Y2K 25th anniversary

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1/1/00: Around the world –
Well, let’s try again, maybe December 31, 2000

By Donald G. McNeil Jr.

At the last minute, Hungary’s millennium planners turned into the Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time Players.

Two unusual events had been set for midnight: the first spin of a giant Wheel of Time holding an hourglass containing seven tons of customized sand, and a special session of Parliament to celebrate 1,000 years of Hungarian statehood.

Money and technical problems delayed the wheel – it will ring in 2001.

Political wrangling put the parliamentary session off for about 12 hours, suggesting that Hungarian lawmakers do not yet have the sense of television that their American counterparts do. The livelier part of the event, the procession that is to carry the 11th-century Crown of St. Stephen to its new home in Parliament, will still take place this afternoon – and there will be a makeup party in Heroes Square for those who missed the millennial one.

Compared to the high-priced blowouts in richer countries, Eastern Europe planned relatively modest celebrations. And even these were not spared controversy.

Warsaw held a disco party in Jozef Pilsudski Square, which Catholic leaders and veterans groups condemned as tasteless because the square contains the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and Pope John Paul II said Mass there twice. The stage for Boney M and other performers was on the same spot as the papal altar.

In Budapest, even the half-laid plans went awry. Just before fireworks surrounded the beautiful riverside Parliament, the sub-zero weather raised a cold fog from the Danube, rendering them invisible.

What would, in many other countries, be all the ingredients for a riot were in place: Tens of thousands of chilled teenagers carrying yard-long cardboard horns, with which, by local habit, one belts total strangers over the head without provocation. Crates of $2 champagne on sale everywhere, the price jacked up to $4. Big cherry bombs underfoot. No public toilets. And nary a cop in sight.

In New York, given the same provocations, the streets would run with blood, suggested a journalist who had been belted for the second time in a minute. “But we have no guns here,” explained Zsuzsanna Langi.

“Yes, in Poland we do this,” replied Sylvester, the next stranger to belt the same journalist, taking the opportunity of a brief interview to bop him twice more before his horn was bent double. “In Poland, I do very bad things. But we don’t kill. Because in Poland to do such bad things is O.K.”

In the end, though, it was a peaceful crowd of extraordinarily happy drunks. In Vorosmarty Square, at the stroke of midnight, the locals stiffened and sang the sad, solemn national anthem, “God Bless the Hungarians.” And were walloped for it by visiting Poles and Slovenes.

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1/1/00: Around the world –
Party? What party? We’re going shopping

By Elisabeth Rosenthal

President Jiang Zemin spoke here of China’s glorious future and a few adventurous souls ventured to the Great Wall, but most Beijingers spent the ticking over of the calendar doing what average folks here do when given half a chance: they went shopping.

This week, dozens of shopping centers and department stores across Beijing announced that they would stay open for much of New Year’s Eve to honor the event, with a number not closing until 2 a.m. and some not at all.

So at midnight and beyond, stores across the city overflowed with parties of families and friends. And thousands of Beijinger’s did their countdown to the end of the 1900s while comparing CD players or in line for the cash register.

“It’s a good way to spend New Year’s Eve for families with children,” said Hu Duanglin, a 63-year-old teacher, who was strolling at the Xidan Shopping Center with his children and grandchild.

“It’s much better than going to a restaurant or a bar,” he said.

New Year’s Eve presented a quandary for people in China, a country where the observance of nonpolitical Western celebrations – like New Years, Christmas and Valentines Day – is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Most homes in Beijing are far too small for private parties. And the celebrations organized for December 31 by virtually every fancy hotel and restaurant were far too expensive for the average family, with tickets often costing over $100.

Department stores seem to have filled a void. Many organized entertainment, including fashion shows, lotteries and sales that began after normal closing hours.

At 10:30 p.m., the sidewalk outside the Guiyou Department Store on Jianguonenwai Street was packed with customers waiting for a chance at a “lucky draw.”

It was not clear if the stores will profit for their sponsorship, since there seemed to be far more lookers than buyers.

“I bought a new hat,” said Sun Li, a 22-year-old student, as she waited for the McDonald’s on Wangfujing Street to reopen for the night at 12:30 a.m. “It’s a New Year’s present. But I’m mostly here to have fun and look around.”

And many seemed to head for the stores by default, falling back on an old familiar place when there is nowhere else to go.

When asked why he and his wife had come to a store to celebrate, a worker who would only give his surname, Su, replied: “It beats staying home and watching TV – so we came. Have you got any better ideas?”

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1/1/00: Around the world –
A once glorious city, overlooked by time

By Norimitsu Onishi

“Timbuktu 2000! Timbuktu 2000!” cried 3-year-old Aboubacari Sidiki, as he dangled from the bumper of a truck parked on a sand-filled street here.

The words meant nothing to him. The boy was simply parroting the slogan that city promoters had been using to draw in Westerners to mark the end of an era at the end of the world.

“Timbuktu, the City of Mystery,” went the campaign. But the greater mystery to Aboubacari and to most grown-up residents of this city was this: What was the big deal with the year 2000 and why were all these foreigners – known locally as toubab – coming to celebrate it here?

“I don’t know anything about the year 2000,” said Niele Maiga, a woman in her 50’s, who like most Muslims here found little significance in the new year. “It’s this year that we first heard about the year 2000. On the radio, they told us women that we should keep the front of our houses and the streets clean because the toubab were coming for the year 2000. Tonight, we’re going to sing in Songhai,” a local language.

Ms. Maiga was carrying a load of clothes through a winding street, past a mud-brick house where a British explorer, Gordon Laing, lived in 1826. Regarded as the first European to reach Timbuktu, Laing was killed before making it back home.

Founded early in this millennium, Timbuktu reached its peak toward the middle, when the trans-Saharan caravan trade turned it into the center of trade between the African interior to the south and the Arab world to the north. Stories of great mosques, sub-Saharan Africa’s first Islamic university and vast wealth – all inaccessible to Westerners – reached Europe.

Today, with the millennium spent, so, too, is Timbuktu. A small city of crumbling, mud-brick houses, the caravan trade a distant memory, Timbuktu is blanketed in sand. The advancing Sahara has encircled the city in dunes. But the magic of its name has endured, enough certainly to attract some foreigners to ring in the new year here.

“Why don’t I get a camel and go into the desert for the first sunrise of the millennium,” said Larry Blum, 36, of Cohasset, Minn., explaining why he had come here. “Most people, especially Americans, don’t even think this place exists.”

