Mark Your Calendars...

...for the return of The Pond and The Holiday Shops at Bryant Park.

Here are the dates you need to know:

The Pond will be open for free admission ice skating, courtesy of Citi, from Friday, October 29 through Sunday, February 27, 2011 (a full six weeks longer than last year's season!)

The Holiday Shops will be open with over 100 artisans, specialty boutiques, and food vendors from Friday, November 5 through Sunday, January 2, 2011.

So dust off those skates and start drafting your holiday shopping list!


For more information about The Pond and The Holiday Shops at Bryant Park, visit their websites at www.ThePondatBryantPark.com and www.TheHolidayShopsatBryantPark.com.

Word for Word Poetry Blogs

We tapped some very special guest bloggers to help us celebrate this summer's Word for Word Poetry series at Bryant Park. All summer long, they provided a behind-the-scenes look at each event and the talented poets who shared their work in the park. It's been a wonderful season of Word for Word Poetry at the Bryant Park Reading Room and we hope to see you at next year's series.

Mary Austin Speaker on Word for Word Poetry, September 14

The last reading of the summer. We New Yorkers (at least the secular ones) don't have enough ceremony in our lives. When the seasons change, we buy things, anticipate the drama of the coming season, and act surprised whenever the seasonal weather doesn't kick in ontime. Tuesday's reading at Bryant Park was the very thing to remind readers and audience members that literature is often the thing that ushers in the new season— and that it will outlast each and every one of those months that seem to alter us, in their small ways, with each passing year. The reading was dedicated to the Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, a magnificent anthology which samples poems from almost 150 poets, spanning 500 years. Edited by the magical Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon-Grosman, the book comes in at 608 pages—a doorstop, complete with illustrations that trace the history of Latin American poetry from Precolumbian Mesoamerica to concrete poetries of the 18th century to Raul Zurita's skywriting of 1982.

From the Archives: Washington Irving in Bryant Park

In this post, BPC’s archivist Anne Kumer, shares the history of one of Bryant Park's former monuments.  

Currently, the Bryant Park grounds are home to several monuments that pay homage to artists, writers, and leaders. Some, such as the statue memorializing William Earl Dodge in the Reading Room, originally stood in other parks and courtyards throughout the city before making their way to Bryant Park. (Dodge’s original home was Herald Square.) Others, such as a bust of American author Washington Irving, resided first in the park, and have since been moved elsewhere. 

My interest in this particular statue was first piqued when I found (and bought) this postcard at the Brooklyn Flea. In case you can't read the back, it says "Same old story" and nothing else. A perfect non sequitur circa 1914.



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In the late 1800s to early 1900s, a large bronze bust of Washington Irving, mounted on a granite pedestal, stood in the south side of Bryant Park. The author of “Sleepy Hollow” and many other works, Irving was one of the first American writers to gain international acclaim. 



The statue was donated to the City of New York in 1885 by Joseph Weiner, a German physician and admirer of Irving’s. Sculpted by artist Friedrich Beers, the bust was originally intended for placement in Central Park. Upon completion some members of the NYC Art Committee declared it a success, while others insisted that it wasn’t flattering enough to Irving. The Commission decided to put the bust in Bryant Park, because Irving had served on the park’s advisory council at one point.

It remained in the park for many years, and possibly up until the 1934 renovation. Some say that the statue was moved before that, lost, and then later recovered in a storage shed under the Williamsburg Bridge.

In 1935, the Irving bust was moved to Washington Irving High School (go bulldogs!), where it remains today.

Look here for more details on the history of this and many other NYC statues, and of course, here, for more information about NYC parks, including the other Washington Irving bust, located in Brooklyn's Prospect Park.

America's Best Restroom Rankings

With great support from fans of our public restrooms, Bryant Park took third place in the 2010 America's Best Restroom competition!

We are in the 2010 Restroom Hall of Fame alongside the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah (second place), the Embassy Theatre in Fort Wayne, Indiana (fourth place), and fellow New York City nominee, the Muse Hotel (fifth place). The restrooms at The Fountain on Locust, a vintage ice cream parlor in St. Louis, Missouri, took the first place honor.

Thank you to everyone who voted for Bryant Park in the competition. We're proud to manage the third best restroom in the entire United States!

Fall Festival Finale

The Grammy-award winning Orchestra of St. Luke's performs tonight in the 2010 Bryant Park Fall Festival finale, hosted by WQXR's Elliot Forrest.

Stop by to hear the music of Scarlatti, Arensky, and Schumann, and take advantage of two special Fall Festival offers from OSL.

