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No ice sculptures, parade, fireworks or in-person performances for First Night this year
By adamg on Tue, 11/10/2020 - 12:07pm
First Night Boston organizers announced today the New Year's Even celebration will be held entirely online and on TV this year due to Covid-19 concerns.
NBC Boston, NECN and Telemundo Boston will air "performances, interviews, and tributes to front line workers" the evening of Dec. 31. Performances will also be shown on the First Night Web site.
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Comments
So
No real different than being at home and watching TV.
I'd just rather watch Dick Clark erm Ryan Seacrest's Rockin NYE.. but I think that will be all virtual too.
Ah well, I guess it will be like it was last year. Me, Twitter, A ton of food I end up tossing, and a bottle of champagne that will go unopened back into the liquor cabinet.
. o O (at what point did I turn into my parents) O o .
No, it's different
Unless you turn off the heat in your home and open all the windows, it will probably be a lot colder at First Night. Less comfortable in general, too. Last time we went (years ago), we ended up the night watching the laser show down by the waterfront. Then, everybody wanted to get on the T at the same time. That was a lot of people; ever see ants swarming? We wound up walking to North Station, just to stay warm.
Years ago it was pretty fun
After getting off the T the first stop would be for some fried dough. Then it was watching the parade and the early fireworks in the common. Then walk around the common to look at the various artworks and performances. (The ones with flames were the best.)
After about 30 minutes of that it would be too cold for anything else outside so we'd go by the ice sculptures and into Hynes. Lots of cool performances, music, etc. Spend about 20 minutes in a room and wonder to the next space.
Around 11pm grab a late dinner at one of the restaurants still open and stay there through midnight.
Around 12:45am go to North Station and wait for the train. That part kinda sucked but 25 minutes later we'd be home.
First Night was one of the greatest things Boston squandered. As other said, the event has been dead for years. I'm surprised they are even doing midnight fireworks at this point.
"First Blight"
lost all significance and meaning long before Covid hit. Time to just let it die.
1976
I attended the various events of the very first First Night here in the prehistoric times of 1976 and it was a charming, enjoyable, low key experience that had a magical and local feel to it. A far cry from today's bloated spectacle where mass marauding multitudes of tourists, suburbanites and blow-ins stand like penguins for hours in Copley Square with no discernable rhyme or reason. Time to do a reset on First Night and start from scratch with something a little less crass.
IMO, lost its soul shortly after that.
The first few First Nights were pretty lit as arts events, they were kind of the anti-July 4th. Then they made them "family friendly" and went overboard on the corporate sponsorship stuff which kind squashed the spirit of Dionysus which started it. I'm not sad it's not happening IRL. Time for a new tradition!
Guess it wasn't 'gone by
Guess it wasn't 'gone by Easter!'
What say you, republicans? Speak up!
No, you missed the last update
The new line was that it was supposed to be gone by November 4th.
For some reason they've been silent about it since then though...almost as though they cared more about Trump's election chances than people's health...but that can't be true, can it?
Link to press release?
Did you get this information from a press release or other online source, and if so, can you link to it? Thanks.
Diminished First Night still had some merit
I hate what Conventures reduced the event to, but I still enjoyed...
- the Handel & Haydn Jubilee (Emancipation Day) concert at Trinity Church
- the organ concerts at Old South Church and the Christian Science Church
- the 7 pm family fireworks on the Common
It was usually too cold for me to want to hang out for the midnight fireworks on the harbor.
With even these activities cancelled, there's not much point in saying that you are holding an event at all.
Why cancel the ice sculptures, though? Outdoor art is one of the few things people have continued to enjoy throughout the pandemic.
I know we do not want crowds
I know we do not want crowds or large gatherings but there must be ways to do things while social distancing. If we can protest in the street we can set up things across the whole city for people to visit and walk to during the daytime.
Or even at night
because ice sculptures look better when lit up.
We've had successful outdoor art events this year in Winchester (a photography exhibit from the Griffin Museum), Brookline (temporary sculptures in Riverway park near Longwood station), Concord (Umbrella Arts Center temporary sculptures in Hapgood Wright Forest), and the Franklin Park Zoo (Boston Lights), among others.
Why not ice sculptures in the winter, too?
Yawn
You do realize that protests and demonstrations were 1) masked 2) distanced and 3) verified via massive testing events to have not changed the COVID picture because of 1) and 2)?
Of course not. Facts and data can't compete with juicy truthisms.
But that poster specifically mentioned distancing
As part of their ice sculpture suggestion. There have been outdoor, ticketed events going on that have worked out well. Some were even free, the tickets were just to manage numbers of people.
Did you mean to respond to someone else?
Original poster here... Thank
Original poster here... Thank you to the other Anon. Seriously lady what is your problem? You go marching around here yelling at people for no reason.
As the other Anon said my suggestion was not anti protest. It was not anti mask. It was recognizing that we do these things and it's been ok. So why not take what we have learned and do it for outdoor events?
We can have ice sculptures throughout the city, we can have other mini outdoor go at your own pace events across the city. The protests proved you don't have to stay shuttered indoors if you are careful and this would be even more spread out.
Do yourself a favor if you want to be taken seriously. Read things twice before biting someone's head off. Ok? I'm not looking for an explanation or an apology. I think I can speak for many of us when I ask for a behavioral change moving forward if you want to be taken seriously.
Eh
As someone who worked the protests, I can tell you 100% truthfully that not every single person who attended wore a mask. And there was no social distancing, you simply can't when there's that many people. As far as people getting tested afterward................yea..............sure....whatever you want to believe.
you are wrong.
you are wrong.
every single person i saw at any of these were masked up, and people did a pretty good job distancing when not being attacked by the police.
Eh
As someone who worked the protests, I can tell you 100% truthfully that not every single person who attended wore a mask. And there was no social distancing, you simply can't when there's that many people. As far as people getting tested afterward................yea..............sure....whatever you want to believe.
First Fight
A cop told me that he and his partner called it first fight and they would place a wager on the location of the first brawl of the New Year . He told me he would place his bet on the first fight being on the MBTA and his partner would bet on a bar downtown.
For a number of years, I volunteered at First Night in Boston.
My first time volunteering to work at First Night, I was an usher for some classical music concert. Ushering wasn't all that much fun, so
for many more years, I did face-painting at First Night, as a volunteer worker, which I enjoyed much more. There were always long lines of people waiting to get their faces painted up for First Night, and I enjoyed myself plenty.
Who else remembers?
Who else remembers the year the ice sculptures in Copley Plaza were surrounded by 15 foot puddles?
Speaking of ice sculptures... When we do do this again how about adding some ice sculptures in City Hall Plaza?
When City Hall Plaza reconstruction is finished, perhaps?
First Night used to cover much more than Copley Square and Boston Common. Even in its Conventures-hobbled state, it once stretched at least to the Harrison Gray Otis House and the Museum of African-American History on Beacon Hill. In its original form, it encompassed all of Back Bay, Downtown Boston, and the waterfront, and may even have included sites in the North End and South End.