As midnight struck in country after country around the world, a year once considered the far future became a reality amid joyous celebrations that lacked the fanfare of last year’s revelry, while evoking hopes for better fortune in the year to come.
Above Grant Park, fireworks illuminated thousands of upturned faces, as a world sobered from its Y2K hangover–weary of its massive international celebrations, specter of millennial terrorist threats and unrealized computer failures–welcomed the new year with a greater degree of reflection.
The second hand’s sweep through midnight also brought with it the actual start of the third millennium under the Gregorian calendar–a calendar that began its measure of time with the year 1.
Cheers and carousing greeted its arrival around the world, while a few celebrations promoting 2001 as the true millennial year touched off in big cities like Denver and Las Vegas, and tiny Lincolnwood in the Chicago suburbs.
Masked revelers and fortunetellers greeted 2001 in the cacophonous Lincolnwood Town Center mall, where balloons and laser lights filled the air as the clock struck 12.
All Sunday night, the banks, churches and cafes of downtown Evanston hosted scores of entertainment acts as the suburb celebrated a non-alcoholic First Night. Later, families braved a blizzard of confetti to watch a midnight circus in the city’s fountain square.
At Union Station, B.B. King led the crowd into the New Year with a thundering rendition of “Auld Lang Syne,” while rock group Kansas closed out 2000 at a crowded and festive Navy Pier. Elegantly dressed couples and families dined in overflowing restaurants on the North Side, and cabbies made a week’s wages ferrying partygoers along Rush Street.
It was an event at once global and personal, a matter for public revelry and individual celebration.
“All the hype was last year,” said Makanju Maxie, a 28-year-old Ravenswood accountant. He celebrated 2000 wildly; but now has a five-month-old son. “This year is different.”
For Jacques Lacava, 39, a French translator in Chicago, the mellower start to 2001 offered a welcome counterpoint to the Y2K bacchanal.
“We thought so much about the Y2K bug that we didn’t think about the meaning of the new millennium,” he said. “It’s a shame, because we should have celebrated it this year instead of last year.”
Not all of downtown Chicago was astir: At the Engine Company 13 on Columbus Drive, a full complement of firefighters prepared for a night of merrymaking gone too far, while hoping for the opposite. The station’s big screen television and pool table provided most of the evening’s entertainment.
Around the world, the coming of the new year held different meanings.
Australia, still basking in the glow of the Summer Olympic Games in September, welcomed 2001 with a spectacular pyrotechnic display launched from the Sydney Harbor Bridge.
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Nonstop applause rose from a crowd that began gathering early Sunday at the bridge and nearby Sydney Opera House, kicking off an all-night party that brought tens of thousands of revelers to neighboring Bondi Beach.
In the Philippines, a steady din of firecrackers and gunfire welcomed the beginning of the new year and marked the end of one capped off Saturday by a terrorist blast in Manila that left 14 dead and 100 injured.
In an address to a nation pelted by typhoons, guerrilla fighting, a weakened economy and a continuing impeachment trial, President Joseph Estrada urged Filipinos to maintain their optimism. “Let us embrace the new year with a smile,” he said.
A similar note was sounded by Chinese President Jiang Zemin, whose televised New Year’s address called for reunifying the mainland with the self-governed island of Taiwan, while pursuing a continued drive toward modernization and world peace.
Midnight brought a thrilling laser show above Beijing, as lion dancers circled and jumped below. Partygoers danced in the throbbing streets of Hong Kong, and 15 parachutists from around the world safely leaped from Malaysia’s Petronas Twin Towers.
As the new year spread across Russia’s 11 time zones, it brought with it the first anniversary of President Vladimir Putin’s rise to leadership of that troubled country and new lyrics to Russia’s national anthem.
Revelry was muted in the Middle East and pronounced in Yugoslavia, where 2001 was hailed in Belgrade as “the first free New Year” after the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic.
Spotlights, fireworks and pop music lit the sky and filled the air at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, while in the Vatican, Pope John Paul II wished peace and prosperity to a crowd carrying candles and huddled against the chill in St. Peter’s Square.
There were no official celebrations in London, though 80,000 packed into Trafalgar Square as Big Ben chimed midnight. In Paris, a 1,000 drummers gathered from across Europe to sound the countdown.
A Sanitation Department snow-melting machine and a team of snowplows were the behind-the-scenes stars of a congested and raucous party in New York City’s Times Square, where a 1,000-pound Waterford crystal ball was dropped to the delight of an estimated half-million revelers.
Its sparkling descent sent Chicagoans and partygoers throughout America’s heartland into the final hour of 2000.
For Patty Maher of Lincoln Park, who was afraid to go out last year but returned to the taverns on Rush Street Sunday, it was a resumption of an annual rite.
“I go out every year on New Year’s Eve,” she said. “It’s a must.”
Joel Kock, visiting Chicago from Milwaukee, put it another way:
“It’s ho-hum back to normal in comparison to last year.”