Where To Celebrate New Year’s Eve 2022 In Manhattan

NEW YORK CITY — Times Square may be the marquee location to celebrate New Year's Eve in Manhattan, but the borough will play host to plenty of other events ringing in 2023.

Here is a look at some additional events happening in Manhattan:

• Central Park midnight run: New York Road Runners will host a midnight run starting at the strike of midnight, when a fireworks display marks the start of a 4-mile race around the park loop. It's for active New York Road Runner members, but you can easily spectate.
• SUMMIT One Vanderbilt: A $300 ticket will get you and your friends into the top floors of One Vanderbilt, the new 67-floor tower right next to Grand Central Terminal. Partygoers can "free roam" all three floors of SUMMIT, watch an evening lightshow against the city's skyline and get open access to glass ledges suspended 1,100 feet above Madison Avenue, according to the event's site.
• The Jazz Club: Those looking for a classy, black-tie affair can make a reservation at The Jazz Club in Aman New York, a luxury hotel in Midtown. The New Year's Eve bash will be in a subterranean setting with live music, "the finest canapés, cocktails, champagne, and spirits flowing late into the night," the event's site states. Interested cool cats can make an inquiry here.
• Times Square: Sorry, but no list of New Year's Eve events in the city would be complete without at least mentioning Times Square. The official celebration will kick off around 6 p.m., when the ball is raised to the top of its pole above One Times Square at the corner of Broadway and 43rd Street — but spectators are encouraged to arrive hours earlier to get a spot.

In the United States, one of the most popular New Year’s Eve traditions is, of course, the dropping of the giant ball in New York City’s Times Square. Various cities have adopted their own iterations of the event — the Peach Drop in Atlanta, the Chick Drop in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and the giant Potato Drop in Boise, Idaho.

The end of one year and beginning of another is often celebrated with the singing of “Auld Lang Syne,” a Scottish folk song whose title roughly translates to “days gone by,” according to Encyclopedia Britannica and History.com.

The history of New Year’s resolutions dates back 8,000 years to ancient Babylonians, who would make promises to return borrowed objects and pay outstanding debts at the beginning of the new year, in mid-March when they planted their crops.

According to legend, if they kept their word, pagan gods would grant them favor in the coming year. If they broke the promise, they would fall out of God’s favor, according to a history of New Year’s resolutions compiled by North Hampton Community College New Center in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Many secular New Year’s resolutions focus on imagining new, improved versions of ourselves. The failure rate of New Year’s resolutions is about 80 percent, according to U.S. News & World Report. There are myriad reasons, but a big one is they’re made out of remorse for gaining weight, for example, and aren’t accompanied by a shift in attitude and a plan to meet the stress and discomfort of changing a habit or condition.

Patch reporter Matt Troutman contributed.