This season, stand in the middle of Bryant Park should you want to do a favor for yourself.
Walk through the fleur-de-lis golden gates and take in the oversized bronze lampposts, the balustrades separating the various plateaus, the monumental urns and ginger pots, the festooned grotto where William Cullen Bryant surveys it all, stroll past the little shops in their glass huts, the golden hues of their lights spreading out like candles in the dark, where the smiling shopkeeps sell the warmth of hot cider and cocoa and truffles and scarves, step up to the ice skating rink lit with blues and reds turning every turning skater rosy in the night, move towards the center and spin, take in the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the Bank of America Tower, and the gold-leafed Bryant Park Hotel, and if you are particularly lucky, Harry Connick, Jr. will be singing And A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square and everybody is smiling, everybody, in love, perhaps, with each other, but most certainly, in love with the night, paying no heed to the garish sun.
The Alamo is a sculpture by Tony Rosenthal situated in the East Village at Astor Plaza very near the Cooper Union. Each side of the cube is eight feet long. Made out of steel, it is upended on an axis and, my favorite part, it spins! One person can manage it, two people can give it quite a whirl. It was erected in 1967, with a permit for a six-month exhibition. People loved it so much however, it has been spinning there for forty-seven years.
The clock in Dante Square in front of Lincoln Center was designed by one of the world's most prominent architects, a man exceedingly well represented on the NYC Skyline. His name was Philip Johnson and he gave us this clock. Across the street in the New York State Theatre, one of the thee largest stages in the Quadrangle of Lincoln Center, and designed by Johnson himself. (I have to tell you I am very fond of the building for the institutions it hosts, but it is by FAR my least favorite building at Lincoln Center and perhaps Johnson's worst design. The lobby looks exactly like a cellblock at Rikers. )(I'm told.) However, I love this sleek timepiece out front, whose four points hit north, east,south, and west.
The Dutch volunteer constabulary police force used to carry green lanterns on the ends of 'hobo poles' to make them visible on the dark night streets of New Amsterdam as they looked for 'thief's, petty larcenists, and pirates in the mid-1600s. During their breaks, they settled in the watch house and hung their lanterns outside so as not to bur the buildings down. Today, nearly every NYPD Police Precinct is adorned with green lanterns to lest you know they are 'watching and vigilant'.
One of the three massive and amazingly lifelike 'trees' in bronze, sprouting boulders in Madison Square Park in an installation titled "Ideas of Stone" by Giuseppe Penone. What does it mean? I was asked.Hmmm. Well. The trees are so real-looking birds have nested on them. Look! But they are leafless, uprooted and dying. Real-looking bronze. And the boulders are either floating in them or toppling the branches over. To me, they heighten the feeling of life by making it feel fleeting, temporal, precarious, a boulder in a tree, frozen in time. Stop for a moment and feel the feeling of being alive. But that's just me. (They made me smile.)
We lost Gus, the bi-polar bear, a few weeks ago at the Central Park Zoo.. He lived to be 27, but never produced any children. Known for his melancholy and obsessive-compulsive behavior, he earned one of the great nicknames in NYC History. I miss him.
The 16-foot high, 66-foot long memorial not only remembers those who died, but celebrates life for those who survived. Excerpts of 83 letters, poems and journal entries written by 65 individuals—both those who returned from the Vietnam War and those who did not—are etched into illuminated glass blocks. Alongside these personal remarks are statements by the four American presidents under whom the war in Southeast Asia was waged, and brief news clips to amplify and give context to the excerpts. Nearby, the Walk of Honor lists the names and ages of 1,741 individuals who entered the military service in NYC and were lost to the Vietnam War.
