New Year's Eve at the Mall New Year's Eve at the Mall (December 30, 2005)

by Jeb Bing

Most of us have been part of the crowds that have filled Stoneridge Shopping Center since Thanksgiving, but how many remember the last great New Year's Eve party there that heralded the start of our city's centennial? For many, it was the Mother of All New Year's Eve parties in Pleasanton and one that is still fondly remembered by the nearly 1,000 who attended. Even today, it offered the best New Year's Eve partying on a grand scale in Pleasanton, not up to the Times Square or even Union Square festivities, but still the largest and best ever for our community. A growing number of hotels and restaurants now offer New Year's Eve dinner and party packages, and new businesses even offer special celebrations for the younger set. Pure Girls on Main Street will host a special party for pre-teens pegged on the televised Times Square countdown to 2006, which will come at 9 p.m. local time so that parents can pick them up at a reasonable hour.

But New Year's Eve on Dec. 31, 1993 was special. The Mall sizzled as elegantly dressed couples--men in black-tie and women in costly gowns--danced the night away to cheer the arrival of 1994 and the start of the city's 100th year. Sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce, the event was a substitute for the Chamber's annual dinner where new officers are installed, customarily held at the end of January. Alice Waterman, Stoneridge's General Manager, made the Mall available after the stores closed at 6 p.m. and arranged to keep the holiday decorations in place. Chamber staff, headed by then-Executive Director Shelby McNamara, and its events coordinator, the late Carol Bush, who died this year, scrambled to move tables, food stations and entertainment platforms into place before the doors opened at 9 p.m. The party was scheduled to end a 1 a.m., an hour after balloons, horns and other New Year's paraphernalia filled the mall at midnight. Unfortunately for the chamber staff, it was 2 a.m. before the celebrants finally started heading home, leaving Shelby, Carol and just four other volunteers the task of moving everything to vans, clearing out finally by 5 a.m. just a few hours before stores opened for New Year's Day, one of their busiest shopping days of the new year.

With a once-proposed downtown street party generating little support and the Mall now maxed out in terms of shoppers and stores, the "Ball at the Mall," as it was called, was likely a once-in-a-lifetime event. But clearly it's still viewed by all who were there as the city's most festive and massive New Year's Eve party. Proceeds went to the Pleasanton Centennial Committee, which, under the direction of former Chamber chairman Brad Hirst, was also a festive and massive outdoor celebration six months later when Pleasanton celebrated its 100th birthday on June 18, 1994. That year also saw economic prosperity come back to Pleasanton, which had been hit hard by the recession of the early 1990s. Since the Ball at the Mall, new restaurants and stores have opened, housing construction and sales have reached all-time highs year-after-year, and Stoneridge Shopping Center is larger and more prosperous than ever, with a new wave of expansion just getting under way. The community New Year's Eve party of Dec. 31, 1993 opened a year that proved to be good for Pleasanton, ringing in a vibrancy that continues today. Happy New Year.

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