Okay, first off, I know it’s so easy for the first reaction to be “omg, how could you with the Omicron surge? And I totally get it. I was kind of judgmental of it all happening still. But, please know that I spent *literally* 2 minutes outside. I was double masked with an N95 and a face shield. I was outside of the barricade, outside of the crowd. I literally live here haha. So, let’s hope that precaution was enough! Now, let’s get into it!
If you’ve been a long time reader of the blog, you might know that I have been JUST off the edge of the ball drop 2 years. I used to live in the mid 40s between 6th and 7th, and I was SO close. I might even argue officially ‘closer’ than I am now – but no view of the ball.
And when I moved back for grad school, I very specifically picked a building where I could SEE the ball. So, it became this whole internal struggle of whether I should watch the ball drop. I picked this apartment in large part for the ONE night.
But I also am hardcore being intense to people about being responsible in the pandemic.
All that being said, I went up to the roof a couple of times during the day. There were signs saying all of our public terraces/rooftops in the building were closing at 8, due to New Years.
So, I went to take some videos of the ball – and the crowd – from an above view, to get a sense of it and update my curious friends.
At 7:45 I went back up to the roof to get one last look at things before they were gonna shut it down. (I also wanted to see if it was possible I might be able to secretly stay up there… I could not.)
There were cops and NYC transportation people and all these official people all around my building. They did a full on sweep of the roof at 8 – every little nook and cranny you could think of, and they completely locked it up. And I even asked “had I somehow been able to hide, would I have been able to chill here for the next 4 hours to watch the ball drop?” and they were like “no. We have snipers there, there, there [pointing], and they’d call in there was someone on this roof who needed to be swept.”
So, the roof was a no go. Weirdly, the roof seemed more dangerous than just being downstairs, since too many maskless people were up there. So, I fairly quickly got out of there.
And then I kept seeing everyone’s tweets of how irresponsible it was to be in Times Square. And I thought “oof, I don’t know if I can do this. I can’t be the worst.”
So, I went down around 11pm.
[I can’t directly see the ball from my apartment window, but you can see it right outside my door.]
So, I went down and the whole entire sidewalk was open and the crowds were herded in the middle of the street.
I sat on this big rectangle on the sidewalk until a cop was like “nobody can hang out here until 15 minutes ’til. This area is locked down.”
So, I went back upstairs, and around 11:45, I heard a huge group of people from the apartment next to mine laughing and going down the hall. I remembered how many people were on the roof and how many people live here and just thought “oh boy this might be dangerous!”
I was just gonna skip it so as not to press my luck. I even got in bed, like “just go to sleep.”
But then around 5 minutes ’til or so, I put on masks, goggles, and face shield, slipped on shoes, and ran down the stairs. My doorman was like “geez, just a minutes to spare!”
As soon as I got outside, I was filming another little video of how I wasn’t at all *in* the crowd, and I was just on the sidewalk far behind everyone – even the people who’d come out from my building.
But as SOON as I’d started, the 60 second countdown started and we were off to the races.