“So what’s happening in the States?” asked Mr. Blum, who is on a “four-month solo expedition” through West Africa. “Heard anything about the N.F.L.?”

Part of the city’s allure surely remains its remoteness, at the edge of the vast Sahara, with no paved roads leading south. Even for those who took the easy way here and flew Air Mali, complications arose in midweek. Mali’s president, Alpha O. Konare, needed Air Mali – that is to say, the one plane that makes up the airline – for urgent business and so delayed passengers’ arrival here by several hours.

“The end of the world?” asked Jehara Maiga, who was preparing fish in the middle of the street when she was told of the West’s view of her city. She laughed uncontrollably at the thought.

Mamadou Kamoute, a teacher, added: “For you, Timbuktu may be a city of dreams. But for us, it’s just another city in Mali.”

About 80 Peace Corps volunteers from West Africa made up the largest group of foreigners here. Sixty-seven had taken a three-day boat trip from the southern city of Mopti.

“We sort of figured we’d move in this direction and see what happened,” said Petra Cahill, 24, of Greenwich, Conn.

Tariq Zehawi, 27, of Houston, said: “Timbuktu is something I didn’t even know existed until two years ago, when I applied for the Peace Corps and was told that I was coming to Mali, and I saw Timbuktu on the map.”

And so despite the locals’ ho-hum attitude toward the new year, the toubab energetically went about their plans to celebrate the arrival of 2000 in Timbuktu. About 100 tourists rode on camels into the desert and planned to spend the night there – a project that appeared incomprehensible to a group of boys hanging out near a hotel.

“It’s not good to go out in the desert at night,” said Sidi Baby, 12. “It’s going to be windy.”

“It’ll be cold,” added Elhaje Baby, 13.

“These toubab, they’re…” began Mahaldane Traore, who was only 15, but wise enough not to complete his thought in the presence of one of those toubab.

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1/1/00: Around the world –
Absence of ‘midnight’ doesn’t darken spirits

By Malcolm W. Browne

With the midsummer sun standing high over the South Pole, painting its vast featureless snow fields with light so intense it hurt the eyes, scientists and support staff began celebrating the new year along with a planeload of tourists and seven intrepid skiers.

Midnight itself was almost meaningless; at this time of year, the sun shines 24 hours a day.

A New Year’s Eve party began at 8 p.m. New Zealand time (America’s Antarcticans set their clocks to Christchurch) in a garage at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, which is in one of the tunnels leading to the cavernous, snow-covered dome that shelters many of the station’s activities.

“There were quite a few colorful costumes,” said Ed Blain, the area manager for the station. “There was a live band and drinks and champagne for all. The New Year’s struck with quite a wild crowd.”

The tourists, who flew in on a specially equipped Twin Otter aircraft, left later for a campsite in central Antarctica. The skiers, four from Singapore and three from Britain, are camping near the polar station.

And staff members began the annual placing of the stake marking the latest position of the true geographic South Pole.

Although the South Pole itself is stationary, the two-mile-thick ice sheet covering the rocky continent slips gradually, moving generally seaward about 30 feet a year.

So each year, on New Year’s Day, a new stake is driven into the ice over the latest South Pole position. Affixed to the stake is an ornamental medallion designed and made by shop workers during the three-month-long winter night at the Pole.

The holidays, which come just about halfway through the South Pole summer research season, are typically an occasion for play.

In past seasons, artists have used chain saws and other tools to create vast ice sculpture menageries, and scientists and support staff who normally work virtually nonstop on astrophysics research, astronomy, climate studies and other projects, take time out for silly games and contests, like chili cook-offs held outdoors in temperatures of 20 below. This year there was a pool championship, with 27 station personnel playing.

Some years, casualties or even deaths in the previous winter have dampened spirits. But this year, except for the station’s doctor, who had to be evacuated several months ago after she discovered she had breast cancer, there have been few problems.

Now that the New Year festivities are over, Mr. Blain said, “We are hoping for a quiet restful season. We have 45 days left.”

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1/1/00: Around the world –
A few holiday tokens in the middle of a war

By Michael R. Gordon

Fighting still rages in Grozny, but the soldiers there made a few bows to the holiday, and seemed oblivious to the political earthquake of President Boris N. Yeltsin’s resignation.

In a hospital’s mess tent, cooks prepared a special holiday dinner. One soldier, a woman, dragged a yolka, a Russian holiday tree, past a row of corpses and toward a complex of tents.

Officers of a nearby armored unit received a small plastic bag filled with cheap cologne, a plastic pen and “Dear Soldier” letters from Russian schoolchildren, like one from Andrei Malakhov, a seven-year-old boy from Yefremov, a small town south of Moscow, who said he hoped all the Russian soldiers would come home alive.

By mid-afternoon, they had already broken open several bottles of vodka and were feasting on bread and pickled cabbage. They had set up camp in a series of trenches that separatist rebels had occupied just weeks ago.

One officer, who gave only his first name, Aleksandr, said the “terrorists” in Chechnya would be finished off within six months.

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1/1/00: Around the world –
A blanket of snow brings some warmth

By Neela Banerjee

The snow everyone had been waiting for all winter finally came. The narrow streets leading down to Red Square, usually clotted with traffic, were empty. For all its imperfections, Moscow on New Year’s Eve seemed suddenly, subtly perfect.

Muscovites who would normally elbow each other rushing to work flowed out of the subway station and toward the edges of the Kremlin. All that had changed in Moscow and all that had stayed the same in this decade of unimaginable twists was here.

In front of the KGB building, an open-air disco rolled its bass line down the blocked-off street. A 20-foot electronic billboard pulsed, “Internet. Da!” And people gathered where they had for generations to see in the New Year, which, for most Russians, is Christmas and Carnival rolled into one.

“We’ve come here for five years, though there’s more people here now,” said Sasha Zorkin, a 30-year-old wielding a video recorder. “I want things to work out for Russia in the New Year, which means that obviously they would work out for me. too.”

There was a sense that all Russian preoccupations for the last 364 days had been cast aside. For a few minutes, this was not a city where terrorist bombs went off three months ago. President Boris N. Yeltsin’s resignation was something to be laughed at.

“Great present Boris Nikolayevich gave us!” said Aleksandr Suldin, a Grandfather Frost whose cotton-ball beard kept slipping off.

Bitterness over the course the country has taken was spit out. Sweet Russian champagne and chocolates were passed around. The bottle rockets each small party set off seemed grander than the official fireworks. Together, everyone’s screams and kisses blocked out the Kremlin chimes.

Some dared to believe in a better future after the century’s seesaw madness.

