Thousands will brave the cold, ringing in the New Year with ball drop in downtown Buffalo, but the signature event is about more than just the countdown.
"It's about joy, connection, and community spirit," says Ekua Mends-Aidoo, especially when, she says, it comes to raising awareness about and raising money for the Police Athletic League and the PAL’s work with inner city youth.
The ball drop is also an opportunity to bring people who might not otherwise come downtown to experience the city's core. Over the last 38 years, the New Year's ball drop has become a part of what it means to be a Buffalonian. And that, wrapped up with the meaning of New Year, makes sponsoring the ball drop a priority for M&T Bank, says Regional President Tracy Woodrow.
"A fresh start, a new day, a hopeful opportunity to lift each other up and make a difference in other people's lives," is how Woodrow sees the new year, and celebrating in downtown is a great chance for M&T's 6,500 downtown employees to share that part of the city with more Western New Yorkers than usual.
The Ball Drop Back Drop
The countdown to the new year is just the latest chapter in the history of the Electric Tower. Opened in 1912, the building's design based was based on the Electric Tower which stood at the center of Buffalo's Pan-American Exposition a decade earlier.
Actually built as the headquarters for General Electric, then Niagara Hudson, and later Niagara Mohawk, the Electric Building "dominated Buffalo’s business section," and, according to the Buffalo Times, gave the city "its first metropolitan note," "rearing its magnificent height of sheer dazzling whiteness like a magnificent cloud."
While that makes it sound like the people of 113 years ago didn’t need a glowing ball to spend time looking at the building, long before the New Year's Eve tradition grabbed Buffalo's imagination, the electric tower served as a beacon of early electric media.
Only months after it opened, the lighting coming from the top of the new tower was used to announce to all of Buffalo the winner of the 1912 presidential election. A steady beam to the north meant Howard Taft had been reelected, a steady beam to the south meant Woodrow Wilson was the new president, and a light to the east was a sign that Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose party had won him a return to the White House.
The newspaper ad touting the returns had a slug line they could use again for the ball drop– Come to the Electric Building and let us entertain you.
Happy New Year!
