Manhattenhenge

 

When I last wrote about our trip to New York City, I left off as we came back to our motel at the end of the first half day to relax our ears from all the noise outside and 33 floors below us. Alas, for a time it wasn't to be. We started hearing a lot of honking going on below us and when we looked out our window, we saw the above scene. 

A crowd of people were upon a bridge looking westward for no apparent reason other than to block traffic. At this point, one lane of traffic was squeezing well into the oncoming lane and both lanes were getting through albeit it at a snail's pace. But soon even that changed.

The crowd size doubled or perhaps tripled in a matter of minutes and soon the people were completely blocking one lane and half of another leaving only a single narrow path barely wide enough to allow a vehicle to pass. In fact, vehicles were having to go one at a time into the crowd, laying on their horn continuously and inching ahead only inches at a time. Eventually traffic going the other way would have enough of waiting and they would inch forward until two vehicles were meeting each other nearly head on then it would be solid horn blasts for ten minutes until each could swerve just enough to one side to get by the other and then the crowd would fill back in behind them. It was absolute bedlam.

Eventually, the cops came to break up the mob and chase them off but just before they did, something clicked in my brain about what was happening. I googled Manhattenhenge and sure enough, it was happening on that very evening. Since the bridge below was across one of the five or six major streets labeled with the best unobstructed views of the occurrence, it made sense why people were endangering their very lives to grab a photograph of the event.

For those unfamiliar with Manhattenhenge, it is an event that happens twice a year at the end of May and again in July, when the sun set lines up perfectly with the east-west street grid of Manhattan. Above is one of thousands of pictures I could find online, this one of the very street and the very bridge in question seen in the background. I myself wasn't about to join the mob to try and capture a photo for myself.

With sunset gone and the horde driven away by police officers, the honking subsided to just the every 10 or 15 second variety and not the continual honking that had been going on for the previous 45 minutes. This new level of honking was easily drowned out by pulling the shade on the window and kicking on the room fan to high, but not before I took one more picture of the lighted world outside our motel windows. The city may never sleep, but I planned to.