This year, the city expects 500,000 revelers to knot themselves into the bow tie that is Times Square. Make that 499,999.

By Bill Corsello

I have about 500 words to decide whether or not I will spend New Year’s Eve in Times Square this year. I have lived in New York City most of my life, and the closest I have ever come to joining the city’s biggest party was a few years ago, while celebrating in an apartment on Central Park South. At 11:55 p.m., everyone ran downstairs and watched the ball drop in the distance down Seventh Avenue. It was cold, crowded and the air was 100 proof—and we were a good 15 blocks away from the epicenter. Do I really want to be in the middle of that mayhem?

Then again, there is that gnawing desire to do and see it all. But I’m not doing it unless I know exactly what I am getting myself into. So, I’m setting out to learn what it’s really like from those who have actually done it.

Every year, an average 500,000 revelers fill the area bounded by 42nd and 47th streets along Broadway and Seventh Avenue to ring in the New Year. I know none of them. I ask everyone: My friends haven’t. My family members haven’t. My colleagues haven’t. Their friends haven’t. Waiters, doormen, a chatty woman on the subway. No one. And I only have about 250 words left.

Of the countless times I ask the question, “Have you ever done New Year’s Eve in Times Square?” I am greeted with looks of the “Are you nuts?” variety, or e-mailed replies that begin “LOL.”

“It doesn’t sound like fun,” one friend writes. “Too many people. What’s the attraction?” a co-worker wonders. “I’m too short to see anything,” a petite office temp offers apologetically. “There’s nowhere to go to the bathroom,” a hard-drinking friend scoffs.

A good friend for years lived on Eighth Avenue and 49th Street, but her only firsthand knowledge comes from making her escape from the neighborhood. “It’s loud and people are drunk,” she says flatly, proceeding to tell stories of police barricades and gruelingly circuitous routes to get to a subway stop that was just a block and a half away from her front door.

With only 120 words left, I finally find someone who has actually been in Times Square at 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 31.

“It was my first year living in the city, and I was eager to impress all my hometown buddies,” the New Jersey native tells me. Was it fun? “I enjoyed certain aspects. You couldn’t move, but there was a sense of camaraderie among strangers.” What was it like at midnight? “It’s like graduation. Everything goes up in the air: hats, confetti. After about two minutes of that, people start to wonder how they are going to get home.”

“I’m thinking of going down there this year.”

“What do you want to do that for?”

Three. Two. One.