While walking through Central Park today on the path that parallels 59th Street, we ran into a wedding ceremony by the Duck Pond. Even though it’s winter and also the middle of the week, there was a surprising number of people in the park today.
As this wedding ceremony concluded and the bride and groom kissed, a few people that were watching from over the park wall, on the 59th Street sidewalk, cheered and whistled, which is why the bride looks so amused in the last photo.
I went up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art again today. I’ll blog about that later. For now, I want to show you what was going on at Union Square that cost me some of my museum time. Like I keep saying, there’s always something going on there and when I was passing through, I saw a huge crowd gathered by the entrance to the subway, so I stopped to check it out.
This colorfully dressed guy had just jumped over the girl that’s standing behind him there, in the center of the open area. I took this photo right as he was landing, though I meant for it to be him in the air over her. This wasn’t impressive enough, so he decided to give us an even bigger show, which I recorded:
Man in Union Square jumps over six women standing in a row.
I was impressed. I half expected him to land on the last girl, turning this otherwise exciting performance into a tragedy. There are very few places in New York City that you can go without seeing some sort of live performance by a regular person looking to make some extra cash. Some are bad, but some, like this one, are pretty damn good and worth the time to watch. I try to keep some change in my pocket for when I see stuff like this, or when someone is playing music (on an instrument, not from a boombox) in the subway and it sounds good.
I haven’t tried to keep up with what days each market is held on, but there was an art market yesterday. This is a photo of the cobbled area along the west side of the park where the stalls were set up, with people selling homemade artwork including oil on canvass, photography, sketches, etc. in various styles. One day I might even buy something from here to decorate my apartment wall. Maybe. I remember hearing people haggling over a price for something that looked like it was about a foot square. The starting price was 500. Ouch.
I’m not sure what the interview was about, but the guy to the right in the photo was pretty animated while speaking. Maybe this was part of a project being done by students at the New York Film Academy, which borders Union Square.
A group of interesting looking folks, sitting on the edge of a fountain in the southwest corner of Union Square. On warm days, Union Square is packed with people who are just hanging out and enjoying the good weather, at least so far. I wonder if that will change when the weather turns from warm and pleasant to hot and scorching, and the cement gets hot enough to sear your ass like a burger on a grill.
There was a group of people working on this painting. I think it had something to do with a project sponsored by Keds shoes. The old man there was taking a photo, like I was doing, and then went right into the middle of things to ask what it was all about, or at least I assume that’s what he was doing. That’s one of the good things about being old. People are more forgiving when you do stuff like that.
Union Square is even more crowded on weekends. This was a Thursday afternoon, around 5 PM.
There’s almost always something going on at Union Square, and even when there isn’t, there are still crowds of people there. The warmer the weather gets, the more people there are. I imagine quite a few of them are NYU students from the nearby dorms, but there were also people hanging out on the grass, having lunch, reading, or just talking to friends on the benches.
Then, of course, there are tons of people passing through to get to the stores around the Square, and to get to the subway entrances scattered around the area. Union Square is one of the major subway stations in New York City.
I like to walk through the park just to see what kind of people are there. You never know what you might come across in New York City, after all.
Three of my favorite stores are situated alongside Union Square: Best Buy, Barnes & Noble and Petco. I can spend hours just browsing in those stores, especially Barnes & Noble. Barnes & Noble is like a museum of words. I could spend a whole weekend just browsing the shelves. It helps that they have a coffee shop inside (which is a bit expensive, but we can’t have everything right?) and they don’t run around throwing you out if you’ve been hanging around too long.
‘Green’ markets and holiday markets are regularly held in Union Square. I’m looking forward to finding time to explore one. I go through there every day, and I’ve seen them quite often, but I’ve never had time to just stop and look.
