NYC Places to Go: The Central Park Snowscape

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Parent Category: Travel Info

Category: Things To Do

Published on Friday, 04 December 2009 22:09

Written by Marion DS Dreyfus

I got off the bus at 57th Street and 6th Avenue and walked up through the Central Park snowscape.

Faerie time.

Little kids with their brilliantly colored toboggans or inverted large plastic frisbees in cherry, lime green, turquoise and violet flopped down the tiniest slopes, shrilly screaming with delight. People were running the track, as per usual, enclosed in their huffing and timing.

Many teams of families and friends were building snowmen, and I saw at least three snow caves, which we always advise people to build in the chilly North, if they are caught in a snowstorm or are lost in the woods and there is available snow.
 
I watched four energetic bunches of people cavorting on tamped-down slopes; some of the adults were sitting on the plastic garbage-can covers so they looked behind their tots.

Against the stark, clean white of the snow, the strong verticals of brown-etched, black tree trunks heavy with the best snowball-making snow (but also the most perilous -- as the death of a man struck by a falling overburdened branch demonstrated to us all), and the colorful gear and costumes of the skaters, made it into a wonder place.

The far off children made the scene evocative of those daguerreotype postcards from the first decade of the 20th century -- rich and wonderful, especially with the high-prancing, horse-drawn hansoms passing by every few minutes. Two offered a free fa-la-la through the park, but I declined, entranced with everything around, far more scenic than anything in the summer months.
 
So I stopped to chat with a chilled but friendly NBC cameraman next to his sound and light transmission truck opposite the old, now closed, Tavern on the Green, supposedly in preparation for a March reopening under new and hopefully solvent management. It was shorn of its usual razzle-dazzle lights, but now looking cozier for the absence of limousines, cabs and liveried doormen. Now it is just a cozy restaurant nestled in the snow banks of the park. The TV guys told me they were forbidden to take shots of anything untoward: Only reportage on weather and snow conditions. No reports on branches falling and ending someone’s breathing in an eye-blink.

Dogs on leashes stood on their hind legs like African prairie dogs saluting the large igloo being built opposite the Tavern. The cave/igloo was now the height of a medium daddy, and his son was inside the stucco’ed white structure, the top of his head just-just visible in the 'atrium' open-air unfinished dome, adding incrementally to the enclosure.
 
A family of four kids and tony parents stopped to discuss the activities in the park, and one noticed the kids wore sleek, aerated bike helmets to prevent damage to their noggins should the boys decide to go tobogganing.
 
Everywhere, people smiled and spoke with one another, accessible as ever in extremis of weather or misadventure.

Everywhere, the overhead shiny sun found its echo in the sunny dispositions of the tots and parents, walkers, runners and horse-drawn, rug-covered buggies.
 
Who said childhood is finished?