Atlas Obscura: Remembering When Americans Picnicked in Cemeteries (April 20, 2018)

During the 19th century, and especially in its later years, snacking in cemeteries happened across the United States. It wasn’t just apple-munching alongside the winding avenues of graveyards. Since many municipalities still lacked proper recreational areas, many people had full-blown picnics in their local cemeteries. The tombstone-laden fields were the closest things, then, to modern-day public parks. [...]

One of the reasons why eating in cemeteries become a “fad,” as some reporters called it, was that epidemics were raging across the country: Yellow fever and cholera flourished, children passed away before turning 10, women died during childbirth. Death was a constant visitor for many families, and in cemeteries, people could “talk” and break bread with family and friends, both living and deceased.[...]

The picnic-and-relaxation trend can also be understood as the flowering of the rural cemetery movement. Whereas American and European graveyards had long been austere places on Church grounds, full of memento mori and reminders not to sin, the new cemeteries were located outside of city centers and designed like gardens for relaxation and beauty. Flower motifs replaced skulls and crossbones, and the public was welcomed to enjoy the grounds.

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Atlas Obscura: How a Guatemalan Town Tackled Its Plastic Problem

Before 2016, San Pedro La Laguna was drowning in plastic pollution that was threatening the fragile ecosystem of Lake Atitlán. The dire need for change crystallized when a solid waste disposal processing plant that was expected to manage a decade of waste was halfway full within six months, mostly with single-use plastics. Rather than build a larger plant—which would’ve been an enormous financial burden on the town and further polluted the lake with debris—Mayor Mauricio Méndez decided to implement a stringent municipal law to encourage lasting, sustainable change. [...]

Villagers initially resisted, as they’d become accustomed to using materials that were now outlawed. To get rid of the single-use plastics already in circulation, leaders of the 13,000-person town went from house to house to talk with villagers about waste management. Residents were wary because they couldn’t afford to purchase biodegradable replacements. The government relieved the community members’ financial burden by collecting all plastic and styrofoam items and trading them for reusable or biodegradable alternatives, completely free-of-charge. [...]

Economic sanctions punish anyone who breaks the law. Individuals must pay 300 GTQ ($40)—a hefty amount considering Guatemala’s average lower-middle-class annual income is $1,619. Companies that use the banned materials face a fine of 15,000 GTQ ($1,940).

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Atlas Obscura: Why Cider Means Something Completely Different in America and Europe

In the American state of New Hampshire, the state beverage of apple cider is like unfiltered apple juice. Usually, mulled spices are added, turning it into a spiced, piping hot drink. But in the famed cider-growing region of Britain’s West Country, cider is a fermented, alcoholic beverage. Look further across Europe and you’ll find that America’s version of apple cider is the outlier—cidre in France and sidra in Spain are both akin to British hard cider, rather than the American mulled beverage. So, how did Americans end up with such a unique form of apple cider? [...]

Cyder was the most commonly produced drink in colonial America—the beverage of choice for most Americans at a time when imbibing water was questionable. Not only was it easy to obtain and affordable to produce, but the fermentation process guaranteed it would be free from disease-causing pathogens, writes Amy Stewart in The Drunken Botanist. Even as Puritans denounced distilled spirits, cider and other low-alcohol products remained in good repute. [...]

But soon, the opportunities of the Industrial Revolution beckoned to millions of immigrants—and a lot of them didn’t want to drink cider. Over 33 million people entered the United States between 1820 and 1920, revolutionizing many American industries. German immigrants became the leaders in brewing and malting, popularizing beer. Coupled with affordable grains grown from the Midwest, beer began to replace cider. By 1900, cider consumption had dropped to a total of 55 million gallons for a country that now had over 76 million people. (While cider was on the decline, beer-making gradually grew more difficult too. World War I diverted grain and altered factory production across the country, and beer producers faced boycotts due to anti-German sentiments.)

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Atlas Obscura: Revisiting the Heyday of California’s ‘Crazy’ Novelty Architecture

The unusual businesses he saw weren’t on some Hollywood backlot, but were California’s classic coterie of mimetic architecture—that is, buildings shaped like, well, anything but buildings. According to Cristina Carbone, a professor of art and architectural history at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, the practice dates back to at least the Renaissance. By the 18th century, says Carbone, who is working on a book on the style, English gardens were sprinkled with follies, such as dining pavilions masquerading as pagodas, churches, and pyramids. In America, the first known example—a six-story wooden elephant named Lucy—rose over the seaside community of Margate, New Jersey, in 1881.

