Outdoor Libraries Here and Abroad

By Grace Kim

Nothing signifies the onset of summer quite like outdoor reading. Some prefer to read in the backyard while others journey to the beaches.  Several cities around the world, from Sydney to Madrid, made innovative spaces for the public to enjoy this pastime. Clever architects and book lovers installed outdoor libraries on beaches and in nooks between busy crowded streets. We were struck by the dreamy library scenes collected by Flavorwire.

Bookyard, built by Massimo Bartolini for the Belgian art festival TRACK in Ghent (Source)

Hay-on-Wye, Wales (Source)

Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia
Photo Credit: James D. Morgan / Rex Features (Source)

If your wanderlust is on overdrive, you don’t have to travel far to quench the desire. The Bryant Park Reading Room sponsored by HSBC invites you to enjoy a wide selection of literature, with a cold drink in hand and plenty of green chairs to sit on to bask under the sunlight amidst blooming flora. Not only is this a place for individuals to find some peace and quiet to sit, but also for poetry readings and dynamic book club discussions. During story time for kids, giggles fill the airspace in the Midtown oasis. For your time here, the traffic noise and towering skyscrapers become distant, and you are in your own story heaven.

Ten Classic Nights with HBO Summer Film Fest

The greatest outdoor movie series of them all returns on Monday, June 17th when the HBO Bryant Park Summer Film Festival, presented by Bank of America, makes its 2013 debut. Tootsie kicks-off the season with Dustin Hoffman starring as a struggling actor who lands a role as a female and becomes a soap opera sensation.

Snacks, meals and refreshments are available at Bryant Park ‘wichcraft kiosks, the Southwest Porch and the Bryant Park Grill and Café, plus a new curated selection of food options from the Hester Street Fair.

Thank you all for entering the announcement contest and signing up for MidCity News. Congratulations to Zsuzsanna, the lucky winner of our HBO/Bryant Park Swag bag!

See you all at the movies!

June 17: Tootsie
Dustin Hoffman shines as a “difficult” actor who, in desperation, auditions as a female, then lands the role and becomes a soap opera sensation. Jessica Lange earned an Oscar as the love interest, and Bill Murray plays the wise-cracking roomie. (1982) 116 Min. (Sony/Columbia)

June 24: Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Something odd is happening to citizens of a small California town, and an alarmed doctor wants to find out what. Don Siegel’s gritty sci-fi thriller is still the definitive version of this terrifying tale of extra-terrestrial possession. Beware the pods! (1956) 80 Min. (Paramount)

July 1: Frenzy
Alfred Hitchcock returned to England to direct this thriller in which an innocent man is accused of a series of necktie murders in Covent Garden. Several memorable scenes proved that the Master was still at the top of his game. (1972) 116 Min. (Universal)

July 8: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
Five lucky children win the chance to tour a whimsical candy factory operated by the mysterious Wonka, indelibly portrayed by Gene Wilder. Valuable lessons are learned, and the music is as sweet as the candy. (1971) 98 Min. (Warner Bros.)

July 15: Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte
Charlotte, a spinster in a rotting plantation mansion, is being slowly and deliberately driven mad by her cousin, Miriam. Screen legends Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland pull out all the stops in this Southern Gothic directed by Robert Aldrich. (1964) 133 Min. (Fox)

July 22: The African Queen
Humphrey Bogart won an Oscar for his turn as a tough riverboat captain fleeing German East Africa alongside prim missionary Katherine Hepburn. The unlikely pair wards off many perils en route, including rapids, gunboats, and leeches. (1951) 105 Min. (Paramount)

July 29: A Foreign Affair
Uptight Congresswoman Jean Arthur tours bombed-out Berlin and finds love. But the rake she falls for is also involved with a cabaret singer portrayed by the one-and-only Marlene Dietrich! Romantic comedy, the Billy Wilder way. (1948) 116 Min. (Universal)

August 5: Norma Rae
Sally Field took home the Oscar for her portrayal of the title character, a minimum-wage textile worker who takes on her bosses at a North Carolina factory. Ron Leibman and Beau Bridges lend strong support. (1979) 113 Min. (Fox)

August 12: The Women
It’s the quintessential 1930’s ‘women’s picture’. Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, and Joan Crawford head a stellar, all-female cast in this witty adaptation of Clare Booth Luce’s play. Ms. Crawford’s parting shot is for the ages. (1939) 132 Min. (Warner Bros)

August 19: E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
One of the all-time box-office champs, Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece tells the story of a gentle alien who is stranded on Earth and develops a special bond with lonely boy Elliot. Funny, warm, and unforgettable. Bring your hankie. (1982) 115 Min. (Universal)

The HBO Bryant Park Summer Film Festival is presented by Bank of America and with the Wall Street Journal and Magnum Ice Cream.

