A New Year’s Tradition’s Last Ear-Splitting Blast

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times Conrad Milster, the chief engineer at Pratt Institute, in an engine room on campus in May.

A longstanding Brooklyn tradition might end tonight with a blast - literally.

Since 1965, Conrad Milster, the chief engineer at Pratt Institute in Fort Greene, has blown in the new year with his private collection of steam whistles. But the loud whistles marking the start of 2014 might be the last to be heard.

Pratt does not sponsor the event; the campus is closed for winter break, and most if not all students have deserted it. Yet as the night wanes each Dec. 31, hundreds of local residents and whistle aficionados have gathered in the institute’s art-filled quad to hear just after midnight the clarion calls of bygone days: a ship entering the harbor or a train leaving the station.

Mr. Milster, 77, attaches a dozen whistles to a pipe outside the school’s power plant. When he pulls a cord, steam pours through a whistle’s opening, creating its own distinctive tone. Stand close enough and you’ll be enveloped in a hot cloud so thick you can’t see a thing. You’ll want to cover your ears, too, as even the smallest whistle can be heard for miles.

Keith Williams for The New York Times The steam whistle from the S.S. Normandie.

Included in Mr. Milster’s collection is his first whistle, a five-tone device he bought from the Lackawanna Railroad after high school.

“When I bought the Lackawanna whistle, I thought, ‘I’d like to hear what it sounds like, so when can I blow it?’” he said. “People are making a lot of noise on New Year’s Eve.”

The Pratt tradition harks back to Mr. Milster’s childhood and to New York history. Growing up in Astoria, he loved hearing the whistling each New Year’s Eve from the waterfront factories, now long gone.

Perhaps his most famous whistle comes from the S.S. Normandie, a record-holding trans-Atlantic ocean liner from the 1930s. Those present for this potential final performance might not get to hear it, though. Mr. Milster has been ill with the flu, and even with the assistance of two other Pratt engineers, he is unsure whether he will be able to raise the 600-pound apparatus onto its three-foot-high mantle.

“As I’ve gotten older,” he said, “the pipes and the whistles have gotten heavier.”

He guaranteed, however, the presence of his homemade calliope, a fixed-volume relic of circuses and carousels. The instrument is similar to a pipe organ but uses steam instead of compressed air. “I did that for 2000,” he said. “I wanted something special, because that was the big one.”

His favorite whistle is from the S.S. Lansdowne, a railroad ferry that served the Detroit River from 1884 to 1956. It’s a sentimental tribute to his late wife. “That’s always the first one we blow on New Year’s Eve,” he said, “because Phyllis grew up on the Great Lakes.”

Now a top-ranked design school, Pratt was founded in 1887 to train engineers. Its power plant includes the two-level Engine Room, one of the last reminders of the school’s original focus. Although officials closed that program in 1993, the chamber’s bottom floor remains a steampunk fantasyland, with a host of dials, clocks and gauges framing three Ames steam engines from 1900 still functional thanks to Mr. Milster’s care.

Pratt officials, who are discontinuing the whistle-blowing practice over safety and insurance concerns, said Mr. Milster will have the option to blow them one last time, in 2015. As of now, though, he seems content for this to be the end.

“I do love doing this â€" it’s always been fun,” he said. “But I’ve done it so many years that the keen edge is sort of gone.”