Most are tourists looking up in awe at the LED screens that dominate the landscape.  Nobody notices the tiny dark figure 350 feet above the pavement clinging to the side of the century old Times Building, home of the New Year's Eve Ball.
Jeff Rolfe is a cross between Spider Man and Guy Fawkes, gingerly making his way up and down the side of the building with a bitter winter wind attacking him from every angle as he dangles.
In his arms are pre-configured wooden racks full of small explosives.
He has to install enough to put smiles on a billion TV viewers worldwide. Thankfully these are the finishing touches to a display of fireworks that in just over 24 hours will hopefully also elicit oohs and aahs from a million New Years Eve revellers in the Square.
For almost everyone the thrill of fireworks is an experience that can be traced back to childhood.
Yet if you were able to time travel backwards two, three or four decades into history and stand once again in front of your local town display, you would likely be  disappointed.
Mr Rolfe, from Fireworks By Santore, says few people realise that fountains, rockets, wheels and bursts have all taken a huge step forward thanks to technology.
"The shows used to be much much longer, over an hour in duration. But attention spans are shorter now," he says.
"Today, 30 minutes is considered a very long display. Technicians used to manually shoot big shells from steel tube mortars that would need to cool down before the next ones could be fired. It was more relaxed. Now we shoot multiple smaller shells per second from several locations, remotely."
Songs were played in their entirety rather than the mixed snippets that are favoured today. And any notion of syncing the beats to the bursts was usually a happy accident rather than anything pre-planned.
New software and hardware means shells and cannons can be fired remotely up to two miles away and timed to within 1/100th of a second.
And in a world full of giant LEDs, laser beams and light shows, fireworks are frequently asked to become team players, which is why "syncing" is one of the most sought after skills in the industry.
"Using computer software, we mark where we want the highs and lows of the display to be in relation to the music," says Mr Rolfe.
"And then we backtrack all the timings, and create digital cues alongside the music track for the firing sequence in an FSK (Frequency Shift Keying) file. When you hear it, it sounds like the noise made by an old modem."
Big events, especially those on live TV are usually produced using "timecode".
A highly accurate digital clock signal is generated from a central source and every person, computer, device and camera at the event uses it as their only time reference.
Music tracks, lighting and fireworks can be pre-programmed digitally to flow together perfectly.
But it can take months of work by specialist designers to produce a dazzling display. One thing on their side is that the chemical compounds have become more sophisticated.
The colours are brighter, the variety of effects has greatly increased and there is far less residual smoke that once might have blocked subsequent bursts.
Fireworks today are so chemically precise and stable, a horizontal rocket with a label that says 60 feet will shoot off a building straight out exactly 60 feet, and predictably reach its peak explosion right at the end of that distance without letting gravity pull it down prematurely.
Of course timecode and technology are not always perfect, and when things go wrong the motto invented for the digital age - "all or nothing" definitely applies.
Perhaps the most famous incident was the 2012 Big Bay Boom display in San Diego, which saw about 18 minutes worth of fireworks explode in just 15 seconds thanks to a timecode issue. It could have been the most expensive fireworks display ever (on a per second basis).
But firework displays that often cost cities as much as a teacher's annual salary have an upside - successful or not.
Officials in San Diego worked out their firework display fiasco still generated about $10m in revenue from local restaurants, tourism, boat hires, and hotel stays.
And accidents don't happen as much these days. The biggest problem with older displays was explosions due to sparks from other fireworks in the display. Now the devices are smaller and more spread out so it doesn't happen as often.
Corporate requests often drive the direction of the fireworks industry.
Companies are increasingly asking for daytime fireworks which have been around for years, but now look much better because once again there are brighter colours and cleverer chemical combinations which make them more dramatic against a bright blue backdrop.
Despite the many developments one request that is harder than you'd think is to reproduce corporate logos.
Mr Rolfe acknowledges that static logos are easy to do. But firing words and exact shapes from the ground into the sky with 100% accuracy for the entire audience to read from different vantage points is an art form that's in its infancy.
"We are just starting to work with it. The new firing systems allow us to shoot from the same location over and over again to basically form line art. It's not a cheap effect. It takes a bit of trial and error to get the sizing right but when it's done right it's pretty incredible."
Other companies offer a variation of ways to reproduce airborne corporate designs closer to the ground, such as Flogos, which are made in a portable bubble container and sent off into the sky at a rapid pace.
But Mr Rolfe believes the future of fireworks is solid. Despite the rising costs of insurance, security, transportation and storage he thinks that beautiful explosions in the sky will never be trumped by holograms or video screens or anything else.
Everyone over five loves sparks and sparkle.
Every year, on the evening before New Year's Eve, thousands of people in New York City amble through the neon glow of Times Square.