The 118-year-old 26- story One Times Square Building with the iconic New Year’s ball drop got a $500 million makeover. Since 1906 the building has been the epicenter of New Year’s Eve Ball Drop celebrations. The $500 million project involves full gut renovation and exterior re-cladding with new LED displays and a public viewing deck.

The 26-story iconic building will have an all-new look including a new façade and new windows. An indoor, 12-floor visitors center is to have a Time Square Museum, interactive and virtual-reality experience and the outdoor viewing deck overlooking the “Crossroads of the World”.

Working around the existing 1906 structure, One Times Square presented interesting design and field challenges for Orange County Iron Works and Gabriel Steel Erectors. To save time, hot-dip galvanizing was used in the interior of the building for all the HHS splice connections and typical beams instead of a primer paint system.

The outer skeleton façade is made up of all galvanized steel tubing and beams to provide decades of maintenance-free corrosion protection. The specifier chose to utilize galvanized steel for just that reason; to avoid the costly routine repair of a paint system, the idea was to install the hot-dip galvanized steel and not have to give thought to maintenance: a ‘set it and forget it approach’.

The 220 tons tube and beam for the skeleton came in truckloads of steel that were turned around in two days by the galvanizer. No other coating system could have been applied as quickly as HDG. The quick turnaround of the factory-controlled hot-dip galvanizing process allowed the galvanizer to match the different components together and ship directly to the job site.