New Yorkers Really Love Their Flowers

tags: Amsterdam Avenue, NYC through my eye, photography, photoessay

I don't know if you know this, but the weather in NYC is hell. Seriously. Whether you imagine hell to be a furnace or a freezer, NYC is nearly always at either extreme. The weather here typically varies between hot and humid, so you have the distinct displeasure of smiling at people while sweat streams down your face all day long, or cold and windy, so you are in danger of freezing to death while waiting for the bus. By my calculations, there are somewhere between 13 and 15 days each year of "weather purgatory": you know, pleasant weather. Those few good weather days are rare enough in NYC that they should demand your utmost attention and appreciation.

Yesterday, the weather was especially gorgeous: The sky was cloudless, the warm air was freshened by a light breeze and the humidity was at a comfortable level. So of course, I had to get out to enjoy it, especially as a reward after I mailed my taxes.

I printed my taxes at the public library at Lincoln Center, so I decided to walk from the library on Amsterdam Avenue to the post office near AMNH, where I would mail them. Of course I had my digital camera with me so I snapped a few pictures along the way, so you could vicariously walk along with me.

Near the entrance to the Juilliard School bookstore, I found this little gem;

Lots of trees are planted in large soil-filled squares cut in Manhattan sidewalks, which provides a lot of space to be filled by zealous gardeners. When I lived in Harlem, my neighbors often turn these spaces into sidewalk gardens that were soon bursting with tomatoes in the summer and autumn months, while residents of Midtown and the Upper West Side (UWS) often fill them with a huge variety of flowers, such as this gorgeous yellow pansy.

After I'd walked away from the pansy gardens near Juilliard, I realized how to use the macro feature on my camera. I almost returned to the pansies to get a few more pictures, but was distracted by a large marble raised flower bed in front of a condo. This flower bed that was home to lots of tulips, and was a great opportunity for me to use the macro feature on my camera;

I love tulips. They remind me of the gorgeous daffodil and tulip fields on the Skagit floodplain in western Washington state -- in early springtime, people travel for hundreds of miles to see and photograph those huge fields filled with blooming tulips and daffodils.

As I sat on the wide marble border around this flower bed, focused on photographing the flowers, I eventually noticed a few people, including the three doormen, who were standing around, watching me.

The picture that you see above took quite awhile to capture because the breezes pushed the tulips around, making my pictures blurry. But I finally captured an image that satisfied me. I am pleased to say that a friend of mine, Jessica, who is an aspiring actress, loves this picture and she told me that she would love to hang it on her wall.

I finally left the catsup-and-mustard tulips and began walking north on Amsterdam Avenue. Along the way, I was attracted by a pair of flower boxes that were standing outside the entrance to a condo on Amsterdam (if you look on the left side of this image, you can see the gleaming brass doorframe);

These window boxes caught my eye because of the lovely muted purples and pinks of the flowers: Someone had obviously spent a lot of time planning this window box. I spent quite a bit of time here, trying to capture the colors, but the sun was so bright that it washed out the flowers' colors, as you can see especially in the pansies above, which are nearly white (the tulips are a closer approximation of the colors I was trying to capture).

Here is a close-up of one of the pansies, which gives you a better idea of what they are supposed to look like in the above image;

As I look at this image on my computer, I realize that this is a little bit blurry. Woops! Sorry about that! It was consistently breezy when I was taking these pictures.

I continued to walk north along Amsterdam and all along the way, I was greeted by scenes such as this one;

Flower shops in NYC like to place their flowers and other plants on the sidewalk outside their entrance on sunny days. Not only do the plants enjoy this, but pedestrians do, too! It almost makes one feel like this is not a concrete jungle after all.

I mentioned earlier that there are a lot of trees in NYC. A fair number of them are fruit trees, and right now, the apple trees are in bloom, as you can see here;

It almost looks like you aren't in the sidewalk of one of the largest cities in the world, doesn't it?

Here's one last look at that gorgeous cloudless sky, as seen through the boughs of a blossoming apple tree;