Stay downtown, ride up
If you want to be in Times Square at midnight, the best place to sleep is not Times Square. That's the whole argument of this page, and it comes down to the other 23 hours of the day. Midtown on December 31 is barricades and crowd flow from the afternoon onward; down here on John Street the offices are shut, the streets are calm, and Fulton Street station is three minutes' walk away with five lines running through it. You go up when you want to go up, and you come back to a quiet block.
The Ball descends atop One Times Square as the clock strikes twelve, the same as every year. What changes every year is the practical part: which streets are open, where the viewing areas start filling, what you can carry. The Times Square Alliance publishes an hour-by-hour schedule for the night at timessquarenyc.org, and that page, not a blog post written in September, is what you should read the week before you go.
Getting up there, and getting back
The 2 or the 3 from Fulton Street runs straight to Times Square-42nd St. On an ordinary day that's about twenty minutes. On December 31 leave far more room than the timetable suggests, because the closer you get to Times Square the more the last few blocks are walked rather than ridden, and access points near the square are managed on the night.
Coming home is the part people don't plan. The subway runs 24 hours in New York, so there is always a train, but after midnight the platforms at 42nd Street are a slow shuffle and you may wait for two or three trains before you get on one. Budget an hour and don't be surprised if it's more. Walking is not the backup plan: from Times Square down to John Street is over four miles.
Our front desk is staffed 24/7, so whatever hour you get in, someone's there.
The case for not going at all
Plenty of our guests go up once, tick it off, and spend the following New Year's Eve downtown instead. The Financial District empties out on holidays, which is the thing people either love about it or don't. Our rooftop terrace is upstairs with chairs on it, and the view from our end of the island is the harbor rather than the billboards.
If you'd rather be out, we keep a guide to what's actually open down here after dark, and a separate one on how the neighborhood feels at night. Book anything you want on the 31st well ahead: restaurant seats on New Year's Eve in this city go weeks out, and a lot of places switch to a set menu for the night.
January 1, downtown
New Year's Day is the quietest morning of the year in Lower Manhattan, and it's a good one to be here for. The waterfront is empty, the light is low and clean, and the walk down to Battery Park takes about fifteen minutes from our door. If you're up for it, the Staten Island Ferry runs on the holiday and costs nothing.
One small thing worth checking: Bryant Park's holiday shops have stayed open on New Year's Day in past seasons, with their January setup running for weeks after the market crowds have gone. Their site posts the dates each fall.