During tonight's performance, tickets to any concert in the OSL 2010-2011 Chamber Music Series will be available for just $20 at the Fall Festival Information Booth. Plus, Fall Festival attendees can enter to win a free pair of tickets to an OSL concert by texting in a review of the ensemble's Bryant Park performance. Full contest details will be available in tonight's program.

Click here for more information about Bryant Park Fall Festival.

Seven More Chances to Attend Fall Festival

Although foul weather foiled our first night of Fall Festival, there are still more seven days of insider talks and evening performances to attend in the park. 


Fall Festival Refreshments
This year the Bryant Park Grill is offering a selection of beer, wine, and snacks for sale during the Fall Festival performances at a lawn-side bar.



Five Boroughs Music Festival
Songs from critically acclaimed composer Ricky Ian Gordon & more
Fall Festival Performance
  Tonight, 6:00pm, Lawn 

The Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program
Opera's rising stars perform a selection of favorite arias, songs & duets
Inside Opera 
   Wednesday, September 15, 12:30pm, Fountain Terrace
Fall Festival Performance
   Wednesday, September 15, 6:00pm, Lawn

Jazz at Lincoln Center
An exhilarating gospel ensemble & a captivating jazz & blues quartet
Inside Jazz at Lincoln Center
   Thursday, September 16, 12:30pm, Fountain Terrace
Fall Festival Performance
  Thursday, September 16, 6:00pm, Lawn

BAM
Funk/rock group WAR retrospective by Black Rock Coalition Orchestra
Inside BAM
   Friday, September 17, 12:30pm, Fountain Terrace
Fall Festival Perfrmance
   Friday, September 17, 6:00pm, Lawn

Brooklyn Philharmonic
The Sound of Brooklyn: a mix of classical & contemporary works
Inside Brooklyn Philharmonic
   Saturday, September 18, 3:30pm, Lawn
Fall Festival Performance
   Saturday, September 18, 6:00pm, Lawn

Parsons Dance
Remember Me with music & lead vocalists of East Village Opera Company
Inside Parsons Dance
   Sunday, September 19, 3:30pm, Lawn
Fall Festival Performance
   Sunday, September 19, 6:00pm, Lawn

Orchestra of St. Luke’s
Baroque and Romantic chamber music by the Grammy-winning ensemble
Inside Orchestra of St. Luke’s
   Monday, September 20, 12:30pm, Fountain Terrace
Fall Festival Performance
   Monday, September 20, 6:00pm, Lawn

Tonight: New York City Ballet at Bryant Park Fall Festival

After a successful Inside Fall Festival lunchtime kick off, we're getting the park ready for this evening's opening performance of Bryant Park Fall Festival, presented by Bank of America.

Join us at 6pm as incredible performers from the New York City Ballet take the Fall Festival stage on the eve of their first-ever fall season. Go behind the scenes as the dancers warm up in a Company Class led by Ballet Master in Chief Peter Martins, followed by performances of Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain pas de deux and Martins’ own A Fool for You, featuring the music of Ray Charles.

This is just the first of eight chances to catch free performances from New York City’s premiere jazz, opera, funk, classical music, ballet, and modern dance institutions at Bryant Park.

Check out the complete Fall Festival schedule at bryantpark.org or follow Fall Festival on Facebook at facebook.com/BryantParkFallFestival.

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. Join us tomorrow from 12:30pm to 2:00pm for the final Word for Word Poetry event of the season at the Bryant Park Reading Room.  


Mary Austin Speaker on Word for Word Poetry, September 7  

This Tuesday on a sunny, windswept afternoon, three poets from the venerable Cave Canem writers workshop shared their work with the audience at Bryant Park. Paul Romero started off the reading by acknowledging, with pride, the three years that Bryant Park has hosted Cave Canem poets. Jocelyn Burrell, Lorelei Williams and Monica A. Hand were introduced by Camille Rankine, programs coordinator for Cave Canem, who mentioned their upcoming participating in the Brooklyn Book Festival.

Jocelyn Burrell, who I'd had the pleasure of meeting at dinner following the Blue Flower Arts reading on June 15, gave the first reading of the afternoon. After editing "Word: on being a [woman] writer," a collection of essays by women authors from Sandra Cisneros to Barbara Kingsolver, Jocelyn is at work on her first manuscript of poems and read from a series called Duels, which she aptly described as "haunted by anxiety," a description that would inadvertently cover a great many of the poems we heard from all three readers, particularly the anxiety about identity, diaspora, the exotic, and the fraught relationship between mother and child.  The first of these was "What is Born," which examined the anxiety of diaspora, rhyming "what stands for the family" with "break into his gallery." The poem had a draggy, labored rhythm that spoke to the difficulty of contending with an identity that is as much mystery as it is tragedy, that is as championed as it is cast out— a favorite line: "Jefferson was a liar / Just like your father." The poem exuded a rough vulnerability that found its way into the following poems, such as "She Will Not," a poem that pried open the mythic gloss of a wedding day to discover the rift between the idea and practice of marriage. "Accounting for the Damage," written when its author was digesting the news of the earthquake in Haiti this year, had the terrifying effect of bringing the reader to the disturbing present of the disaster ("palms wander, bayonet the sky"), through its history as a supplier of raw goods to colonial powers, ("the murmur of sugar"), and then to the forgetful, notably abstract present ("the world already winding its watch and moving on without you"). A truly shattering poem that I will not soon forget. She ended her set with a nod to the changing of the seasons as we sloughed off the heat of August and looked toward the first days of fall. Persephone, to Demeter: "Summer, / I cherish your grief, long you / dead." (link: http://leximaven.wordpress.com/)