When this style of vernacular architecture landed in California a few decades later, it emerged into a sea of mission-inspired structures. But soon, these roadside curiosities—built with a wink and a whole lot of plaster—were perhaps more densely clustered there than in anywhere else in the world.  [...]

As California’s open spaces were tamed by roads and cars, business owners scrambled to find ways to entice drivers to pull off the highways and reach for their wallets. Automobiles became more widely accessible after World War I, and “the middle class was able to get out, and that had never happened before,” Carbone says. Mimetic buildings were, for a time, a useful tactic—both functional architecture and large, loud advertisement. “If Californians were going to be fully committed to this ‘automania,’” Gebhard writes, “then why not cultivate a set of architectural images which would instantly catch the eye, and which we would continue to remember?” These buildings were “not necessarily near anything terrifically important,” Carbone says, but they could draw the attention of drivers just passing through.

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Atlas Obscura: The Misunderstood History of the Balkans’ Surreal War Memorials

The memorial house on Petrova Gora is one of many hundreds of unusual, oversized monuments that were built by the former Yugoslavia during the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s across the Balkan States. These Yugoslav war memorials—often dubbed “spomeniks” by Western media—have gained a lot of online attention in recent years. However, as viral images, they are increasingly taken out of context.

The monuments are often described as “abandoned” and “forgotten,” or lumped under the catch-all title of “communist monuments.” In reality though, these abstract designs expressed more than mere political affiliations, and many still serve their communities in the same roles they were built for. Few of the spomeniks are forgotten; “orphaned” might be a better word. They stand like children of a vanished state now scattered as memory markers across a post-Yugoslav Balkan landscape. [...]

With their wild and futuristic shapes, the monuments, by design, also looked relentlessly forward to the future. Depicting rockets and towers, fists, flowers, stars and wings, these steel and concrete monoliths didn’t dwell on images of suffering, but rather symbolized broader themes of anti-fascist struggle and the victory of life over death.

Instead of focusing on individuals—a Bosnian hero, a Serb or a Croat—the monuments of multiethnic, socialist Yugoslavia were also designed to celebrate universal ideals. “Brotherhood and Unity” became the slogan of post-war Yugoslavia, and the abstraction of these monuments was a gesture of inclusivity. Often, the monuments were formed from multiple segments that rose together without touching, and yet which, from a distance, might be viewed as one single object, an allegory for Yugoslavia itself.

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Atlas Obscura: The WWI Memorial That Refuses to Glorify War

If this seems obvious now, it certainly wasn’t then. There are Grande Guerre monuments absolutely everywhere you go in France, and not by happenstance. After the war, the French government offered funds to every settlement in France—every city, town, village, hamlet, community—to build a Grande Guerre memorial. I’ve been told that in the entire country, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, only five settlements declined to do so. I cannot name any one of those five, and I’ve never met anyone who can, but even if they do exist, the participation rate was still, effectively, 100 percent. [...]

And that’s the one thing that almost all French Great War memorial statuary has in common: romanticism. Not a trace of fear in the men’s faces, even the dying. They clutch their chests, thrust their arms out toward heaven, call out for their men to carry on!, stare out at the battle still underway. But they are not afraid. They do not experience regret. They may be a few seconds from death, but they are still fiercely alive, and looking only forward, never back. Even the dying figures seem more vibrant than I feel some days, and more noble than I am on my best ones.

That’s not what Landowski was going for. Rather than gone to a better place, he focused on: gone. Those empty dinner chairs, vacant bedrooms. He worked in granite, not marble or terra cotta. It took him 15 years to create eight figures, each standing in for roughly 170,000 poilus killed. They huddle together, eight towering stone men around 25 feet tall, arms hanging down, heads listing forward or to one side, eyes neither open nor closed. A Lebel rifle rests against one; another cradles a machine gun to his chest. The figure next to him carries two sacks full of grenades. Another rests his fingertips on a pick handle. A couple of them still wear their packs. Seven are in uniform; one appears to be naked. They are dead, but alive, but dead. Gone, to be sure, but definitely still right here. He called them Les Fantômes—the phantoms.

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Atlas Obscura: Getting to Know the Bathtub Marys of Somerville, Massachusetts

SOMERVILLE, MASSACHUSETTS DOESN’T ATTRACT MANY pilgrims. Spend enough time walking its narrow streets, though, and you’re guaranteed a particular kind of religious experience. It may reveal itself proudly in a front yard, or sneak up on you in a side yard. But eventually, undoubtedly, you’ll be blessed by the presence of a Bathtub Mary: a sculpture of the Madonna, generally about waist-high, carefully sheltered in its own protective nook. [...]

