Miami's NYE Tradition Hasn't Always Gone Smoothly

MIAMI, FL — Back in the mid-1980s, when Steve Carpenter was curating all of the neon props for the television show "Miami Vice," he got a call asking if he would be interested in building a 2,000-pound neon orange to ring in the new year Miami style.

"I said, 'Well, that’s nice — but where do you want the neon, and what do you want me to do?'" Carpenter recalled replying, in an interview with Patch ahead of the city's 2020 New Year's celebration. "They go, 'No, no — you just put it wherever you think it should go.'"

The call was from Rodney Barreto, who chaired the Greater Miami Host Committee at the time and is now the Super Bowl Host Committee chairman.

Carpenter said he was scared to death that Barreto wouldn't like his Big Orange once he saw the finished product.

Fortunately, those fears were unfounded.

"When we saw it at night and lit, it looked amazing," Carpenter said. Not bad, considering he sketched out the original design with a marker on the floor of his Hialeah workshop.

"We built it right on top of that marking," he said.

Over the years, he's added some 2,000 LED lights that create the illusion of dimples on the orange — that is, an orange with 200 feet of neon on it.

That was 34 years ago, and the iconic Big Orange has been ascending the 400-foot-tall facade of the InterContinental Miami ever since to mark the arrival of each new year, including what's being referred to as the start of the Roaring '20s this New Year's Eve.

New York has its famous bedazzled ball drop in Times Square, but the Big Apple's much-heavier geodesic sphere is only 12 feet in diameter.

The Big Orange may be considerably lighter than the Times Square ball, but Big Orange is much larger at a whopping 35 feet tall and 30 feet wide. It has to be transported in four separate pieces to fit through the highway overpasses along the route from Hialeah to downtown Miami.

By contrast, New Orleanians gather to watch that city's 8-foot-high fleur de lis descend a pole on New Year's Eve.

Nashville starts each year on a good note with its 16-foot-tall red music note drop.

Unlike those other cities, Big Orange rises at midnight — rather than falls — to a spectacular fireworks display just across from Pitbull's annual free concert in Bayfront Park. The fireworks are shot off from a barge anchored in scenic Biscayne Bay.

It's not clear whether Pitbull is a fan of Big Orange.

"He kept calling it the pineapple" at one point, Carpenter said.

Weighing in at 1 ton, the Big Orange needs to be secured to keep it from crashing against the hotel.

"We have two cables that come down 400 feet," Carpenter said. "We have a steel apparatus on the roof that’s counterbalanced with like 1,000 pounds of weight on each side. We have two window washing motors, and there’s two guys sitting up there (on the roof) and I’m talking to them with a walkie-talkie."

The first couple of years proved challenging before Carpenter took over the duties of overseeing the annual ascent of Big Orange, which is made from perforated aluminum that has tiny triangular-shaped holes to allow 50 percent of air to flow through.

"It looks solid when you look at it, but it’s actually like a screen," Carpenter explained.

Carpenter said his now-iconic Big Orange wasn't the first choice of city fathers. "They call this their 35th year because the first year they tried a big orange balloon, but it blew all over because there’s so much wind that it didn’t happen," he said. "They never took it up to the top. It was just blowing everywhere."

Even the first two years with the aluminum design didn't exactly go smoothly. But that was a result of human error.

The first year, Carpenter said, "The guy starts the countdown, and they start raising it. After about 35 seconds, the guy yells on the radio, 'Stop stop!' Rodney runs down there, and he goes, 'Why did you stop?' The guy went. 'It’s at the top.'"

Only it wasn't. It was about 20 feet shy of the hotel roof. "From the ground, it looked like it was the top," Carpenter said.

Most revelers probably had no inkling there was a problem.

"They turned on 'Happy New Year,' and then the fireworks went off," he said. "The second year ... they gave it to another guy. That guy did the same thing. He stopped at about 20 feet from the roof."

Carpenter offered to take over the responsibility from that point on, and things have gone much more smoothly ever since — even though, one year, his crew was surprised to find a naked woman in the bushes as they hoisted Big Orange into place.

Over the years, Carpenter has worked on neon pieces for a number of other TV shows and movies, including "Burn Notice," "Bad Boys," "Bad Boys II," "The Fast and Furious" and "2 Fast 2 Furious."

Sylvester Stallone's "The Specialist" featured Carpenter's neon smoking woman, which blew actual smoke as the woman appeared to be moving her arm as if she were smoking. Carpenter also created a 16-foot neon crab for that film that was blown to pieces.

More recently, Carpenter provided neon for a number of music videos, including videos for Cardi B.

Carpenter recently added the neon touches to J-Lo's 50th birthday present from Alex Rodriguez — a 6-foot-wide $100 bill that said "Yo quiero" —or "I want" — in Spanish.

In addition to Big Orange, Carpenter also brings along a smaller version of the iconic piece to each New Year's Eve celebration so people can take selfies with it.

"Thousands of people come up. They’re really nice. They just take pictures with it," he said. "What I do is I put 'Welcome 2020' (on the smaller version). It like stamps the date for them in their photograph. Everybody will know where they were at that time."