Putt to Perfection and Go Swedish with Kubb

By adding a five-hole putting green and upgrading Kubb, the Bryant Park games count hits 30. These great amenities are free and open to the public daily, 11:00am - 7:00pm.

There are more things to do than ever at Bryant Park this year, particularly as we head into peak season. On any weekday, visitors to the park can choose between chess, backgammon, juggling, board games, Pétanque, Ping Pong, Le Carrousel, and the Reading Room. This year, we’ve introduced one exciting amenity and upgraded another, bringing the grand total of games in the park to 30.

Need to practice your putting? On the west side of the park, adjacent to the Southwest Porch, you’ll find a brand new putting green. Designed and developed by Junior Designer Alexandra Gonzalez, the Bryant Park Putting Green measures 15’ x 34’, and is made from SYNLAWN Turf. There are five putting holes, each with slightly different topography.

Alongside the BP Putting Green is the new Bryant Park Kubb area, also designed by Ms. Gonzalez. We introduced Kubb, a Scandinavian game best described as either “Viking chess” or “a combination of bowling and horseshoes”, last year as part of the Bryant Park Games program. Finding it was especially hard on the lawn, we decided to dedicate a space to it and installed a 12’ x 20’ expanse of SYNLAWN Turf to ensure it endures the entire season and beyond.

Both of these great amenities are free and open to the public daily, 11:00am - 7:00pm. Just check in with the attendant for free equipment and instruction.  

This is an excerpt from Bryant Park's weekly newsletter, MidCity News, written by Terry Benoit. MidCity News keeps park enthusiasts informed about our events, milestones, operations, and all of the detailed maintenance work that goes into caring for the park. Weekly updates are sent with our sister organizations 34th Street Partnership and Chelsea Improvement Company. 

You can read the newly redesigned MidCity News online, or sign up to receive it in your inbox. 

Avoiding Climate Catastrophe with Fred Guterl

Curious about climate change? Join one of the leading thinkers on the subject at the Bryant Park Reading Room sponsored by HSBC this Wednesday. Fred Guterl, executive editor of Scientific American, discusses how the overwhelming success of Homo sapiens and ever-growing advances in technology might trigger another mass extinction. More importantly, he offers optimistic advice on what we can do to avoid catastrophe. He'll be in the park at Word for Word on the release day for his new book The Fate of the Species: Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction.

You could win a copy of Guterl's book tomorrow. The first person to arrive for the event after 12pm will win a copy of the new book. Just find the Reading Room Coordinator and say the secret passcode "Climate Catastrophe".  Reading Room is open weather permitting 11am to 7pm. Books available courtesy of publishers, while supplies last.



Word for Word Author
Wednesdays, 12:30pm - 2:30pm
May 15 - August 21
Bryant Park Reading Room sponsored by HSBC

Word for Word Poetry 2013 Kickoff

We have a collection of very talented guest bloggers to cover the Word for Word Poetry series this summer. They capture a first-hand account of the poetry readings, as well as help to interpret the work of our visiting poets who present at the Bryant Park Reading Room sponsored by HSBC.

Anne Lovering Rounds for Word for Word Poetry, May 14, 2013


Tuesday, May 14, a crisp spring evening, saw the start of the park’s Word for Word Poetry Poetry series. Opening night featured Alex Dimitrov, Monica Ferrell, and Brenda Shaughnessy, three acclaimed poets who noted they were honored to be reading in the park and to be performing together.

Alex Dimitrov inaugurated this year’s series by reading from his debut collection, Begging For It. As he put it, he tends toward “quiet” “broken love poems,” although in the outdoor space of the Reading Room, he specifically sought out “louder” work. If Dimitrov’s poems are loud, it’s in the way they condense desire, in lines like “we start and stall, / and all all all we do / is want” (“This Is A Personal Poem”). About the poet Frank O’Hara, Dan Chiasson has spoken of the elegiac strain underlying the poet’s work, as if parties full of friends could end any time; as if any hookup could become a breakup. Dimitrov raises these stakes, starting from the broken moment—“After every needle finds its way inside me” (“America, You Darling”)—and exploring it for potential pleasure: “A mosquito presses into my skin / with such cruelty I mistake it for love” (“Sensualism”). In a timely expression of the seductive power of terminal interaction, Dimitrov shared “Self-Portrait as Daisy in The Great Gatsby”: “I wait for everyone to leave the party,” the poem says, darkly confident that the end of party will be climactic in its own right.  

Monica Ferrell followed this first set with poetry of surreal spaces. In “The Date,” she mused, “This time we’ll come gloved and blindfolded. We’ll arrive on time, with bees in our hair, with an escort of expiring swans… This time…This time…” The mood turned tongue-in-cheek when she read “Oh You Absolute Darling,” which catalogued the at once cliche, humorous, and bizarre utterances of an ex: “You are sexier than anyone I’ve ever met”; “Dear gypsy-themed Barbie doll”; “If your waist were any smaller, you wouldn’t exist.” The poems Ferrell read had complexity of texture in common—even the familiar, annoying “drip, drip, drip” of a bathroom faucet took on a hypnotic, sinister quality in “Days of Oakland,” as “copters’ dilated eyes” shone into the poet’s apartment. Ferrell’s diction covers an amazing range (from “drip, drip, drip” to the sigh, “Ah, invalid,” in “Beautiful Funeral”), and her poems operate on fascination with and transformation of the environments they observe.  

