultists marked the occasion, each in its own way. It was especially tight on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives, where Christian fundamentalists had camped to witness the end of the world, and at the Old City’s Temple Mount, with sites sacred to Muslims and Jews.
On the last New Year’s Eve of the Christian millennium, observant Jews ushered in the Sabbath, as they do every Friday, and many went to pray at the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site, while 400,000 Muslims flocked to Al Aksa Mosque on the Temple Mount to mark the last Friday of prayer and fasting in the holy month of Ramadan.
With religious bans on celebrations that might desecrate holy days, the celebrations in Israel were relatively subdued. In Palestinian-governed Bethlehem, the town revered by Christians as the birthplace of Jesus, 2,000 doves were released at midnight on Manger Square, and in secular Tel Aviv, thousands just went to the beach to watch the sun set over the Mediterranean.
In Paris, with new lighting on buildings, boulevards and bridges over the Seine twinkling like the bonfires of a great medieval encampment, people packed the Champs-Elysees from the Tuileries to the Arc de Triomphe as a digital clock at the Eiffel Tower counted down – overcoming an old-fashioned glitch that shut it down five hours before midnight – and announced the millennium in a burst of 20,000 electronic flashes.
In London, two million people lined the Thames for a spectacular fireworks show, while Queen Elizabeth, Prime Minister Tony Blair and other dignitaries gathered under the 20-acre Millennium Dome, a flying-saucer-like colossus at Longitude Zero in Greenwich, to mark the transition while the bells of St. Paul’s and Westminster and churches across Britain pealed. Huge street parties were held in hundreds of Britain’s cities.
In Egypt, floodlights, lasers and fireworks illuminated the ancient pyramids at Giza and electronic music reverberated over the desert as 50,000 people wined and dined in luxurious tents and watched a sparkling millennium show under the watchful eyes of police officers on camels.
Elsewhere, there were torchlight parades in the streets of Stockholm; fireworks and singing by massed choirs in Reykjavik, Iceland, and Helsinki, Finland; concerts and a ball at the opera house in Tallinn, Estonia; enormous street parties in Edinburgh, Scotland, and a Millennium Ball at the Catherine Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia.
In the United States, huge festivities were held on the Washington Mall, and in New Orleans, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco and other cities.
In New York, it was a day to remember. The centerpiece was the spectacle billed as “Times Square 2000: the Global Celebration at the Crossroads of the World.” Worried authorities had closed 50 blocks of Midtown to traffic, banned alcohol in open containers and flooded the area with 8,000 officers just in case. All vehicles were towed away as a precaution against car bombs.
Throughout the city, 37,000 of New York’s police officers were on duty, and there was plenty for them to survey. The Times Square celebration was only one of 329 public events in the city, the biggest of the others at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, at the Bronx Zoo and in Central Park and Bryant Park in Manhattan.
The celebration in Times Square went off as planned with all-day, all-night pulsing music and cacophonous entertainments by 1,000 musicians, actors, dancers, puppeteers and other performers working from a stage on Seventh Avenue between 45th and 46th Streets.
Broadway, curving like a dancer’s leg, was packed from 42nd Street to Central Park, along with most of the side streets between the Avenue of the Americas and Eighth Avenue. The old wickedness of Times Square was missing, but for most in the crowd it was an adventure just to be caught, shoulder to shoulder, jostling for happiness at the intersection of past and future.
The show ran all day and all night, from 6 a.m. yesterday to 8 a.m. today, and thousands showed up early to stake claims near ground zero. By the time the sun went down, the crowds were already gigantic. They came in shoals from the suburbs, from across the nation and from countless places abroad, and they swept into the vast clogged carnival, determined to experience the exotic and illusory evening.
They were in a euphoric mood, capped and scarved and padded like armadillos against the cold. They watched twilight print the sky with darkness, and the blue night city come to life, glittering like a tiara. By midevening, much of Midtown was seized up in human gridlock. Laser lights slid up the skyscrapers and washed over the writhing mass of Lilliputian figures below.
The crowds were squeezed into police-barrier pens to create lanes for emergency vehicles, and many had to watch events on giant video screens. The closer to 1 Times Square, where the ball descended, the more bleary the crowd looked, many having stood their ground for a day and a half. A stench arose from a layer of garbage underfoot that included pizza and other less identifiable things.
The tradition of celebrators’ watching others celebrate was continued on a global scale. Live video from festivities around the world were pumped into Times Square, and the scenes there were beamed by 45 networks out to a worldwide audience of a billion people.
It was all perfect for television – the images clear and colorful, reducing everything, even the millennium, to entertainment. There were no distracting speeches by dignitaries striking the just-right crystal phrases; indeed, the program – including an international pageant that, hour by hour, reflected the countries where midnight was then occurring – was deliberately languageless.
That, too, was perfect for this crowd, which seemed preoccupied with itself: people taking pictures of each other, fussing with food, gawking at the neon forest, looking for Peter Jennings and paying little attention to the pageant of Japanese yogi-bushi umbrellas, Sri Lankan monk chants, Russian ballerinas, Kenyan war dancers, Argentine rain forest butterfly puppets and Lakota Sioux in face paint.
But the crowd got into the spirit of things, screaming numbers as the final seconds of the failing millennium were counted down. The tensions that had been building for weeks reached a climax, and there was an inescapable sense of a great public moment at hand, one that most generations could never experience.
On center stage, the buckram face of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, proud as a drum major, stood at the controls of the descending ball with Dr. Mary Ann Hopkins, 36, who was being honored for her work in war-torn countries as a volunteer in Doctors Without Borders.
And when midnight struck, the roar was deafening: a din of horns, amplified music and countless voices shrieking at the edge of madness. In the chaos, lasers zoomed, flashbulbs sparkled, a blizzard of confetti and streamers and balloons filled the air, and in the distance a blinding dazzle of fireworks exploded.
They sang, “Auld Lang Syne,” and the joyous screams and congratulatory embraces went on and on. The fireworks, too, went on and on over the East River off South Street Seaport, in Central Park, in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park – the biggest pyrotechnic display in history – a booming, sparkling, scintillating barrage of rockets and sunbursts that bathed the awed faces in eerie light and echoed off the facades of a city that seemed to exist only in the imagination.