Win Fall Festival VIP Seats, Swag, and More!

Fall Festival Kick Off Contest

Enter the Bryant Park Fall Festival Kick Off Contest on Facebook or Twitter for the chance to win a pair of VIP seats and free refreshments at the Fall Festival performance of your choice!

Entering is easy. Become a fan of Fall Festival on Facebook and click the “Like” button beneath any Kick Off Contest post. To enter on Twitter, follow us @BryantParkNYC and retweet our Kick Off Contest message to your followers. Entering on Facebook and Twitter gives you two chances to win!

The Kick Off Contest closes Monday, September 13 at noon and winners will be announced shortly after.



More Chances to Win

Each evening at Fall Festival is a chance to win. Our wonderful presenting arts organizations have given us great prizes, including swag bags, season passes, and tickets to their upcoming performances, to give away to you!

Enter to win on site every night during Fall Festival by completing the survey included in the performance program and returning it to us at the Fall Festival Information Booth. While you’re at the Information Booth, sign up to receive email blasts from Bryant Park and you’ll be entered for an additional chance to win.

Audience members at Monday’s New York City Ballet performance in the park will have the chance to win two tickets to an upcoming New York City Ballet show and a New York City Ballet swag bag!

Click here for the complete schedule of Fall Festival performances.

Live from The Southwest Porch

Our lips were sealed...in July we collaborated with 'wichcraft to host our first "secret" Artists Den concert at The Southwest Porch at Bryant Park.

The Artists Den is an organization that presents unforgettable concerts from emerging and established musicians at non-traditional locations across the globe. Although Bryant Park has hosted and presented countless music performances over the past 20 years, working with the Artists Den was a new experience for us.

Like all Bryant Park events, Artists Den concerts are 100% free of charge, however, the location of each concert is only revealed to a select number of attendees chosen at random from the Den's electronic mailing list. For those who aren't selected to attend the secret concerts, each show is filmed and airs on public television as the series Live from the Artist's Den, which includes interviews with the artists and insight into the unconventional concert venues.

It was hard to keep our mouths shut, but we're happy to share the following featurette, hot off the presses, of the first Artists Den concert presented at The Southwest Porch, featuring iconic British rock band Squeeze.

Check your local listings for the full episode on Live from the Artists Den in early 2011, and sign up with Artists Den for your chance to attend future concerts at Bryant Park or other venues in your area.

Countdown to Bryant Park Fall Festival!

Bryant Park Fall Festival returns this year with eight consecutive days of afternoon talks and evening performances from New York City's most celebrated performing arts organizations. Presented by Bank of America, Fall Festival invites park visitors to indulge themselves in a free taste of the city's 2010-2011 cultural season.

From September 13 through September 20 you can experience not one, but two Fall Festival events every day, featuring the following arts institutions:

• Monday, September 13: New York City Ballet

• Tuesday, September 14: Five Boroughs Music Festival

• Wednesday, September 15: The Metropolitan Opera's Lindemann Young Artist Development Program

• Thursday, September 16: Jazz at Lincoln Center

• Friday, September 17: BAM

• Saturday, September 18: Brooklyn Philharmonic

• Sunday, September 19: Parsons Dance

• Monday, September 20: Orchestra of St. Luke’s

Get a behind-the-scenes look at each night's performance, as well as the institutions' upcoming seasons, at Inside Fall Festival, a series of afternoon discussions with the artists and producers that bring Bryant Park Fall Festival to life.

Make yourself comfortable on the Lawn each evening (chairs, tables, and picnic blankets are welcome) and watch as incredible performers from each organization take the Fall Festival stage, located on the Upper Terrace.