Bathtub Marys get their name from the structures they’re typically placed in: actual bathtubs, tipped up vertically and dug halfway into the ground to form graceful, arched shelters. Although domestic shrines and home altars are a long-lived Catholic tradition, it’s thought that this particular incarnation began just after World War II, when postwar economic recovery led to a rash of home remodeling. Families installed shower-bathtub combos, and their old claw-footed tubs, which were difficult to recycle, ended up out in the yard, repurposed as religiously inflected lawn art. [...]

Pacini is far from the first Somervillian to be captivated by the statues. Cathy Piantigini, a lifetime resident and children’s librarian, has spent the past few years walking every street in the city in an attempt to map them. A local brewery, Slumbrew, has even put out a limited-edition beer called the Bathtub Mary. (It’s a pale wheat ale.) Some of the city’s newer residents have put their own spin on things—one bathtub arch now houses a toy robot.

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Atlas Obscura: The Hunt for Ukraine’s Toppled Lenin Statues

The toppling of the Bessarabska Lenin led to a phenomenon that has become known as Leninopad, or “Leninfall”—the removal of Lenin statues from around Ukraine. Of course, it wasn’t the first time Soviet monuments had been brought low, as statues had been destroyed as early as 1990. But in the following months the intensity increased—so much so that in February 2014 alone, a total of 376 statues were torn down.

Ukrainians had a lot of statues to work with, but their efforts were diligent and comprehensive. In 1990, when Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union, there were 5,500 Lenin statues around the country, more than in any other former Soviet republic. With the country’s 2015 decommunization laws, which outlawed communist symbols including statues, flags, and Soviet-era place names, there was a mandate to remove the last of the Lenin monuments. Today, none still stand. But they haven’t disappeared. [...]

The afterlife of these statues is the subject of the new photobook from Fuel Publishing, Looking for Lenin. Photographer Niels Ackermann and journalist Sébastien Gobert started the project by searching for the remains of the Bessarabska Square Lenin, and they ended up photographing toppled Lenins across the country. Their goal was not just to see where the physical embodiments of the Soviet past had ended up, but also to discover how Ukrainians felt about the ongoing process of decommunization.

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Atlas Obscura: What’s A Woggin? A Bird, a Word, and a Linguistic Mystery

One of these people was Paul O’Pecko, the Vice President of Collections and Research at Mystic Seaport. “You know how once somebody mentions something to you, the piece of information seems to jump off the page when you are not even looking?” he asks. This quickly happened with woggins. As soon as Lund’s network was alerted, more mentions from ship’s logs began flooding in. A Sag Harbor vessel sailing in 1806 “kild one woglin at 10 am.” New Bedford sailors from 1838 describe “wogings in vast numbers & noisy with their shril sharp shreaking or howling in the dead hours of the night.” In a 1798 diary entry, Christopher Almy of New Bedford writes of “one sort the whalemen call woggins,” which have stubby wings. When they move over the rocks, he says, they “look like small boys a walking.” [...]

But the mystery was only half solved. Penguins, as we understand them, live in the Southern Hemisphere. And yet sailors in the north were also getting in on the action, reporting that they had “caught 10 wogens” or “saw wargins.” “Whalemen were noticing them before they went far enough south to see true penguins,” says Lund. [...]

Michael Dyer, another librarian from New Bedford, had found another major clue: the notebook of a schoolboy named Abraham Russell, decorated with a careful sketch of a “Sea Waggin found on the banks of Newfound Land.” The drawing looked as though it had been traced from a particular illustration of a great auk found in a popular navigational guide. Further finds reinforced this theory, and finally, the group of detectives nailed it down: A southern woggin is a penguin. A northern woggin was a great auk.

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Atlas Obscura: Resurrecting the Forgotten Bike Highways of 1930s Britain

In the 1930s, Britain’s Ministry of Transport built an extensive network of bike highways around the country—at least 280 miles of paved, protected infrastructure dedicated to cyclists alone. For decades, it was entirely forgotten—overgrown and overlooked—so much so that no one seems to remember that these lanes had existed at all. [...]

