A Bit of Trompe L'Oeil at Bryant Park

Observant visitors to Bryant Park are noticing something delightful about the reverse sides of our information signs. Until recently, the signs’ backs were, like the backs of most free-standing signs, blank and visually disruptive to sightlines in the park. Bryant Park Corporation had long sought an elegant solution for the aesthetic problem that these utilitarian objects present.

Then a while back, BPC President Dan Biederman visited the Playa Vista project near Los Angeles Airport, and noticed that some purely functional streetscape objects, such as utility boxes, were cleverly camouflaged with photographic images of what a viewer might see if the object were not there. A BPC staffer contacted the artist responsible, Joshua Callaghan, and soon we were collaborating with Callaghan for a similar project in Bryant Park, and Herald and Greeley Squares in the 34th Street Partnership (34SP) Business Improvement District.

We selected the backs of five information signs at Bryant Park, and two utility boxes at Herald and Greeley Squares, for the treatment. “For the backs of the signs at Bryant Park, we chose to simply camouflage the objects with images of what is on the other side. But in the case of the utility boxes in Herald and Greeley, we had an opportunity to portray a fantasy of what might have been there, such as horticulture or movable chairs,” says Julie Ember, BPC/34SP Industrial Designer. The photographs are, depending on a park visitor’s attention to detail, attractive or invisible. Either of those possibilities works for us.

Herald Square

The prints were made by a state-of-the-art Plug Digital printer, using environmentally friendly solvent-free ink, and are mounted on vinyl that is resistant to UV rays and graffiti. Next time you’re in the park and you walk by an information sign, check out the back. We think you’ll get a kick out of it.

Park-Inspired Art

Bryant Park tends to inspire all forms of artistic expression in its creative visitors, from poetry and outdoor theater, to photography, painting, and drawing.

Just the other day, Greg Betza, an artist, illustrator, and designer from New Jersey, emailed us to share some of his lovely sketches of the park. Betza works in many different styles and mediums, and has illustrated for major publications like the Chicago Tribune and Men's Journal.

For a closer look at the lines and detail in Betza's park drawings, click on each image below to view a larger version in your browser.

Le Carrousel and 40th Street Allee

Le Carrousel

People watching in the park  

Thank you for sharing, Greg!

Word for Word Poetry Blogs

We've tapped some very special guest bloggers to help us celebrate this summer's Word for Word Poetry series at Bryant Park. They provide a behind-the-scenes look at each event and divulge about the talented poets who share their work in the park. Experience Word for Word Poetry yourself every Tuesday through September 14, from 7pm to 8:30pm, at the Bryant Park Reading Room.


Anne Lovering Rounds on Word for Word Poetry, August 24

Who would have known it was summer? Last Tuesday, audiences braved a cool and blustery night in the park, gathering to hear four exceptional poets. Their poems of place, as organizer Tess Taylor called the work on the evening’s agenda, went far beyond the city, though in the end we were called back to Manhattan. Each of these poets engaged in questions of travel: literal journeys and metaphysical, explorations without and within.

Sean Hill read first, starting with poems from his 2008 book, Blood Ties & Brown Liquor (University of Georgia Press). The title alone is a clue to the way Hill writes colors—of urban environment, of nature, of skin—into his poetry. The poems in Blood Ties are set in Hill’s hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but to call them “historical” isn’t enough to capture their sensuousness. Listen to the ways the speaker multiplies the implications of “McIntosh Street,” a black business district: “like the apple red but not / red delicious red but red / like redeye gravy on grits / at Gus’s or red like stoplights / but they’re also green and yellow / like apples in Allen’s Market…” Hill takes what seems ordinary (a red apple) and carefully and consistently adds to the palette; different reds thicken the world. Again and again, shades and particular colors defined the spaces of these poems: “Ivory soap,” “graying water,” and “colored soldiers cross[ing] the slate ocean” in “Auspice”; the “yellow sunshine on a white plate,” a breakfast in “Uncle John”; hands the “black-brown / of crossties— / creosote soaked” in “Hands 1921.” Hill currently lives in Bemidji, Minnesota, a place he called “very white,” both in its harsh winters and in its racial makeup. His final poem, “Sam Kee, I imagine…” envisioned the life of an opium dealer, put on trial and acquitted in Bemidji, “left / in peace to make a living getting / their sheets as white as snow.” From jade green to blood red to snow white, Hill’s colors are gorgeous, intricate, painful; they are the hinges on which his poems turn, observing landscape, working out identity.

From the Archive: America's Best Restroom

In this post, BPC’s archivist Anne Kumer, shares the history of Bryant Park's restrooms, currently in the running for 2010 America's Best Restroom competition.


The tradition of comfort and hospitality is longstanding in Bryant Park. The first restrooms date back to 1911, when the main branch of the New York Public Library was built. Designed by architects John Merven Carrére and Thomas Hastings, the Beaux-Arts building was completed in 1911, with a raised terrace at the rear of the library and two comfort stations at the east end of Bryant Park. These structures originally functioned as two separate restrooms - women’s at 40th street, and men’s at 42nd street.

