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New Jersey may have the game, but New York City is hosting the most lavish parties headed into Super Bowl XLVIII this weekend.
This week, the NFL shut down a main thoroughfare in Times Square, the city’s busy center, for four days of festivities leading up to Sunday evening’s match between the Denver Broncos and Seattle Seahawks.
Super Bowl Boulevard runs from Broadway and 34th Street up to 47th Street with plenty of ways to engage fans in between. The 13-block party is engineered by GMC in partnership with the NFL and boasts a programming line up that began Wednesday afternoon with the delivery of the Lombardi trophy. A few lucky fans will have the chance to pose with the statue before Sunday’s winners do.
The celebration officially began Wednesday evening, amid below freezing temperatures, with comments from New York’s Mayor Bill De Blasio, Governor Andrew Cuomo and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. Goodell thanked New York for being such a great host; never mind the fact that the game will take place across the Hudson River. Their remarks were followed by performances from The Boys Choir of Harlem, who sang “On Broadway” in matching winter hats; The Rockettes, whose legs were still bare despite the cold; and the leads from the Broadway show “Jersey Boys.”
Throughout the rest of the week, football fans, New Yorkers and tourists lined up at autograph stations to meet NFL stars, pose with oversized XLVIII roman numerals and take a 60-foot toboggan ride, right in the middle of Broadway. The outdoor slide is a tribute to the conditions players will experience during the first ever cold-weather open- air Super Bowl.
The enormous slide is bested in size by a temporary FOX Sports broadcast center, built by Production Resource Group, located at the top of the Boulevard. Equipped with 8,100 square feet of studio space, from which FOX will deliver live pre-game coverage, the three-story structure’s completion was announced on Friday, just two days before Super Bowl Sunday.
From inside the studio, broadcasters have sweeping views of Super Bowl Boulevard, and the building’s exterior is furnished with one 30-foot by 20-foot and two 12-foot by 22-foot LED video screens built by PRG. The screens will display snippets of FOX Sports shows, but not complete game coverage of the Super Bowl itself.
The majority of the game-related broadcasts that fans will see in their homes will originate from the studio, but will not be shown on the screens outside.
“The idea was that FOX really wanted to move its studios to the heart of the excitement happening in New York,” said Bobby Allen of PRG Marketing, “This was an ideal way to create a broadcast studio that they could use prior to the game beginning, when they will move to New Jersey, where they have a much smaller location on the field.”
Whether or not the Boulevard promotion will impact at-home viewership of the actual game remains to be seen, but New York’s football fans are enjoying the festivities and the attention that the city is getting.
Howie and Estelle Barenfeld of Monroe, New York, braved the cold, and called the Boulevard a once in a lifetime experience. “We just couldn’t miss it,” Mr. Barenfeld said. “We don’t have tickets to the game, so it’s the next best thing. We jumped in the ball pit, got some autographs. I didn’t do the toboggan ride, but I thought about it. We might even come back another day.”
Image courtesy of Getty Images via The Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel.
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