These bike highways were nine feet wide and surfaced in concrete, and they ran along major roads for miles. According to Reid’s research, the Ministry of Transport was inspired by newspaper reports of similar lanes in the Netherlands and contacted the Rijkswaterstaat, its Dutch counterpart. The head engineer of the Rijkswaterstaat sent the Brits “these incredible exploded diagrams of how they built cycleways next to the road and the railways and how they separated the traffic,” says Reid. “The Brits, in effect, were ‘going Dutch,’” decades before that phrase became a mantra among cycling enthusiasts who long for infrastructure as good as Amsterdam’s. [...]

In the years that followed the construction of the cycleways, though, cars became the predominant form of transportation, and the bike lanes fell out of use. Even the Ministry of Transport forgot that it had built them. “Within 40 years, it had been lost in their own department that they were doing this,” says Reid. He read the ministry’s minutes going through the 1960s and found records of ministers saying that they’d never built anything like a bike highway before.

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Atlas Obscura: Why the First Cremation in the U.S. Was So Controversial

Burning the dead is an ancient practice, and in some cultural traditions, it’s a thousands-year-old norm. Today, cremation in the U.S. is soaring in popularity; by 2018, the Cremation Association of North America predicts that over 50 percent of Americans will choose to have their bodies cremated.

But in late 19th-century America, cremation was a radical, tradition-bucking idea. LeMoyne and other cremation advocates believed that burying the dead in the ground allowed germs to seep into the soil, thus contributing to the spread of diseases like cholera, typhus, and yellow fever. Cremation promised to sterilize human remains and bypass the altogether slow and icky process of decomposition. When performed in a state-of-the-art indoor furnace, it was a sanitary and high-tech alternative to burial.

Cremation was also a solution to an urban problem. As cities expanded, they surrounded burial grounds that had once been miles away from town—and rested on prime real estate. “In and about New York, Brooklyn, and Jersey City, 4,000 acres of valuable land are taken up by cemeteries,” wrote Hugo Erichsen in his 1887 pro-cremation treatise The Cremation of the Dead. “It is calculated that with the probable increase of population in the next half a decade, 500,000 acres of the best land in the United States will be enclosed by graveyard walls. … It is an outrage!”

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Atlas Obscura: Why England Was A Year Behind Belgium, Spain and Italy for 170 Years

In 1584 a violent, angry crowd ransacked the city of Augsburg, Germany. Citizens broke through thick windows and shot their guns into the street. They were marching to City Hall to make it clear that they would not take the authorities’ new plans sitting down. They were in the midst of the Kalenderstriet, or “calendar conflict.” It was a response to the proposed change from the Julian calendar, which had been used for over a thousand years, to the Gregorian calendar, which would fully skip 10 days. [...]

The importance of holidays, fasts and feast days explained the Church’s interest in keeping the calendar “correct,” but the rift between religious groups in Europe meant that the change was haphazard around the continent, sometimes even centuries apart. Catholic-majority nations like France adopted the changes right away, but Orthodox Christian and Protestant-majority countries held off. [...]

The year’s length changed in many places during the transition, too. While the Julian calendar initially started off with January as the first month in the year, religious holidays took precedence as year-openers after the Roman Empire fell. For centuries, England had celebrated New Year’s on Lady Day (or Feast of the Annunciation), on March 25, but 1752 jarringly began anew in January, making 1751 the shortest year England ever recorded, with only 282 days.

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Atlas Obscura: The Mystery and Occasional Poetry of, Uh, Filled Pauses

Nearly every language and every culture has what are called “filled pauses,” a notoriously difficult-to-define concept that generally refers to sounds or words that a speaker uses when, well, not exactly speaking. In American English, the most common are “uh” and “um.”

Until about 20 years ago, few linguists paid filled pauses much attention. They were seen as not very interesting, a mere expulsion of sound to take up space while the speaker figures out what to say next. (In Russian, filled pauses are called “parasite sounds,” which is kind of rude.) But since then, interest in filled pauses has exploded. There are conferences about them. Researchers around the globe, in dozens of different languages, dedicate themselves to studying them. And yet they still remain poorly understood, especially as new forms of discourse begin popping up. [...]

But researchers digging into the weird world of filled pauses have turned up some crazy, fascinating stuff. Some have taken sentences full of “ums” and “uhs” and edited them out to find out if people react more positively to someone who doesn’t use them. (They do.) Some are putting people in MRI machines to find out what weird neural stuff is going on when people use filled pauses. (Definitely some stuff.) And in Japan, researchers are trying to puzzle out how and why Japanese filled pauses are so unusual.