“It has been a horrible century for Russia – it seemed we lived well under the czars and are knocked down now,” Lena Razumova, a 22-year-old unemployed French teacher, shouted over the firecrackers and her friends singing next to her. “But we’ve come here to celebrate the New Year with all Russians. I’m an optimist. I am!”

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1/1/00: Around the world –
A day at the races, a night of big parties

By Mark Landler

How do you mark the passage of 1,000 years of human history? Simple in Hong Kong, a city of chronic gamblers and cold-eyed oddsmakers: you head for the track.

At 12:45 a.m., as the last wisps of smoke from New Year’s Eve fireworks drifted away from the Happy Valley Racecourse, the crack of a starter’s gun set off the Millennium Cup.

The Hong Kong Jockey Club billed it as the first horse race of the 2000s, though rumors swirled that it might have been edged out for first-in-the-world status by post-midnight races in New Zealand and Australia.

Floral Joy won $110,000 from a total purse worth $200,000. It was a good prize, but not extraordinary for a jockey club that generates more than $10 billion a season in betting.

Such details did not dampen the spirits of more than 50,000 people who cheered wildly as one of the favorites, Floral Joy, streaked across the line several lengths ahead of the next horse.

If a horse race seems an offhand way to celebrate the ultimate New Year’s Eve, remember that strictly speaking, the new year does not even arrive here until February 5, when Hong Kong and the rest of the Chinese-speaking world will welcome the Year of the Dragon.

Considering that Hong Kong was celebrating someone else’s holiday, it threw quite a party. The city mounted a splashy fireworks display at Happy Valley. At the stroke of midnight, fireballs placed at 175-foot intervals around the track erupted into a fountain of flames. An enormous illuminated dragon, which the organizers described as the largest ever, held court in the infield.

For some Hong Kong residents, gambling seemed the only way to celebrate the millennium. “This is the perfect atmosphere for racing,” said Wilson Chan, a local businessman who lost money on the first seven races of the evening but was sure he would win it all back on the main event.

Albert Cheng, a popular local radio host, said horse racing symbolized stability in this former British colony, which reverted to Chinese rule two years ago. “Deng Xiaoping promised us that the dancing would go on and the races would go on after the handover,” Mr. Cheng said, paraphrasing a now legendary remark by the late Chinese leader.

The Millennium Cup capped an evening of festivities that featured performances by several of Hong Kong’s biggest film and pop stars, including Jackie Chan, Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh. Mr. Chan served as the clown prince of the evening – singing, dancing and mugging with all the cheerful exuberance he brings to roughing up bad guys in movies like “Rumble in the Bronx.”

Of less interest to the star-crazed audience, Hong Kong’s chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, led a countdown of the final seconds of 1999. Mr. Tung then slipped away to the Hong Kong Convention Center, where he caught a Whitney Houston concert.

Ms. Houston performed at one of the evening’s hot tickets, a dusk-to-dawn party hosted by Richard Li, the son of the Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing. The younger Mr. Li only decided to hold the bash a month ago, and his organizers worked frantically around the clock to book marquee performers and ready a dinner for 1,000.

Mr. Li, 33, was not modest about his ambitions. The evening was advertised as “Ultimate Millennium Party – Utopia.” In addition to the usual New Year’s Eve trappings, Mr. Li produced a laser show on the grounds of his future technology office park, Cyberport, which was telecast to the guests inside the center. The fees for Ms. Houston and the other performers alone totaled more than $2.5 million.

For Mr. Li to assemble one of Hong Kong’s most sought-after New Year’s Eve parties from a standing start in less than a month is a testament to his own drive. But it also reflects the long shadow of his father. At 76, Li Ka-shing remains the city’s most powerful businessman.

Across Victoria Harbor, the Regent Hotel vied for the status of gaudiest party. Famous for its lavish celebration of Hong Kong’s handover in 1997, the Regent converted its entire harborfront hotel into a stage set that chronicled the 20th century, with ballrooms and restaurants decorated in period styles.

At midnight, nearly 3,000 guests gazed out of the hotel’s floor-to-ceiling windows toward Hong Kong island, where the already dramatic skyline had been transformed in a dizzying light show. Brilliant hundred-foot lighted dragons wrapped themselves around buildings, while the numerals 2 0 0 0 flashed on several skyscrapers.

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1/1/00: Around the world –
Solemnity and flash in the land of Jesus

By Deborah Sontag and William A. Orme Jr.

In a beautiful, almost ethereal scene, about 2,000 Christians quietly ascended the Mount of Olives as midnight approached. Following a lighted crucifix, they carried votive candles that flickered in the still darkness of a city devoid of any official celebration of the millennium.

At the top, they planted the crucifix and gathered round, moved by the serenity. Then, switching in a flash from the sublime to the cheesy, it turned into a Dick Clark New Year’s Eve special with a Fellini-esque cast, set in the heart of the Holy Land.

There, a Franciscan priest stepped onto a rickety sound stage and into an emcee persona. Beckoning the crowd closer, he led a heavily accented English countdown to midnight. An amplified electronic keyboard let loose a bad disco version of “Auld Lang Syne.” And the people, from the Italian nuns to the Catholic church group from Texas, all ran for cover as sparks from a fireworks display rained on their moment of faith.

“Very beautiful, the fireworks, but very, very close,” said Sister Elisa, a Spanish nun, as she brushed a spark from her habit.

Compared with the festivities around the world, at ground zero in the land where Jesus lived and died, the celebration was a modest, even rinky-dink, affair. Midnight marked just another day in the year 5760 on the Jewish calendar and 1420 on the Islamic one. Most of Jerusalem was shuttered; the Israeli government staged no events.

Bethlehem was another story. Manger Square was packed, a Palestinian block party par excellence, culminating in a resounding fireworks show that coincided with the release of 2,000 doves for peace. Stunned, the doves crashed and bumped their way into the night, somewhat startled and tentative symbols, but the crowd was elated.

Like Manger Square, the rocky hillside of the Mount of Olives, venerated by Jews for its ancient cemetery and by Christians as a place where Jesus preached and prayed, was heavily guarded by security officials.

But it could not have been more peaceful. The faithful lined up on the steps of the Church of All Nations, praying in many languages and singing Latin hymns as they gazed on the spectacularly lit Old City.

“It’s a time of looking forward to the future with hope, and not toward disaster and doom and all that,” said the Rev. Mitchell Pacwa of Dallas.

