Tomorrow the huge, newish Grand Park begins its bid to become the warm-weather Times Square with its first-ever New Year's Eve celebration: there'll be live music, food trucks, a cash bar (there's no booze in Times Square!), and a giant 3D projection display on City Hall. Using digital mapping, the special effects team will make the building do all kinds of crazy things, like perhaps "disappear and be replaced by Grand Park's renovated jewel, the Arthur J. Will Memorial Fountain," according to County Supe Zev Yaroslavsky's website. Photographer Sterling Davis caught a dress rehearsal and recorded the video down below.
Organizers are planning on hosting about 10,000 people in Grand Park for New Year's (comparable to the number they saw on the Fourth of July this year), but didn't book big musical acts or celebrity hosts, since they don't actually want huge crowds squashed in like the Times Square cattle pens. Aside from the 3D light show, there'll also be "[i]mages of revelers and their hopes for the New Year" projected on the Hall of Records, and a top secret, non-ball-drop countdown method. The director of programming says "We can represent the passing of time in ways that are much more creative and dynamic and sleek now … The ball dropping is great and iconic, but it's really analog."
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