On 18 January 1904 the cornerstone to a new headquarters and printing plant for The New York Times was laid in midtown Manhattan, on Longacre Square, where several new subway lines would converge. A replica of Giotto's Florentine Tower, the building soared 375 feet and delved several stories below street level.

In the move from the paper's old Park Row address, not one of five thousand pieces of linotype was lost. The first paper to come off the new presses, which could print and fold 144,000 copies of a sixteen-page paper in an hour, rolled off on 2 January 1905. The celebration marking the move began on New Year's Eve, when publisher Adolph Ochs proposed to drop an enormous lighted ball to mark midnight, beginning a famous tradition to mark the New Year. Longacre Square soon became known as Times Square.

Sources:

Meyer Berger, The Story of the New...