Not long after midnight, the foreigners scattered, back into their hotels, tour buses and taxis, leaving only the few Palestinians walking home and the many Israeli soldiers packing up. Norma Sakhel, a Palestinian Catholic, descended the mount with a group of friends. “Look at them,” she said, smiling at the Israelis. “They were protecting us. Protecting us from what?

“Those who expected violence are those who do not believe in God,” she said.

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1/1/00: Around the nation –
Citywide spectacular lights up Hollywood

By Todd S. Purdum

Hollywood, the semi-real place that helped the 20th century shape so much of its own image, bid it farewell tonight with a citywide spectacular of song and showmanship, kitsch and multiculturalism grandly intended to herald the emerging Los Angeles of the next millennium.

Perhaps inevitably, the icon of choice was not a microchip, a container ship, a freeway or even a digital video camera, but the hoariest symbol of local self-promotion: the HOLLYWOOD sign.

At the edge of midnight, Mayor Richard J. Riordan of Los Angeles and Jay Leno, the host of the “Tonight” show, were scheduled to flip a switch to light each letter of the sign in a sequential countdown, to be shown on local and world television and beamed to five separate parties from the urban Crenshaw district to the suburban San Fernando Valley.

In the end, the lighting was still scheduled, but had been scaled back. A laser-light show and a drop by synchronized skydivers were canceled in deference to dry weather that had created fire hazards in the hills below the sign (though it rained off and on today).

Another impediment came from homeowners, who had opposed lighting the sign, which was originally built to advertise a residential housing development called Hollywoodland in the 1920s and was last lighted during the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

Only residents and their guests were allowed to drive into the neighborhood tonight, in hopes of holding down parking and traffic chaos.

“We’re in a very dry season,” said Noelia Rodriguez, the deputy mayor of Los Angeles and Mr. Riordan’s chief spokeswoman. “The fire hazards certainly played into it. The last thing we need is to torch the Hollywood sign.”

The festivities began this afternoon with a musical celebration dubbed Opus 21, in which churches, choirs and other groups began a simultaneous sounding of bells, cymbals, gongs and shofar.

By midafternoon, pouring rain and minor street flooding had scattered a crowd of several hundred people from Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, where the theme was “The Global Village.” A street fair on Grand Avenue featured face painters, a Ferris wheel and considerably fewer than the 2,000 marching band members that had been promised.

“So far, so good,” said Linda Miller, who came from nearby Torrance, Calif., with her husband, Dave, to watch their daughter march in the band.

“I kind of wish it didn’t have to rain.” Surveying the crowd, Mrs. Miller added: “It’s a little thin. I think they were a little light on the advertising.”

A few blocks away, on Olvera Street, the site of the city’s original Spanish settlement, crowds were thicker.

This being Los Angeles, there had to be at least one glitzy event, and a private party on a lot at Paramount Studios was the A-ticket tonight, a benefit dinner for 560 people intended to raise $1 million for the Los Angeles Public Library.

With tables costing $25,000, food by Wolfgang Puck, music by Frank Sinatra Jr. and a backyard view of the Hollywood sign, the event was also to honor Lew Wasserman, the founder of MCA, as Hollywood’s “Man of the Century.”

Giant video screens linked this exclusive party to the more populist ones around the city, which were also to get a special treat: excerpts of a concert at the new Staples Center arena featuring the Eagles and Jackson Browne.

“I consider myself to be working tonight,” said Janet Karatz, the chairwoman of the charity dinner. “And I can’t imagine wanting to do anything else.”

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1/1/00: Around the nation –
Bilingual celebrations in a border boomtown

By Jim Yardley

The last day of the 1900s arrived like any other at the foot of International Bridge No. 1: old women and cowboys, teenagers and tourists, all of them and thousands of others crossed back and forth from Mexico as if the notion of two countries were mostly an inconvenience not of their making.

“It’s like it was one city,” said Terry Medinilla, a salesman at El Porvenir, a clothing store that depends on customers walking across the bridge from Mexico. “We can’t be without them, and they can’t be without us.”

So, naturally, Laredo and its Mexican sister city, Nuevo Laredo, decided to ring in the year 2000 together, with a ceremony shortly before midnight above the waters of the Rio Grande that divide them. With an intended dose of symbolism, the two mayors planned to meet in the middle of the closed bridge and embrace, a reminder of the artifice of boundaries created by a line on a map or, for that matter, by a tick of a clock.

“We want to remind the two countries how important our people are, and the role they play for the economies of the country, both sides,” Mayor Betty Flores of Laredo said earlier in the day.

Indeed, the future arrived in Laredo in 1994 with the North American Free Trade Agreement. Even if prosperity now smells a lot like truck exhaust, Nafta has made Laredo the busiest cargo crossing point on the border and transformed a city once called the poorest in the nation into one whose population has doubled to 200,000 since 1990.

“Some people refer to our town as the biggest truck stop in the nation,” said Maria Eugenia Guerra, the outspoken publisher of the monthly newspaper LareDos.

The result is a city on the make whose many contradictions were laid bare as it rang in the new year. Its new rich, many of them recently arrived executives from sprouting border industries, gathered at private parties, like the ones at the La Posada Hotel and the local country club ringed by expensive new homes. Yet in the old neighborhoods of shacks and shanties, families held more modest fiestas or trickled down to the free party at a city park beside the Rio Grande.

Just across the river from the party, a huge red, white and green Mexican flag fluttered in the breeze. The night before, as pedestrians with the appropriate documentation passed back and forth over the bridge, two men in their underwear could be seen wading across the Rio Grande. They each held a bundle of clothes above the water as they reached the American side of the river and disappeared.

No one on the bridge seemed to notice or care. A few blocks away, on the Mexican side of the river in Nuevo Laredo, a dinner crowd ate at the El Dorado Restaurant. Mexican cowboys in dusty blue jeans and white hats at one table, drinking beer and listening to a Mexican band, even as a John Denver song played on a tape in the background. Two American women wearing expensive jewelry sat at another table, while two young American men flirted with a table of even younger women. In a corner, a tourist fed her baby in an Italian stroller as her husband ate a plate of cabrito, or goat.

Here on the border, the 21st century has arrived.

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1/1/00: Around the nation –
Quiet, gentle passage on the Illinois Prairie

By Dirk Johnson

As darkness shrouded the fields, Bill Lenschow milked the cows and finished his chores, then sat down with his wife, Kathy, to a special dinner of steak and shrimp.

With lights blazing in their house on Washington Place, the Newquist children played bingo and card games with their parents, Tammy and Howard.

In a hospital on Edward Street, Jeri Delaney clasped the hand of her husband, Patrick, who is recovering from a stroke, gave him a kiss and told him that she loved him.