Inside Fall Festival
Weekdays, 12:30pm – 1:30pm on the Fountain Terrace       
Weekend, 3:30pm – 4:30pm on the Fall Festival Stage
Monday, September 13 – Monday, September 20

Bryant Park Fall Festival
Daily, 6:00pm – 7:30pm
Monday, September 13 – Monday, September 20
Fall Festival Stage, public seating on the Lawn

Visit bryantpark.org for more information or check out Bryant Park Fall Festival on Facebook.

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 31

Before any of the poets took the mike on Tuesday night for a program entitled “The Katrina Project,” Bryant Park’s own Paul Romero shared two poems: Patricia Smith’s “Siblings: Hurricaines 2005” and “Victoria Green (mother of four),” by Cynthia Hogue. Smith’s poem, an alphabetical litany of hurricane names and personifications (“Rita was a vicious flirt”), came to Katrina only in its last, haunting line: “None of them talked about Katrina. She was the blood dazzler.” The second poem, from Cynthia Hogue’s recently-published When the Water Came, is an “interview-poem” whose speaker recalls Katrina with both tough irony and pride of place. Together, this pair of poems set the stage for a night whose three readers would cross genre boundaries, blend tones, report, reveal, remember. This past week, many “Katrina five years after” events have been in the atmosphere and in the media. The Katrina Project was not such a marking of anniversary, as if to celebrate; but nor was it all about anger; nor was it all about lament. What emerged from the three voices in this project—Nicole Cooley, Tonya Foster, and Yusef Komunyakaa— was power of poetry to intertwine creation, observation, and remembrance.

The first poem Nicole Cooley read, “September Notebook,” immediately connected New York and New Orleans. At points, the poem put the two seasons of 9/11 and Katrina, and the two cities Cooley calls home, into mythical perspective, terms that transcended circumstance: “Once upon a time there were two Septembers in two cities: / the one of the towers on fire / and the one of floodwaters rising.” At the same time, Cooley’s takes on both events were always personal; the fire and the flood came across in memories of her child’s hair, a family phone conversation: “The sharp smell threaded through / my daughter’s hair for days”; “I / was on the phone with my parents, begging them to leave the city.” Throughout, “September Notebook” maintained this balance between talking small (“I hold my daughter on my lap”) and talking big (“I’d like to sit with her, Our Lady of the Breach”; “I’d like to force the floodwaters down her throat”). Throughout, Cooley’s poems reflected the reach of disaster by calling out intimate details and individual memories, carefully listing the objects of land- and cityscape, then letting these portraits speak for themselves. In “Debris,” for example, she turned her eye to the stratigraphy of rubble in New Orleans: “The face of a metal fan”; “A front door”; “A sign: do not destroy”; “A refrigerator spray painted Help Me Jesus”; “A sign: we’re coming home.” In “Write a Love Note to Camellia Grill,” she catalogued messages on post-it notes that covered the iconic diner of New Orleans when it closed: “Dear street car”; “Dear neutral ground”; “I will stay hungry forever.” A poem written along Highway 90, Hurricane Alley, described a “new lexicon” in “The spray painted X”; “The house marked O”; “Missing a whole story.” By noticing that lexicon of destruction and naming its features in her poetry, Cooley suggests the stories that are missing, that we may otherwise have missed.

The Fall Season

As summer draws to a close, we’re looking to the next season of activities in the park. Fall visitors to the park will enjoy exciting program returns in addition to brand new things to try!

 

After a summer hiatus, Bryant Park Fencing returns to the Library Terrace next Friday, September 10 with free lessons taught by the Manhattan Fencing Center. Equipment is provided and no prior experience is necessary. All we ask is that you pre-register for the lessons each week by calling (212) 382-2255. This is also a great one to watch! You never know who might stop by. The spring lessons finished with a visit from Olympic Silver Medalist Tim Morehouse.

Bryant Park Fencing
Fridays, 1:00pm – 2:00pm
September 10 – October 15
Library Terrace at 5th Avenue & 41st Street

In a couple of weeks, Birding Tours will also return to the park. In the spring, the New York City Audubon Society held guided tours in the park, which led birdwatchers to spot and identify the different varieties of birds that stopped into the park along their northward migratory path. The fall series of the Birding Tours will give park patrons a chance to spot birds in the opposite migratory pattern.

Birding Tours of Bryant Park
Wednesdays, 8:00am – 9:00am
September 29 – October 27
Meet just inside the park at 42nd Street & 6th Avenue

Beginning next week, anyone can learn to juggle for free in the park at lunchtime! All skill levels are welcome to join the jugglers in the park, who will be happy to get newcomers started, or model a trick that you have in mind.

Juggling in Bryant Park
Monday - Friday, 12:00pm – 1:00pm
September 7 – October 15
SE corner of the Lawn, or adjacent gravel if the Lawn is closed 

Visit www.bryantpark.org for a full schedule of programs and events in the park

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!