Children’s Museum of Manhattan to Hold “Special Kid’s Ball Drop” on NYE
The event will be held during the day at 212 W. 83rd St. There will be two tiny ball drops, one at noon and one at 1 p.m. According to the museum, it will give “families the excitement of a New Year’s countdown without the crowds of Times Square or the late-night hours.”
| 30 Dec 2024 | 01:33
The Children’s Museum of Manhattan will be hosting two NYE ball drops kids on Dec. 31, at the kid-friendly hours of noon and 1 p.m. (
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Attention, parents of young children: do you want to celebrate New Year’s Eve in the big city, but your tykes are too tired and tiny for a late night out at Times Square? Well, the Children’s Museum of Manhattan will be holding a “Special Kid’s Ball Drop” to fix that problem and help your little ones ring in 2025. It will be going down at the museum proper, at 212 West 83rd St.
In fact, there will be two “sparkly, kid-friendly” countdowns and ball drops: one at noon, and one at 1 p.m. In other words, perfect for a holiday celebration before nap-time. Kids aged “0 to eight” are encouraged to attend. There will be festive sparklers and even a lively DJ “dance party” with beats by DJ Ino, the museum says.
Tamar Mackay, the museum’s Director of Public Programs, told Straus News that we want “to have a safe space for families with young children to come and celebrate. Times Square on New Year’s is not very kids-friendly...midnight is not very kid-friendly, either.” The museum inaugurated the event in 2014, she explained, in order to provide an alternative to the overwhelming status quo.
“We often have full families come. It’s very intergenerational,” she added. “Parents, grandparents, siblings of different ages. They’re excited too, because now they don’t have to stay up to midnight to watch the ball drop.”
The Children’s Museum’s festive ball is custom-designed “in-house” by “artists and educators,” Mackay said. “This year, we used foil and gold leaf.” There will also be bubbles and noise-makers. DJ Ino will craft a set that has broad appeal; as an educator himself, he has his finger on the pulse of what “kids want to hear,” but there will also be classic oldie tracks that “families want to hear.”
Quite impressively, the museum predicts that they will see 1,000 people turn out to this year’s two ball drops in total. Some of those people will likely be regular museum visitors that were unaware of the event prior to coming, and will end up staying. “It’s a really exciting day at CMOM,” Mackay said.
For families that want to stick around after the ball drops, there will also be a “memory time capsule” crafting session, where kids can collect of all of their favorite memories from 2024 in one place. In a few years, Mackay noted, they can return to these capsules to be “reminded of what they were all thinking about.”