In this small town on the prairie, people tended to mark the passing of the 20th century in gentle, personal ways.

It was a time to be grateful, said John Garman, 62, who went to Mass and then settled in to watch college football on television.

“It’s a wonderful time,” said Mr. Garman, who lives in a five-story housing development for the elderly, known here as “the high-rise.” “There is peace on earth.”

Lillie Jackson, 73, Mr. Garman’s neighbor, remembered a New Year’s Eve from her childhood when she played with a doll that she had made of a corn cob, with string pulled from a burlap sack for the hair.

“That was a time,” Ms. Jackson said, “when people didn’t expect so much.”

Mary Kate Diedrich, 9, and her brother, Ryan, 8, readied their noisemakers for the celebration in the living room of the farmhouse – they were doing a countdown at 10 p.m. – and tried to imagine life 100 years ago. Their great-grandmother, Ruth Logan, had explained just the other day how different things had been.

Told that women could not vote and were expected to stay home, Mary Kate said she had other plans. “I want to be president,” she said.

There was no celebration on State Street, the main avenue through town. But some people, like Debbie Saalfeld, a 52-year-old teacher, danced to the music of a disc jockey at the Stratford Inn.

Steve and Nony Roush went to dinner at Johnny’s Char House, the new place out on “the four-lane,” as people still called the highway that leads to the neighboring town, DeKalb. George and Trish Diedrich, the parents of Mary Kate and Ryan, slipped away for a toast at the Hinks, a neighborhood tavern.

But for Mr. and Mrs. Lenschow, whose cows need to be milked before dawn, millennium or not, the year would pass without much thunder.

“When you get up at 4 a.m.,” Mr. Lenschow said. “You don’t stay out too late.”

Almost everyone remembered dreaming about the year 2000 as children.

“I remember thinking, ‘Boy, I’m going to be old,’” said Mr. Roush, 50, with a chuckle. “And, well, I guess I am.”

Bishop Joseph Thomas, the leader of the Israel of God Church on North Avenue, who was born in 1903, planned to stay on the straight and narrow. He walked around the corner to the house of a friend, Lessie, who was having a party.

Despite the revelry, Bishop Thomas was staying away from vices – alcohol and cigars – just as always.

“That’s how I got to be 97 years old,” he said.

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1/1/00: Around the nation –
A first look at 2000 with little fanfare

By Carey Goldberg

The pastel sky over the Bay of Fundy darkened from peach glow to dim lavender. Taps sounded; the flag descended; and there came the soft thunder of a muffled stampede: hearty applause from more than 300 pairs of gloved and mittened hands.

That is how, at 3:57 p.m. today, this easternmost town in the continental United States bade farewell to the last day of the 1990s, with a bone-chilling ceremony at the candy-cane-striped lighthouse at West Quoddy Head, the easternmost point of this easternmost town. A children’s chorus did its tentative best, politicians spoke, and everybody went home for hot chocolate.

“This is Maine’s version of Times Square, right here in Lubec, Maine,” said Representative John Baldacci.

Neither Mr. Baldacci nor anybody else seemed to think the Maine version came off the worse in that comparison.

A town of about 1,800, miles from the nearest traffic light, Lubec is heartily exploiting the prime viewing of the new year that its easternmost position affords. National media coverage has brought visitors from as far as Virginia and Manhattan for Saturday’s dawn ceremony, and the caps and T-shirts reading “First Light 2000” and suchlike have been selling fast.

But the ceremonies, and the trinkets, and the town itself are unmistakably homespun, from the festive baked bean supper to the festive polar bear dip to the festive bonfire at the Frog Pond, and that was the core of their appeal to many visitors, more than any geographic distinction.

“It’s a small-town celebration, it’s unique,” said Brett Golladay, 20, a student at the College of William and Mary, explaining why she and her friend Dan Degnan had driven 15 hours to get here. “I wanted to do something unique for the new year.”

Part of the homespun appeal is that while they are happy to have visitors and attention, townspeople are too sensible to make much of this millennial moment.

“I hate to be a party pooper but it’s just another day,” said Hazel Avery, a volunteer with the town’s historical society. She was helping the society at the craft fair at the school gym, where handknit booties could be bought for $4. She planned to skip Saturday’s dawn ceremony.

“I’m going to stay where it’s nice and warm,” she said.

At the town post office, clerks offered a special “Last Light of the Old Millennium” cancellation, but Edward Fletcher, a fisherman stopping in on an errand, was not getting one. Nor was he excited by the whole First Light thing.

“I get up every morning and see the sun come up, it’s no big deal,” he said. “When I get up tomorrow I’m still going to have bills, and I’m still going to be married to the same woman, so what’s the big deal?”

But to more excitable types, the Lubec area offered multiple millennial thrills.

Peter and Sandy Kaynor, of Peru, Me., planned to celebrate midnight in New Brunswick, in the Atlantic time zone, then cross the bridge to Calais, Me., to celebrate in the Eastern time zone, then, Mr. Kaynor said, “catch a quick nap and drive down here for dawn.”

There has been a bit of dispute over exactly where the first rays of 2000 will hit in the continental United States. Some hardy souls planned to climb Cadillac Mountain near Bar Harbor, Me., saying they believed it would get the first rays because of its height. Nantucket Island also put forth a claim of first-light primacy.

According to the official Lubec Millennium Web site, the Naval Observatory said that sunrise in the three spots would be nearly simultaneous, at about 7:04, but that Lubec would in fact be first. Just to be sure, people in each spot plan to stay in contact by cellular phone and announce when they first see the sunrise. The competition, the Web site emphasized, is friendly.

There is a serious side to Lubec’s millennial hoopla, however. The town may call itself a “sleepy fishing village,” but the subtext is that it depends on a troubled industry, and it is a poor town, with a per capita income of under $9,000, in one of the poorest counties in New England.

Some residents say they hope the attention paid Lubec this New Year’s, while it might not persuade many to visit in midwinter, might pay off next summer in tourism.

“It’s really put us on the map because of this,” said Junia Lehman, owner of West Quoddy Gifts.

Some brave travelers, though, were not about to wait for summer and miss this special dawn.

“We just wanted to do something a little different, and it’s a really comfortable, down-home place,” said Jonathan Herzog, a Manhattan lawyer, who made the 10-hour journey with his friend Allen Roth, a real-estate developer, and his dog, Nash.

Times Square “has too many people,” Mr. Herzog said, adding, “That’s only for out-of-towners.”