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Atlas Obscura: Where's Me a Dog? Here's You a Dog: The South's Most Unusual Regionalism

Ohioans, for instance, call the wheeled conveyances used in grocery stores “shopping carts,” rather than shopping wagons, carriages, buggies, or any of the other terms used around the country. And if that shopping cart gets dirty, in Ohio, it doesn’t need to be washed; it needs washed. [...]

This discovery began with a blog titled “Here’s you a blog,” which Larry Horn, one of the project’s founders, had come across. This blogger had first come across this grammatical quirk–”here’s you a…”–while traveling in Kentucky: a post office clerk had handed over a stamp featuring a dog, and said, “Here’s you a dog.” The phrase delighted the blogger, and she started using it to label pictures of dogs, until she realized she could apply it to other nouns–like her blog. [...]

When Wood and his colleagues investigated the construction, they found that it, too, is used mostly in the American South, stretching west through Texas. In other words, it seems like the South has invented a way of speaking that, as far as anyone knows, doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world right now–and may never have.

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Atlas Obscura: It's Not Hiking: The Patient Practice of Long Distance Walking

Walking became an American fad in 1963, thanks to President John F. Kennedy. President Kennedy often talked about the importance of physical fitness, pointing out that during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency marine officers were required to be able to walk 50 miles in 20 hours. Then-attorney general Robert F. Kennedy decided to back his brother up and in February 1963 he walked a 50 mile route that ended in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. A walking craze overtook the nation. According to an April 1963 New York Times article, teenagers, marines, Boy Scouts, government workers and “Sunday drivers” took to roads and walkways in droves, while department stores scrambled to meet the demand for pedometers. Interest in the 50-mile Kennedy March, as it came to be known, ignited globally, and today you can still attend an annual version in Sittard in the Netherlands. But the craze is mostly forgotten in the U.S. today. [...]

While long distance walking is a novelty for many Americans, it has long been popular in Europe—miles of established paths criss-cross the continent, and in England they are often clearly marked and cared for. If a path unravels across a farm, the farmer is the caretaker of that expanse. Many enthusiasts belong to the Long Distance Walkers Association, based out of England. Founded in 1972, the LDWA is a clearinghouse for information, organizes long distance walks, publishes a journal called “Strider”, and holds an annual meeting. It has around 8,000 members. The LDWA site cautions that “what constitutes an LDP [long distance path] is a matter of opinion and views vary widely” but most of the routes they catalog are 20 miles or longer. [...]

But long distance walking isn’t quite the same as hiking. For one thing, many long distance walkers simply go for one long walk that lasts a day—20 or more miles is common. Walks organized by the LDWA average around 26 miles. Once a year they host a 100-mile walk split up over two days. And long distance walkers aren’t necessarily campers. Even when they do go on adventurous multi-day excursions, they’re just as likely to post up at a bed and breakfast where they can take a shower and have a beer. There are even businesses that will carry your gear for you. And long distance walking doesn’t have to be rural; some tramp through urban centers or parks. Long distance walkers go solo, but they also go in groups. There are no “hard and fast” rules, says Elrick 

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Atlas Obscura: Saint Catherine Russian Orthodox Church

In 2004 the Church of the Great Martyr Saint Catherine became the first Russian Orthodox church built in the holy city since 1054, when the churches split in an event known as “The Great Schism.” The 950 years in between saw less than accommodating stances between the two factions of Christian faith, though things have been warming up for some time now.

In the late 19th century, plans were made to build an Orthodox church in Rome, but was delayed over a century by two world wars and a communist government in Italy. Finally, approval was granted by the city in 2001 to build the church on the grounds of the Russian embassy to the Vatican. The church was given a blessing by Patriarch Alexy II. [...]

The rift between the two faiths is not as great as it used to be. Important representatives of both faiths attended the opening ceremony in 2004 and the consecration in 2009. Catholic Romans attend the liturgies at St. Catherine given in Italian, and though there are only a few hundred of them, the Russian Orthodoxes disperse to the many Catholic churches in Rome in a show of reaching a hand across the aisle.

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Atlas Obscura: The World's Most Beautiful and Unusual Chess Sets

In 1923, the year after the founding of the Soviet Union, the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) produced a unique chess set. Since originating in sixth-century India, chess designs had been inspired by military battles, royalty, even nature; now, the inspiration was ideology.

