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WPCNR MAIN STREET JOURNAL. January 1, 2017:

When festivities began with music entertainment at 10 PM Sunday evening, New Year’s Eve in White Plains ,about 25 persons were jumping up and down to the music.

Within the next hour it had grown to about 100 persons. By midnight, balldrop time, about a block from Main Street up past Martine Avenue from the live television feed was filled with people which from our television vantage point was impossible to estimate accurately.

Perhaps many had weathered the 10 degree weather inside the restaurants and came out for the bitter end of 2017.

It was the coldest night I can remember for this festivity that has been going on since 2003.

2017, a bitter year ended on a bitter note.

The telecast from Times Square on CNN hosted by Andy Cohenand Anderson Cooper was devoid of excitement. There was no chemistry between the two hosts who had no idea it seemed what was going on. They made no comments about the size of the crowd which was very silent and decidedly unfestive. Of course this had to be the weather. There was a lot of jumping up and down down there, too.

This pairing of Cooper and Cohen was a fiasco. There was no sweeping shots of the crowd. There was no comment on whether the crowd was down in size from previous years. Jokes ran into bad taste late in the broadcast with comments about Tom Cruise’s anatomy. Please.

The ball dropped with a colorful tasteless blaze of color from the Times Tower much like the tasteless year we just experienced.