173

1/1/00: Around the nation –
Washington crowd flocks to the Mall

By David Stout

Although it had seen many huge crowds over the years, for inaugurations, Fourth of July fireworks, protests and parades, never in memory had the Mall in the nation’s capital drawn multitudes for New Year’s. But on this mild winter night with a lovely sunset, hundreds of thousands of people here thronged to the Mall for a long-planned celebration on the last New Year’s Eve of the 1900s.

“It’s a very friendly crowd,” Sgt. Frank R. Onolfi of the United States Park Police said as afternoon turned to evening.

But by shortly after 10 p.m., there were so many people trying to get close to the Lincoln Memorial, the focal point of the observances where President Clinton was about to speak, that sections of temporary fencing were pushed down along Constitution Avenue. Multitudes stormed through the gaps instead of being funneled through several security points, where the police had been checking for alcohol.

Police officers saw that the throngs could not be repulsed without the risk of serious injury or disorder, so they let the people come through. Another line of fences stopped them close to the reflecting pool, and the police said order was soon restored. No serious injuries were reported.

Early in the evening, it was clear that the crowd was befitting of a cosmopolitan city and a changing America. The celebration drew people of different languages and accents, from other countries, from all over the United States and from Washington itself. People who live in the District of Columbia tend to be blase about motorcades and potentates and ceremonies, but many Washingtonians thought tonight’s event was something they could not miss.

“We normally stay home on New Year’s, but we had to see the millennium celebration,” Thea Anderson said. She and her husband, Clarence, who have lived here for 27 years, were at first a little nervous about venturing out, given the talk of danger, however remote. But in the end they took the Metro downtown, and were glad they did.

Patrick and Jane Wilson of Greenville, S.C., arrived this morning, early enough to get close to Mr. Clinton at an event before midday. Mrs. Wilson was delighted to get pictures of the president, and the couple were pleased with the crowd-control measures, which they found efficient without being oppressive.

“Everything is so laid-back,” Mrs. Wilson said. “There’s no pushing or shoving.”

Many people at the Mall tonight wore party hats. One merchandise tent offered “millennium celebration” certificates. An entrepreneur hawked T-shirts labeled, “I survived Y2K.” The going rate was $5.

For a relative few, the evening called for tuxedos and formal gowns – proper attire for the White House Millennium Dinner, where the first family greeted guests before leaving for fireworks festivities on the Mall.

Joggers threaded their way nonchalantly through the Mall celebrators. There was lots of room, the Mall being one of the jewels that make this a pedestrian-friendly city.

For all the anticipation, some people were just not getting it. Connie Liang took her children – one 18 months, the other 3 years. “My children are too young to remember this,” she said, “but at least they will be able to say they were here.”

174

1/1/00: At the crossroads –
How many in a throng? Crunching the numbers

By Andy Newman

Half a million? A million? A zillion? The world will never know how many humans squeezed their way into the Designated Watching Zones around Times Square to see the ball drop, but it is not impossible to estimate how many people could have been there.

Around 11:20 p.m., the mayor said the crowd was “pushing two million.” But a calculation shows that the theoretical capacity of the area open to spectators was considerably less.

Keep in mind, this calculation does not include Central Park, where the mayor said spectators were congregating. Nor does it include those watching from skyscraper windows or peering at video screens along side streets, or simply partying somewhere in the vicinity of mid-Manhattan.

Here’s the math: According to practitioners of crowd size estimation, an average standing person will fit in a square about 17 inches on each side, or about two square feet. The city was only allowing spectators into pens that took up about half of the pavement area along each block of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, between 34th Street and 59th Street. But to take the most-crowded-case scenario, assume that every inch of pavement along Broadway and Seventh, as well as a few feet of each side street, was filled with people.

A typical block of Seventh Avenue around Times Square is 265 feet long and 60 feet wide, for a total of about 15,900 square feet – enough room for 7,950 people. A typical block of Broadway is a bit longer – about 275 feet, enough space for 8,250 people.

Adding up all the blocks of Broadway and Seventh Avenue between 34th Street and Central Park South, including the trapezoid where Broadway and Seventh intersect, and figuring 20 feet or so of cushion on each side street, the total capacity of the viewing area is – approximately – 430,333.4 people.

There was considerable spillover onto Eighth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas north of 42nd Street. But even if those streets were also filled, there would be room only for another 265,000 or so spectators, for a total of about 700,000.

175

1/1/00: At the crossroads –
Joy vanquishes fear in square, and amid the vast throng, a marriage proposal

By Jane Gross

In a rainbow blizzard of confetti and a symphony of neon and fireworks, a mighty crush of New Year’s merrymakers welcomed the year 2000 in Times Square, the world’s most famous intersection.

Undeterred by fears of terrorism or Y2K havoc, the Times Square crowd showed every sign of being the biggest and noisiest ever, bent on watching history happen, watching themselves on huge video screens and hoping that friends and relatives were watching them on television at home.

After the ball atop 1 Times Square dropped at midnight, a jubilant Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani admitted that he had been nervous about the threat of terrorism or Y2K upheaval “right until the last minute.” But the day’s festivities had gone without a hitch.

“I am so proud of all the people of New York City,” he said. “I am so proud of the most diverse city in the world. We can have a great celebration and we can do it peacefully and decently.”

As the revelers whooped and hollered, hugged and kissed, one couple made the ultimate hopeful statement about the new millennium. At the stroke of midnight, Alex Buxton asked Sicely Schiffgen to marry him, with what looked like a four-carat diamond and platinum ring.

The most die-hard of revelers arrived a day ahead of schedule, camping out on a chill, rainy night in cardboard huts in order to claim prime viewing spots for the party to end all parties.

They won the bragging rights for being in Times Square at 7 in the morning, when 2000 arrived in the islands of the South Pacific, 17 time zones away. At that moment, as sanitation workers tried to haul away remains of the soggy campsites, the 83,000-watt Waterford crystal ball was hoisted to the top of its tower to the strains of Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.”

Tamar Stratyevskaya, 23, could have used a hot shower right about then. She had spent the night, with only a quilt to warm her, in the makeshift village of cardboard lean-tos, just the sort of encampment mayors from coast to coast have been trying to dismantle.

“Everyone I know thought I was crazy,” said Ms. Stratyevskaya, a resident of Washington Heights. “But actually, it’s kind of fun.”

Other less compulsive revelers came in waves throughout the day: families who wanted a taste of the excitement before nightfall; immigrants eager to ring in the New Year twice, once along with their homeland and once in their new home; and tourists and New Yorkers alike who wedged themselves into spectator pens to await the midnight saturnalia.

