Museum Mile
Yesterday evening I went to museum mile, thereby crossing another New York event off my ever growing list of things to be done. The festival covers the mile long stretch between 82nd and 105th on Fifth Avenue that includes free admission to the Met, Neue Gallerie, Goethe Institute, Guggenheim, Jewish Museum and a few others.
This is not a day for museum lovers or the claustrophobic, entrance into each museum includes a growing line and you’re herded through by foot traffic you can barely escape.
What’s best about the museum mile though is the street fair, probably the only one in New York not filled with vendors but fire jugglers, magicians, balloons, jazz and klezmer bands, drawing stations, clowns and sidewalk chalk, lots and lots of sidewalk chalk. I’d never seen so many NY adults and children sitting in the street drawing to their hearts content, I walked from 82nd to 105th and by the time I made my way back down the entire street looked like it had been covered in rainbows.
The street artist De La Vega was out in full effect as well, with chalk drawings accompanied by a long string of “words of wisdom” which sounded more like words of encouragement and curiously appeared near the end of the mile:
- The discipline of emptying your mind is as important as the discipline of filling it up.
- Why does the feeling of emptiness occupy so much space?
- The pressure of survival in the big city will make you lose sight of your dreams…Hang in there.
- It is better to let go of someone with the truth than to keep them with a lie.
- A man torn between two women will eventually lose them both.
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