Lawyer to stage New York-style ball drop in downtown Bangor

BANGOR – Move over, Big Apple.

Bangor lawyer Stephen Smith is planning a ball drop of his own tonight.

Smith, who owns, lives and works out of the downtown building that houses Sweets Market, said this week that he decided to drop a ball from the top of his 26 Main St. building “just for fun.”

“It’s all sort of very last-minute.”

Though Smith’s ball won’t be nearly as fancy or expensive as New York City’s ball, designed by Waterford Crystal, he believes his big purple beach ball covered with white Christmas lights will do the trick just fine. “It cost about four bucks altogether,” Smith said.

For Smith, part of the fun will be to see if anyone shows up.

“We put some posters up in the usual downtown places and on telephone poles,” he said, though he noted that he won’t be at all surprised if the only spectators turn out to be “the guys with 40-ouncers.”

With a busy Bangor law practice, Smith said he usually goes to bed about 9:30 p.m. He said he has decided to make an exception for New Year’s Eve, when at the stroke of midnight, he’ll grab it by the extension cord and “chuck it off the roof.”

Though this might be one of Bangor’s first ball drops, the tradition has been around for almost a century. The first ball-lowering celebration atop One Times Square in New York City occurred on Dec. 31, 1907. The event now is a worldwide symbol of the turn of the new year. The ceremony draws hundreds of thousands of spectators to New York City and is seen by satellite by more than 1 billion people each year.

The only years the drop did not take place were 1942 and 1943, when the event was suspended due to the wartime dim-out. But crowds still gathered in Times Square, celebrating with a minute of silence followed by chimes ringing out from an amplifier truck.

In the early 1980s, they replaced the ball with an apple but it just wasn’t the same. The traditional ball prevailed and appears to be here to stay. Since 2000, the ball has been a geodesic sphere designed by Waterford Crystal, 6 feet in diameter and weighing about 1,070 pounds.