As always, the college crowd, doing a cold-weather imitation of spring break in Fort Lauderdale, grew wild and crazy – or wilder and crazier – as the witching hour approached. Mugging for the television cameras, throwing each other in the air as if in a mosh pit, smelling suspiciously like contraband alcohol and marijuana, they tirelessly welcomed another year of hijinks.

Kamran Syed, a 19-year-old student at the University of Southern California film school, had flown from Los Angeles by himself to see the ball drop. “Hoo wah!,” he shouted, noting that he had just downed three Bombay Sapphire martinis and had been awake for 31 hours.

Carlos Reina, another solo traveler, who drove all the way from northern Mexico, also had had too much to drink, too little to eat and not enough sleep. “I hope I die here,” he said, swilling beer. “I’m so happy.”

But not all the party animals were men. Three United Airlines stewardesses were as close to the ball as a spectator could get, near the Armed Forces recruiting station on the narrow traffic island at 43rd Street separating Seventh Avenue and Broadway.

“I’m cute, that’s all you need to know,” said Nancy Lewis, 25, of San Diego. “I flirted my way past the police. That’s how I got here.”

In years past, the rowdy countdown to midnight was the soul of the Times Square celebration. But for the year 2000 celebration, led by the Times Square Business Improvement District, and consonant with the transformation of this once-squalid triangle, a family-friendly daylong celebration was planned.

Two years in the making, with all the special effects of a Disney movie and the bravura of a Broadway play, Times Square 2000, as it was called, was an hour-by-hour, time zone-by-time zone evocation of the cultures of each region of the world.

That made it possible for people who would never venture to Times Square on New Year’s Eve to sample the historic party.

Erin Rogers and Troy Blakely, sweethearts living in New York for less than a year, ventured forth from their East Side apartment shortly before noon, the New Year in Indonesia. “We came to see it before it got crazy,” said Ms. Rogers, a special education teacher. “Someday we can tell people we were there at 12.”

Another New Yorker with a simple game plan was Diane Keller, a social worker. She would stay long enough to shoot one roll of film, she said, and then head for the sales at Lord & Taylor.

Rosalia Aragon, with her 10-year-old son and several colleagues from work, did Times Square in under two hours, watching the New Year arrive in Southeast Asia. Then they all took the train back to New Jersey for quiet celebrations at home.

Mrs. Aragon would have liked to have seen her home country Mexico usher in the New Year, but that would not come until after midnight. Kazutaka Noma and his family were luckier – they were able to celebrate at 10 a.m., under a hail of pink confetti, meant to resemble cherry blossoms, just as his parents were popping Champagne in Japan.

Tourists, as usual, seemed to dominate the crowd, like the Thompsett family from Kentucky, who were saving money by staying in a Holiday Inn in Poughkeepsie. They reached Times Square at mid-afternoon, when spectator pens were already full up to 47th Street. There, they claimed a spot, which they dared not abandon, with a decent view and a barricade to lean on when they got tired.

“I told them it’s going to be long and boring,” said John Thompsett, an Army recruiter, as his children, Aaron, 13, and Lillian, 15, rolled their eyes. “I’m trying to get them educated in once-in-a-lifetime things.”

Dr. Janet Mouradian, a surgical pathologist at Cornell Medical Center and an unlikely denizen of Times Square on this particular night, kept herself busy editing an Armenian play, written by her New Year’s companion, Herand Markarian.

Dr. Mouradian, an Armenian immigrant, had braved this scene once before, in 1964, her first year in America. “I do what I enjoy in life and there’s only one millennium,” she said.

Looking down on the square at intervals through the day and evening was Peter Jennings, the anchorman for ABC-TV’s 24-hour broadcast. He would stand pressed to the bulletproof windows of the studio, staring at the mobs below. They, in turn, would wave to him, seeking the perfect position in front of an ABC camera so they could simultaneously wave to the folks back home.

The pantomime was a perfect metaphor. New Year’s Eve here, despite the extravagant performance – dancers, puppets, souvenirs, sound-and-light shows – is all about seeing and being seen. Thus the run on camcorders and disposable cameras at the electronics stores along Broadway. And the posters (Mom, We Made It Fine, Trust Jesus, Sammy Loves Christine) raised high to any camera nearby.

Many people came prepared with supplies to keep them comfortable, occupied and fed: beach chairs and blankets, chess sets and mystery novels, and munchies of all kinds. One family turned a carton upside down to make an ad hoc picnic table, then unpacked a loaf of bread, jars of peanut butter and jelly and a half gallon of milk.

The crowd for the most part was jolly. But not Shelley Brown, from Maryland, who sat sniffling and hacking in a lawn chair, wrapped head to toe in scarves and blankets. At her feet was an overnight bag, stuffed with tissues and cough syrup.

Mrs. Brown had come down with the flu at the most inopportune of times. But she didn’t want to disappoint her husband, Ryan. “I’ve been talking about this for the last seven years,” he said. “I grew up watching Dick Clark on television and thought it would be so cool. We had to be here.”

176

1/1/00: A peaceful party –
Primed for a seat in front of the tube

By David W. Chen

It was late afternoon in Hoboken, N.J. He was wearing a plastic, cobalt-colored top hat advertising “Millennium 2000.” She was donning a pair of plastic, glow-in-the-dark glasses proclaiming “2000.” And together, Jeff and Stacy Vitale looked like they were primed for a party for the ages tonight.

Their destination? Not Times Square, since they had worked all day in Midtown Manhattan, buying the millennial gear along the way.

Instead, they were heading to one of the most crowded spots tonight in this hip city: Blockbuster Video.

“I want to rent ‘Mickey Blue Eyes,’” said Mrs. Vitale, a 30-year-old accountant.

The Vitales were far from lone wolves. Throughout Hoboken a surprisingly large number of people said that they would celebrate what was supposed to be the grandest New Year’s Eve of all time in regular, couch-potato fashion.

All day and into the early evening hours, people were behaving as if this night were no different than any other weekend night: picking up groceries, grabbing some beer and wine, ordering take-out food.

Some people said that they were making a statement, of sorts, by refusing to fall for what has been a nonstop blitz of hype.

And some people, like Cybele Emanuelle, a 28-year-old Web designer, had to work or be on call. So Ms. Emanuelle said it was no big deal that her evening’s agenda included “The Blair Witch Project.”

“It’s a Blockbuster night,” shrugged Ms. Emanuelle, who was eying a bottle of Champagne at Sparrow Wine & Liquor on Washington Street. But Saturday, she added, will be a different story: she’ll be going to a party.

