Chicago Wants to Steal New York City's New Year's Eve Thunder

For decades, New York City has cornered the market on New Year’s Eve celebrations with its Times Square ball drop.

But this year, Chicago wants to challenge the Big Apple’s New Year’s Eve supremacy and will be organizing its own late-night countdown extravaganza to ring in 2016, according to NBC 5 Chicago, which will broadcast the party.

The event, which will be called Chi-Town Rising, will be held along the Chicago River, between Michigan Avenue and Columbus Drive, and it will feature musical acts on three stages and a massive fireworks display, the report stated. Instead of a ball drop to mark the new year, the Chicago celebration will have a star ascending the 36 stories of the west tower of the Hyatt Regency Chicago, the report added.

Ticket sales and other celebration details will be released on the event’s website in the coming months.

Two pieces of advice for event organizers while the celebration is still in the planning stages:

1. Think about a new name. Chi-Town Rising wouldn’t be a terrible title for an action movie franchise—think Transformers: Chi-Town Rising or Jupiter Ascending 2: Chi-Town Rising—but it’s not something that screams, “Happy new year!”
2. Don’t forget the sage wisdom of Omar from The Wire: “You come at the king, you best not miss.” If you want to take down New York City, you need to be on point and pull out all the stops. That means no Billy Corgan belting out “Today” backed by a bunch of musicians who were still in diapers when that song was popular.

via NBC 5 Chicago