The final reader of the night, Brenda Shaughnessy, offered a last take on longing and possibility. Reading from her most recent book, Our Andromeda, she dwelled on questions of potential relationship, potential versions and reinventions of the self. “Did you receive my invitation?” the poem “Visitor” asks, twice. In “I Wish I Had More Sisters,” “My sisters will seem like a bunch / of alternate me, all the ways / I could have gone…/ …But who could say they weren’t / myself, we are so close. I mean, / who can tell the difference?” Like the only-half-fantasies and alternative reflections her poems imagine, Shaughnessy’s tone is both playful and haunting: “Heart, what art you? / War, star, part?” she asked in “Artless.” Alex Dimitrov began the reading with the landscapes of breakup; Shaughnessy left us with fantastical proposals for rearranging the pieces.  

Anne Lovering Rounds is Assistant Professor of English at Hostos Community College, City University of New York. 

From the Archives: The Arnold Constable & Company Buildings

In this post, archivist Anne Kumer shares some park history. This post also appears on NYC Circa, a history blog about New York City, its buildings, and public spaces. 

Just south of the Flatiron building, on East Nineteenth Street, between Broadway and Fifth Avenue, sits the  Arnold Constable Company building. It has one of the largest and most impressive mansards in the city. I can't think of another that is this palatial. It also looks to be two high-ceiling-ed stories tall. I'm impressed in ways I can't explain.

Arnold Constable & Co. building, Broadway facade, April 2013. Photo: Anne Kumer

The company was originally founded in 1825 as a small dry goods store in lower Manhattan. In 1857 the founders built a five-story white marble store on Canal and Mercer Streets, a bit north. Because of the store's success, the need to expand again came in less than ten years. In 1869, the company moved farther north, this time to a cast-iron building on Broadway and Nineteenth Street. Designed by Griffith Thomas, the Broadway facade was constructed of white marble. One of the store's founders,  Aaron Arnold felt it was ". . . the only material elegant enough for a prosperous emporium." The AC & Co. was definitely that -- it catered to the carriage trade before the term even came into being, and is credited as being the city's first department store. Arnold died a year before the store's expansion along Nineteenth Street, straight to Fifth Avenue in 1876.

It looked (and looks) something like this:

The Arnold Constable & Co. building showing the Fifth Avenue facade looking west, 1877. Image: archiseek

In 1914, the NYT reported another move uptown to an undisclosed location. That location turned out to be the corner of West 40th Street and Fifth Avenue, directly across from the main NYPL building (built in 1911), near Bryant Park, and just one block south of this. The company traded in its cast iron and mansard glory for a much less decorative structure. French Second Empire be damned.

After the move to West 40th and Fifth Avenue, 1915. Image: MCNY

Around 1925, the store became part of A.T. Stewart Company -- a name in retail history that you can't swing a dead cat without encountering a million times -- and in the late 1930s, several branches of the store were built by then president, Isaac Liberman. In 1975 was forced to close its doors, 150 years after they originally opened in 1825.

This location is now the home of the NYPL Mid-Manhattan branch, but might not be for too long, though this could delay the progress some. The Mansard-ed up Broadway building is still home to a large retailer though: ABC Carpet & Home.

Other Sources:
Ladies' Mile Historic District designation report
Hendrickson, Robert. The Grand Emporiums, p. 154-155

2013 Summer Film Fest... Coming Soon!

The moment you've all been waiting for is almost here. The full line-up for the HBO Bryant Park Summer Film Festival will be announced next week. We'll let you know what classic films, cult flicks, and musical pix we have in store for your Monday nights.

Make sure you're in the know and sign-up now:
Want to be the first to know? The full line-up will be delivered straight to the inbox of our MidCity News subscribers next Wednesday, May 22.

The contest is now closed. Please check back for more contests and opportunities to win! 

Contest
By signing up, you'll also be entered to win one of three prize packages from HBO and Bryant Park! The grand prize winner will receive a True Blood swag bag, and two runners up will receive HBO apparel, Bryant Park Klean Kanteens, and 'wichcraft cream'wich gift cards. If you're already a MidCity News subscriber, don't worry. You are eligible to win too! Go ahead and fill out the form above, and you'll be entered to win.

The contest will close at 11:59pm on Monday, May 20 and three randomly selected winners will be announced Wednesday, May 22 via email. A valid email address is required for entry. Prizes will be mailed by Friday, May 24. Entrants must have valid mailing address within the continental United States.