177

1/1/00: A peaceful party –
Their hopes and fears know no season

By Christopher S. Wren

“If I could erase this year and do it over, I would,” said Anthony Boyce, a heroin addict who wanted to check into a detoxification program and celebrate the dawn of the new year by sleeping through it. “I need to clear my head and not think about what to do next,” said Mr. Boyce, 47. “When you’re carrying a load on your shoulders 24 hours a day, it gets to where you can’t think of a way out.”

At the Positive Health Project, a walk-up sanctuary at 305 West 37th St., some of the homeless and destitute shared their modest hopes and considerable fears as a few blocks away Times Square was being readied for New Year’s Eve. The project dispenses more than 13,000 clean syringes and 36,000 condoms a month, along with advice about staying healthy on the street.

Dolores Serina, 35, said that she had to move into a women’s shelter after her husband went to prison for selling drugs and city officials declared their basement room an illegal dwelling. “Going into the New Year, I’m scared,” Ms. Serina said.

“A lot of these people haven’t slept last night,” she said. “They depend on this place for safety.”

For the first time, the project’s executive director closed the needle exchange and other services this New Year’s Eve for fear that his drug users would get swept up by the officers patrolling the celebration at Times Square.

Mr. Serina said, “I look around and I see people spending money on all these little gizmo-gadgets and I say, ‘My God, if they only gave me a dollar, I’d be all right.’”

178

1/1/00: A peaceful party –
In the city’s bunker, much ado about not much as the celebrations proceed

By David M. Halbfinger

The city’s $13 million crisis center suddenly fell to a hush. Dozens of beefy officials wearing uniforms or windbreakers or suits – the mark of real power – stood up from behind their computer consoles and stared in awed silence at what the video monitors were showing.

They, themselves, were on TV, in the background of the latest briefing for the media. What was being said was much less interesting.

As midnight drew near, the city’s preparations for a New Year’s Eve disaster were beginning to look almost like overkill, at least as viewed from the inside of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s so-called bunker, the hardened command and communications center billed as able to withstand most bullets, some bombs and all bugs – the year 2000 kind.

Fears of widespread computer, power and electronic-system failures around the world had fizzled, leaving the mayor’s aides to relay the most mundane incidents, like a cut chain-link fence at an electrical substation in Jamaica, Queens. (It was garden-variety criminal mischief, not an attempt at sabotage, officials said.)

At an early evening briefing, Mr. Giuliani said there had been more bomb threats than usual yesterday – 16, as compared with 9 on the average day – but that all had been checked out immediately and “proved bogus.”

Jerome Hauer, director of the office of emergency management, and Deputy Mayor Joseph Lhota said at 11 p.m. that there were no more police and emergency medical service calls than usual, that banks were reporting no greater use of automated teller machines than usual, and that the higher-than-usual temperature in Times Square had left the city’s medical stations underused.

With so little in the way of emergencies to manage, officials in the bunker exasperated the 75 or so journalists watching through a glass wall yesterday by repeatedly lowering a screen installed to block any view. Only when television reporters went live, and when the mayor appeared, did the screen get raised.

Asked what secret business was being conducted behind the screen, Mr. Lhota joked that he did not know – he was in an adjoining room, smoking cigarettes.

But when Sen. Charles Schumer appeared in the press room just after midnight, the screen was abruptly lowered again, so that Mr. Schumer could not be photographed with the important-looking backdrop.

Senator Schumer, a Democrat, praised Mayor Giuliani for his handling of the millennium celebration, saying, “I think he had the right blend of being careful, but at the same time not scaring people.”

But when he was finished, television and radio reporters suddenly discovered that they had not been able to record his remarks.

Someone, it turned out, had cut the audio.

179

1/1/00: A peaceful party –
A day in the spotlight: No naps on the agenda

By Elisabeth Bumiller

Earlier in the day, the mayor, who gave himself the job of ubiquitous master of ceremonies of the city’s new year celebration, said he began his last morning of the 1900s at 5:30 a.m. having trouble getting his lights on. “I was convinced that it was Y2K,” the mayor said, but “actually I was sleepy.”

Mr. Giuliani spent much of his day in front of cameras. He started at 6:40 a.m. with a news conference at the All-Star Cafe in Times Square, then had interviews from 7 to 8 a.m. with NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox News. He also had two news conferences at the Office of Emergency Management’s Command Center at the World Trade Center.

But he may have been tired by the time he did his weekly radio call-in show. “Now we’re going to go to Carl in Richmond Hill,” Mr. Giuliani said shortly after 11 a.m. “Hello?” said Carl. “Hillary?” responded the mayor, causing listeners to think for a brief moment that perhaps the first lady was on the line and that there would be fireworks before the ones over the city at midnight.

Mr. Giuliani’s spokeswoman, Sunny Mindel, explained later that the mayor had been looking at a computer screen displaying the next caller’s name and the subject of the call, which was evidently Hillary Clinton, and had inadvertently switched the names. Ms. Mindel said the mayor had not had a nap, did not plan to have a nap and “has all the sleep that he needs to have.”

180

1/1/00: A peaceful party –
Getting them ready for the big event

By Alex Kuczynski

Yesterday afternoon, Margaret Mullen, a 29-year-old hairdresser at the Jean-Claude Biguine hair salon on 45th Street and Avenue of the Americas, stared out at the thousands of people crowded around the plate-glass windows of the salon and the conga line of young women waiting for Ms. Mullen’s tonsorial skills at the front desk.

“All these people need our help,” Ms. Mullen said wearily.

Ms. Mullen was just one of thousands of people plying the beauty trade yesterday in New York City, just a dutiful handmaiden doing the coifing, manicuring, waxing and whatnot for the rest of womanhood.

“Last week, it was empty,” Ms. Mullen said. “Everyone was away. This week, I get to make everyone else in the world beautiful for their parties.”

Jennifer Kazawic, an advertising executive with the Odyssey Channel, said she had wrangled tickets to a party at MTV headquarters. Rada Tyutyunikova, a colorist at the salon, said she wanted to go home.

Ms. Mullen, who lives with her boyfriend, a professional dogwalker, and her 4-year-old daughter in Yorkville, said that her plans were simple: she was going home to have dinner.

“It won’t be very exciting,” Ms. Mullen said. “But at 12 o’ clock, Kayla will throw stuff out of the window and scream, and that will make her happy. And sometimes, if you look out my mother’s window at the right angle, you can see the fireworks, or something that looks like fireworks, a little bit.”