The photo above shows the 40th Street Women's Restroom, and back of the NYPL in the early 1920s. If you look closely, you can also see the ghostly evidence of passerby on 40th Street (the result of a long exposure and slow shutter speed), as well as the William Cullen Bryant monument.

The men’s restroom (at 42nd Street) remained open and functional until the 1960s, when it was closed because of disrepair and poor use.

The original women’s restroom (at 40th Street) became the district office for the Parks Department until March 1, 1988, when the Bryant Park Corporation (then called Bryant Park Restoration Corporation) took over day-to-day management of the park.

After the Bryant Park Corporation assumed management, the 40th street structure was turned into a storage area/office for park operations. The original men’s room at 42nd street was renovated as a restroom for both sexes. Starting with the 1988 renovation, the restrooms have had full-time attendants. Since then, we have added scented oil diffusers, fresh flowers, modernized the facilities, and even been nominated for America's Best Restroom. Vote for us here. There are only five days left to vote!

Last Chance to Vote for Your Favorite Bryant Park T-Shirt!

Time is running out to tell us what you think of our Bryant Park T-shirt designs, created by Bryant Park Corporation's in-house Graphic Designer, Jamie Song.

Your votes and comments will determine the top three T-shirts that will be developed, produced, and available for sale in the online Bryant Park Shop this fall. 

If you haven't already, please check out the nine preliminary T-shirt designs below and let us know what you think. Just click on your favorite image and hit Submit at the end of the poll to cast your vote. If you like more than one design, feel free to refresh the page and vote again!

We're eager to move forward with your favorite designs, so the poll will close at the end of the day tomorrow.

The Boules are on a Roll

On the heels of our August 5th post about the recent flurry of media attention for Bryant Park Pétanque, comes yet another article about the French game's renaissance around the globe.

Pétanque, and the Bryant Park program, received international recognition last week in an AP article French bowling? Yes, pétanque's got swank, by Emma Vandore.

The story was picked up by countless news outlets around the world, including Fox, CBS, ABC, and delves into the game's origins, major tournaments, champion players, and glamorous celebrity enthusiasts. Our Pétanque Courts at 42nd Street and 6th Avenue were given due credit as the epicenter of New York City's cultural "melting pot" of pétanque players.

Around the same time, cartoonist Steve Brodner revealed on his website the original Bryant Park Pétanque illustration he submitted to The New Yorker (below), and the behind-the-scenes story of why it was revised before publication.

Brodner's Bryant Park Pétanque cartoon that was published in the August 2, 2010 issue of The New Yorker can be seen here.

Word for Word Poetry Blogs

We've tapped some very special guest bloggers to help us celebrate this summer's Word for Word Poetry series at Bryant Park. They provide a behind-the-scenes look at each event and divulge about the talented poets who share their work in the park. Experience Word for Word Poetry yourself every Tuesday through September 14, from 7pm to 8:30pm, at the Bryant Park Reading Room. 


Anne Lovering Rounds on Word for Word Poetry, August 17

As the Word for Word reading was about to begin last Tuesday, a particularly balmy evening and a wonderful night to hear poetry in the park, I happened to overhear a conversation. A young man behind me was describing to his friend the way green spaces were especially conducive to reading. “I can’t read near concrete,” he said.

It was a commentary about silent, solitary reading. But with its ceiling of leaves, the Reading Room has an equal ability to draw listeners completely out of the built, Midtown surrounding. It really is a room, and this intimate quality of the space especially complemented Tuesday’s readers, a cluster of Canadian poets. As the six (six!) readers passed the mic, the night developed a close, connected, chamber-music feel.      

Ken Babstock, the first of those six, opened with “Hunter Dearie and Hospital Wing”— what he called a “toxic ballad.”  Babstock’s way with meter is masterful, and it was a pleasure to pick out the dactyls from these lines of toxic content: “children of blood lung”; “Hospital Wing sings to his children.” In “Autumn News from the Donkey Sanctuary,” we also heard a blend of registers. The poem begins from a mild satire of community newsletter-style writing (a donkey named Pliny the Elder?) but soon slips into the more sinister territory of the “perimeter fence, / the ID chips like functional cysts slipped / under the skin,” and ends with straightforward, serious, and resonant instructions: “Have a safe winter / outside the enclosure.” Babstock closed with a poem called “Brno.” How do you even say that? Babstock asked with a laugh, identifying Brno as a town in the Czech Republic. But the poem found its groove in complexities of consonants, elucidating rhymes like “experimental theater” and “V-neck sweater,” chewing on a sci-fi alphabet (“new SIM card and Vodafone PIN”). The more alien or unpronounceable the language, the more Babstock thrives on making surprising, elegant verse out of it.