Central Park was the first landscaped public park in the United States. Advocates of creating the park--primarily wealthy merchants and landowners--admired the public grounds of London and Paris and urged that New York needed a comparable facility to establish its international reputation. A public park, they argued, would offer their own families an attractive setting for carriage rides and provide working-class New Yorkers with a healthy alternative to the saloon. After three years of debate over the park site and cost, in 1853 the state legislature authorized the City of New York to use the power of eminent domain to acquire more than 700 acres of land in the center of Manhattan.

New York in 1904 was a city on the verge of tremendous changes - and, not surprisingly, many of those changes had their genesis in the bustling energy and thronged streets of Times Square. Two innovations that would completely transform the Crossroads of the World debuted in 1904: the opening of the city's first subway line, and the first-ever celebration of New Year's Eve in Times Square.

This inaugural bash commemorated the official opening of the new headquarters of The New York Times. The newspaper's owner, German Jewish immigrant Alfred Ochs, had successfully lobbied the city to rename Longacre Square, the district surrounding his paper's new home, in honor of the famous publication (a contemporary article in The New York Times credited Interborough Rapid Transit Company President August Belmont for suggesting the change to the Rapid Transit Commission). The impressive Times Tower, marooned on a tiny triangle of land at the intersection of 7th Avenue, Broadway and 42nd Street, was at the time Manhattan's second-tallest building -- the tallest if measured from the bottom of its three massive sub-basements, built to handle the heavy weight demands ofThe Times' up-to-date printing equipment.
The building was the focus of an unprecedented New Year's Eve celebration. Ochs spared no expense to ensure a party for the ages. An all-day street festival culminated in a fireworks display set off from the base of the tower, and at midnight the joyful sound of cheering, rattles and noisemakers from the over 200,000 attendees could be heard, it was said, from as far away as Croton-on-Hudson, thirty miles north along the Hudson River.
The New York Times' description of the occasion paints a rapturous picture: "From base to dome the giant structure was alight - a torch to usher in the newborn year..."


The Lovely City

Statue of Liberty

The Statue of Liberty, officially Liberty Enlightening the World, was designed by French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi and completed in July 1884. Working with dreams of the famous figure over a decade before its completion, Bartholdi produced a number of miniaturized working models. Once the design was finalized, wooden molds were made, over which copper sheets were attached and hammered into shape. The copper shell was then joined to an internal iron structure designed by Gustave Eiffel, who later built the Eiffel Tower. The statue commemorates the alliance between the United States and France during the American Revolution from 1775 to 1783, and was funded completelythrough the donation of the French people. On the 4th of July, 1884, The 151 feet (46 meters) tall 225 ton Statue of Liberty was delivered to the American Ambassador in Paris. People were awed as the colossal 15-story lady towered over the four and five-story buildings surrounding her. In order to bring it to New York Harbor, The Statue of Liberty was dismantled into 300 pieces and packed into 214 wooden crates. The pieces of her torch-bearing arm alone, which had been displayed previously in Philadelphia for the 1876 centennial- filled 21 boxes.