43
Youngstown organizers change approach to New Year’s ball drop
Youngstown's New Year's Eve Ball
Gallery
YOUNGSTOWN BALL
History
A 1-foot disco ball with no lights was dropped from the City Hall Annex in 2000.
A 3-foot ball rented from a party-supply store with no lights was used in 2001, 2002 and 2003, when the ball was dropped from the top of the 10-story Home Savings and Loan building on West Federal Street.
A 4-foot ball with hundreds of lights was used from 2004 through 2008 on roof of the City Hall Annex.
A 6-foot ball with a dozen large lights was lowered from a Youngstown Fire Department ladder truck in a parking lot near the Covelli Center in 2009.
Friday night, the 6-foot ball will be lowered from the roof of the City Hall Annex.
Source: Youngstown Water Department supervisor Mickey Koziorynsky
City organizers change approach to New Year’s ball drop
By Ed Runyan
YOUNGSTOWN
Everyone knows Youngstown isn’t New York City, but with its impressive, tall buildings, it feels a little like the Big Apple, especially on New Year’s Eve when the city drops a New York City-style New Year’s ball.
The ball has seen some changes since 2000, according to Mickey Koziorynsky, a supervisor in the Youngstown Street Department who heads up the five-person staff that drops the ball every year.
This year, for instance, the ball is being dropped from the City Hall Annex Building at Market and Front streets — a short distance from the parking lot near the Covelli Centre, where the ball drop was staged last year.
But last year’s ball drop didn’t capture the imagination of Youngstowners in quite the way organizers of the city’s First Night Youngstown celebration had hoped, Koziorynsky said.
The Youngstown Fire Department lowered the ball from a basket atop a ladder truck.
That apparently didn’t feel quite enough like New York City, Koziorynsky said.
In New York, a ball drops along a post high in the sky on Times Square until the stroke of midnight.
But because this year’s ball is 6 feet in diameter, 2 feet bigger than when the annex was last used in 2008, it wouldn’t fit through the third-floor stairwell the way the smaller balls did in the past.
Councilman John Swierz, president of First Night Youngstown, had to ask the fire department for assistance in getting the ball onto the roof.
Ladder 22, which can reach 100 feet into the air, had no trouble lifting the ball onto the annex roof Wednesday morning, and Koziorynsky and his crew determined later Wednesday that the new ball, pole and hoist should work together quite nicely on New Year’s Eve.
“Of the 11 years, there was only one year where nothing went wrong,” Koziorynsky said with a smile, seeming to enjoy the challenge.
Koziorynsky, who will retire in November and plans to be in South Carolina for New Year’s next year, said he looks forward to another novelty this year: The weather for Friday night is expected to be fairly warm — in the 40s.