What Happens to an ‘Antiquated’ New Year’s Eve Ball?

The retiree was the ball that fell in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

It was decommissioned after a final descent at One Times Square, having resided there since just before New Year’s Eve 2008. The ball had been resting comfortably where it had landed on New Year’s Eve: at the foot of a 139-foot pole, behind the digits “2025.”

But the ball had to go up one last time to come back down. There was a crowd chant of “5, 4, 3, 2, 1” from the reporters and photographers standing in the cold on the top of the building. Once the ball shinnied to the top, there was another — “10, 9, 8, 7.” It knew what to do. There was no “Auld Lang Syne” this time — no one sang. No one drank Champagne, either.

Michael Phillips — the president of Jamestown, the real estate firm that owns One Times Square — said that a replacement was in the works. The ball that was retired on Wednesday is only 17 or so. Joe Calvano, the owner of AMA Electric Sign, the company that maintains the ball, was the one who described it as “antiquated.”

Lighting technology has changed, he said, just as technology had changed when this ball took the place of its predecessor. This one has nearly 2,700 Wedgwood Crystal triangles bolted to nearly 700 light-emitting diode modules. It can generate 16 million colors — 15,999,999 more than the first one, in 1907.

It used to be that the balls from New Year’s Eves past went into a dusty room in the subbasement after they had fallen for the last time. Soon they will go on display upstairs. One Times Square, originally built in 1904 for The New York Times, is being remodeled to bring immersive, technology-driven displays to a structure that took shape when Cy Young was pitching the first perfect game in baseball and Giacomo Puccini had just premiered “Madama Butterfly.” Phillips said there would be space in a “time travel history experience,” which will fill four floors and open in the fall.