The chess set produced in Lomonosov had two very distinct sides. For the pieces in white, the king is a skeleton, wielding a femur bone as a scepter. The queen unashamedly displays an abundance of riches. The bishops are the tsar’s imperial guards, and the pawns are bound in chains. These are the pieces for the capitalist side.

The communist side—in red, naturally—is led by the king, who is a blacksmith, and queen, who carries wheat. The pawns are female farm workers and the bishops, red army colonels. The message wasn’t subtle, but it was evidently popular: the Communist Propaganda Set became one of the most copied in the world.

This extraordinary set is just one example of the designs featured in Master Works: Rare and Beautiful Chess Sets. As the book shows, even with the apparent limitations of structure—32 pieces across 64 squares—there is capacity for unusual and inspired design. 

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Atlas Obscura: In Austria, Zoo Elephants Eat Leftover Christmas Trees

Every year at Christmas, a giant tree towers outside of Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace, impressing guests and glowing gently in the night.

And every year after Christmas, employees take the lights off the tree, chop it into pieces, and feed it to the local elephants.

This year’s tree officially became a snack yesterday morning, the Local reports. The Schönbrunn Palace pachyderms shuffled out of their enclosure and began happily munching on the remains of the 18-foot spruce.

Used to punier plants, the animals seemed excited at the opportunity to eat something bigger than they are. “It is really something extraordinary for them, because it takes them quite a while to get through such a large portion,” keeper Andreas Buberl said.

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Atlas Obscura: An Adorable Swedish Tradition Has Its Roots in Human Experimentation

During the second World War, at a mental hospital outside of Lund, Sweden, researchers forced a group of patients to ingest 24 pieces of a sticky, light brown substance in a single day. These severely disabled patients were involuntary participants in a long-term study commissioned by the state medical board in cooperation with big industry, and this coerced feeding would continue for three years. The four to six doses that they consumed four times a day over that time were in some ways sweeter than their typical medicines—but also more troubling. No benefit to the patient was ever expected. Rather, the goal was to measure the damage inflicted by the substance over time and determine a dosage safe for public consumption.

The ruinous “treatment” in question was a caramel candy. The corporate underwriters were sugar, chocolate, and candy companies. And the effects of the so-called Vipeholm experiments still reverberate today. In fact, one direct result has become a lasting—even beloved—part of Swedish culture.

In Sweden, Saturday is for sweets. The Swedish custom of lördagsgodis, or Saturday candy, was spurred by the outcomes at Vipeholm, which definitively proved that sugar, particularly between meals, causes tooth decay. The idea behind lördagsgodis is moderation—to limit candy consumption to a weekly, rather than a daily, occurrence. [...]

Before the Vipeholm experiments, the cause of tooth decay had been a topic of much speculation. People blamed their dental woes on everything from wine and hot foods to masturbation and vitamin deficiency, writes Samira Kawash in her book, Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure. By 1938, leading scientists around the world were pointing to either too many carbohydrates or a lack of various vitamins as the source of dental cavities. But there was no definitive proof.

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Atlas Obscura: How New Year's Eve Came to Times Square

On New Year’s Eve in 1903, there was no countdown to midnight, no ball drop, and no partygoers wearing silly hats in Times Square. In fact, there was no “Times Square.”

But all that changed the following year, when the newspaper publisher Adolph Ochs moved the headquarters of the New York Times from Park Row to West 42nd Street and celebrated with a bash that launched an iconic New Year tradition.

At the turn of the 20th century, Times Square was called Longacre Square. Stables, harness shops and carriage factories—not glitzy theaters and chain stores—lined the intersection of West 42nd Street, Seventh Avenue and Broadway. [...]

August Belmont, the president of the new subway and a New York Times shareholder, was probably the one who suggested the renaming of Longacre Square. He had to have been aware that the Times’ archrival, the New York Herald, had successfully named the intersection of 34th Street, Sixth Avenue, and Broadway – now Herald Square – after itself. “Belmont wanted to get the most bang for the bucks he was putting into the railroad,” said David W. Dunlap, a longtime reporter at the Times’ Metro section.

Mayor George McClellan made the name change official on August 8, 1904. To commemorate the newspaper’s new address, Ochs planned a spectacular street party for December 31, 1904. At the time, New York’s main New Year’s Eve celebration was a relatively somber affair at Trinity Church downtown, where revelers sang hymns and bells clanged at midnight. The Times’ party, in contrast, would usher in 1905 with fireworks, noisemakers and Fanciulli’s Concert Band at the foot of the Times Tower. 

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