How a Knoxvillian Brought New Year’s Eve to Times Square

Adolph Ochs was the son of Bavarian Jewish immigrants.  His parents, Julius and Bertha Levy Ochs, had immigrated after the catastrophic European revolutions of the 1840’s, and lived in Knoxville before the Civil War.  As war approached, they moved to Cincinnati, where Adolph was born.  They moved back to Knoxville near the end of the war, and his father, Julius at first prospered as a merchant.  They lived in a large house on Sharps Ridge. Julius Ochs was a prominent citizen, a justice of peace, and a leader of the Radical Republican Party.  He helped found Knoxville’s first synagogue, Temple Beth-El. But after an economic collapse in 1867, the Ochs’ had to move into a small, cheap place downtown, on Central Street, and the sons had to go to work.

Adolph, the oldest, got a job with the local Republican newspaper, the Knoxville Chronicle, which was then located on Market Square.  There’s probably no trace of the original 1860s-’70s building where he worked, but it was near the location of Scruffy City Hall.  He began as a paperboy, and after a promotion, became a “printer’s devil” – ans apprentice printer.

At this time, it;s not obvious that Knoxville celebrate New Year’s Eve, but a week earlier, the city did celebrate Christmas, in a big way, with fireworks.

Adolph worked his way up, even doing a little writing and rewriting, and eventually familiarized himself with all the jobs in putting out a newspaper.  By the time he was 19, he was pretty sure he could run a paper by himself.

Knoxville was overloaded with newspapermen, but Adolph heard about a struggling newspaper in Chattanooga call the Chattanooga Times.  With the help of some investors, he bought it, and hired several members of his Knoxville family to come help him run it – including his father – and he turned it into a very successful newspaper.

In 1886, Adolph hear another failing newspaper call the New Your Times was for sale.  He bought that one, too, and using his experience in Knoxville and Chattanooga, made it a very successful newspaper, adding features like the book review and the weekly magazine.  He gave it a new motto, borrowed from his cousins in Knoxville, the Blaufelds, who ran a successful cigar shop on Gay Street.  “All the Seegars that are Fit to Smoke,” they said.  So he wrote “All the New That’s Fit to Print,” ans it became the motto of his newspaper.

He changed the newspaper, and he changed the map of Manhattan.  He moved the Times to an intersection of Broadway and Seventh that had been known – and mainly just in New York – as Longacre Square.  It was a busy, but not famous place.  Ochs persuaded the city to give it it’s own subway stop.  (By the way, another former Knoxvillian was influential in subway development at the time:  William Gibbs McAdoo, who had introduced electric streetcars to Knoxville in 1890, was then working on the first subway under the Hudson River.)

In 1904, Och renamed Longacre Square to Times Square, after his newspaper.

Ochs liked the idea of celebrating a holiday in a big public way, to promote the Times, and to promote New York, and he wanted to celebrate a holiday that was a holiday for everybody.  He picked New Year’s Eve, and originally celebrated the arrival of midnight with fireworks.  When that drew complaints – in fact, fireworks were banned in New York  – in 1907, Ochs opted for a quieter solution, based on a method of signaling ships in the harbor.  They’d lower a giant electrically lit ball along a rooftop mast.  In an era when electric lights were still fairly new, seeing them move was an astonishing sight.