Good morning. It's Monday. We'll look at what goes on behind the scenes in Times Square before the ball falls on New Year's Eve. We'll also find out about free online therapy for teenagers.
It's time for the countdown to the countdown. There's a lot to do before everyone looks up at the skinny building in Times Square and chants "10-9-8-7 …"
What about One Times Square, the building that serves as the stage for the ball drop? "This will be a New Year's Eve under construction," said Michael Phillips, the president of Jamestown, the real estate firm that has owned One Times Square since 1997. Jamestown recently had a topping-out ceremony for its $500 million reinvention of One Times Square, which will add immersive, technology-driven displays to a building that took shape when the Wright brothers had just flown their airplane and air-conditioning had only recently been invented. "The wins and losses of our lives have played out against this building," Phillips said, mentioning ticker-tape parades and V-J Day at the end of World War II. "All the technology that's going into this building just amplifies that." The makeover is part of a plan the company announced in 2022 to make the building a showplace for what Phillips called "Times Square 4.0" and to make Times Square itself a "global multimedia destination." Last month, Jamestown installed a countdown sign on One Times Square that is 50 feet 3 inches high, about the height of a five-story building. As the construction continues, the neighborhood could get one of the few spectacles it does not yet have: a casino. SL Green, the city's largest commercial landlord, wants to win a gambling license in partnership with Caesars Entertainment. But not everyone's on board. Bigger crowds, bigger spendingCrowds in Times Square are thicker than they were a year ago, though tourism is still less robust than it was before the pandemic. The Times Square Alliance, a coalition that promotes the neighborhood, said that hotels in Times Square averaged 89 percent occupancy from July through September, about five percentage points below the level in 2019, the last full year before the pandemic. At $283 a night, the average daily rate for a hotel room in Times Square was 13 percent higher from July through September than from the same period in 2019. The alliance said that figure trailed comparable ones for Manhattan as a whole — $334 a night, up 20 percent from the third quarter in 2019. Another figure suggests that consumers are spending more freely now. They charged $212 million on their Visa cards at businesses in Times Square from July through September, according to data from Visa supplied by the alliance. That was 17 percent more than in the same three months of 2019.
WEATHER A storm moving through the region will deliver heavy rain in the morning. The rain will ease in the afternoon. Temperatures will be in the high 50s during the day and the mid-30s at night. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING Suspended because of bad weather. The latest New York news
We hope you've enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Free online therapy for teens: Will it work?
New York City is offering free online mental health therapy to teenagers. But many in the city's mental health care community worry that the new program is a modest gesture in a time of crisis. Some also question why the city has signed a $26 million contract with the for-profit provider Talkspace when the company is the target of a class-action lawsuit filed by a former client.
My colleagues Ellen Barry and Christina Caron write that about 1,400 teenagers, or less than 1 percent of the more than 400,000 eligible adolescents, have signed up in the month since the start of the therapy program, NYC Teenspace. Teenagers can exchange unlimited messages with an assigned therapist once a parent or legal guardian has signed a consent form. The program also provides a 30-minute virtual therapy session once a month. Dr. Ashwin Vasan, New York City's health commissioner, acknowledged that the city was "taking a risk here" by embracing teletherapy on such a large scale. But he added that the "cost of inaction is much higher." "What we wanted to do was create the easiest low-barrier, democratized access to help that we could," he said. Dr. Zachary Blumkin, the senior clinical director of the Psychiatry Faculty Practice Organization at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, praised the spirit behind the initiative. But he said he had seen no evidence that a monthly therapy session and text exchanges would provide a substantial benefit for teenagers with mental illness. "One concern is, this could be kind of a Band-Aid over a gushing wound, and that could make things worse," he said. METROPOLITAN DIARY Crackers
Dear Diary: Although both of my parents were New Yorkers, I grew up in a small town outside Cleveland where my parents moved in 1969. After graduating from college and then tramping around North America for a year with two buddies, I ended up spending the scorching summer of 1988 with my grandmother in a tenement building in the Parkchester neighborhood in the Bronx. I loved the way the disparate group of tenants engaged in one another's lives in small ways each day. Two of my favorite residents were older sisters who lived nine floors above my grandmother. Regardless of when I bumped into them, they seemed to have had a few cocktails. One Saturday morning, I picked up the phone to hear one of the sisters formally introducing herself and asking whether I would come up to help with a small favor. When I knocked on their door, it opened to reveal the sisters side by side. One turned around quickly and went to the freezer. She opened it, took out a small, foil-wrapped package and turned back to me. She said their parakeet Crackers had died a few weeks earlier. Would I be willing to bury the beloved bird outside the building? Down I went with the special cargo, then out the door and around back. I heard the sisters calling down from above, guiding me a bit to the left, a bit closer to a big tree and then finally to stop. I dug a small hole and laid Crackers to rest. I had no doubt a few more dry sherries would be hoisted that day. — Kevin Clegg Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Geordon Wollner and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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N.Y. Today: Gearing up for the ball drop
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