Central Park Comes to Life: Snowmageddon 2010

As most of you may have heard -- and some of you have experienced -- NYC is currently in the middle of a blizzard. This being the city that never sleeps, not much changed today other than schools being canceled and my haircut getting rescheduled.

Since school children were out for the day, however, this meant a lot of sledding, snowball fighting and snowman building in Central Park. I took a little stroll to check out the scene.

The hill at the 77th Street entrance.

This little girl was half of a pair of adorable twins, both of whom wore ballet pink Moncler jackets and ski pants. So New York.

My Bean Boots put to good use.

Snowmen of all varieties were on display:








In the Spring and Summer months I spend a lot of time in this particular section of the Park, called Cedar Hill. I pack a lunch and read on the benches while I eat. Sometimes I even take a nap in the sunshine on this exact knoll (I hope this news won't worry my mother; I haven't been murdered yet.). In fact, I've experienced some of the most restful sleep of my life in this very spot.

In the snow, however, this location that I know so well and frequent so often is wholly transformed. My sudden consciousness of this fact today made me realize that the versatility of NYC's landmarks is one of the things I love best about this city.

Just beyond these Park walls are two of the places where I work. Whereas this part of the Park often serves as my lunch spot or after work stop, today it felt like a playground designed exclusively for winter sporting fun.

This statue of Alice in Wonderland is often crowded by tourists in warmer months but was reclaimed today by native New Yorkers.

And the Boat Basin -- which in the summertime is full of electronic toy sailboats, and a point of convergence for ice cream-eating visitors -- was transformed into a place for quiet reflection today.

Any geographic location that experiences seasons undergoes this kind of transformation from month to month, but because many of those places (I'm thinking of my homestate of Kansas) are car-based societies, one's experience doesn't change from Autumn to Winter to Spring to Summer. In New York, you live outside and every change is felt in wholly-consuming and wonderfully metamorphic ways.

As I left the park I passed a father pulling his children in a sled across a Fifth Avenue crosswalk.
Only in New York.

Cxx.