It was really,
really cold yesterday; it was around 20F, but if felt like
minus 20F--
I'm so glad the visitors are still enjoying themselves!
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/30/nyregion/30nyinterrupted.html?_r=1&hp
New York, Interrupted
In Between Holidays, Nothing Happens
but Magic 
Tourists had their pictures taken in front of the frozen pond on the south eastern corner of Central Park.
Visitors filled the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue despite the cold. Even ducks in Central Park had the capacity
to inspire wonder.
By
MANNY FERNANDEZ
Published: December 29, 2009 On Tuesday morning, tourists from around the world and across the country trained their eyes and their cameras on a group of loudmouthed New Yorkers, some of the rare locals left behind this holiday season: the ducks at a Central Park pond.
This is a week of suspended animation in the city, in between holidays, when the great systems of New York — the schools, the courts, the communications media, Wall Street, City Hall, the bodegas in Queens — slow to an administrative crawl or shut down altogether, when New York City belongs not to New Yorkers, but to Spaniards, Italians, Canadians, Germans, Californians. Tens of thousands of people have left town to go back home, while tens of thousands of others have left home to come to town.
It was a calm, sunny 56-degree morning in Glendale, Calif., where
Luigi Di Giulio, a 69-year-old chiropractor, lives. But he was not at home at the moment. He was in Central Park, standing at the edge of the half-thawed pond near Central Park South and Fifth Avenue.
Though dressed in winter gear, with a black mask that he usually wears when skiing covering the bottom half of his face, Mr. Di Giulio shivered in the 20-degree chill. The city asks a lot of its visitors, in this or any other month: harsh climate, harsh traffic, harsh prices. Mr. Di Giulio estimated that he and his family — his wife and two daughters — had spent roughly $5,000 on their trip to the city, including airfare, their hotel suite and other expenses.
But standing in front of an icy pond near the end of his eight-day visit, Mr. Di Giulio could have been hired by the city’s tourism bureau. Others have said it before him, many times, in many ways, but he said it, too, with feeling: He loved New York. They had pizza at
Grimaldi’s in Brooklyn one day (the line was so long they waited an hour and 10 minutes just to step inside and order), and then walked across the Brooklyn Bridge back to Manhattan.
“It’s the energy,” he said, somewhat muffled, through the black mask. “I don’t think there’s any city in the entire world like this. And I am from Rome.”
A couple from Montreal had walked by him moments earlier, along the path that follows the rocky edge of what is known simply as the Pond. And there were countless others, people Mr. Di Giulio never met but, seeing their faces, overhearing their conversations in foreign accents, he somehow added to his New York experience.
There was
José Pereda from Madrid, with his wife and two sons, on their way to
F.A.O. Schwarz. Asked to name the thing he liked most about the city, Mr. Pereda responded, “The city.”
And there were
John Perazich and his wife,
Patricia Wynn, admiring the ducks. The couple drove to New York from their home in Washington, and Mr. Perazich said he quickly noticed the benefits of visiting the city in this in-between week: He found a parking spot on the street. “It’s a Tuesday-Friday spot, and Friday is a holiday,” said Mr. Perazich, a lawyer.
From October through December, an estimated 11.5 million international and domestic tourists visited New York City, down slightly from the 11.75 million in the same period last year, according to NYC & Company, the city’s tourism and marketing arm. Standing at the corner of Central Park South and Fifth Avenue — with the crowds streaming in and out of the park, the Plaza Hotel and nearby shops, or hopping on and off horse-drawn carriages — the difference between 11.5 and 11.75 million is hard to see.
Many of those visitors will travel to the top of skyscrapers to look down on the city, but those who strolled beside the pond in Central Park did so for the opposite effect: To sink down just below street level and look up. Up above were the bare branches of the trees, and beyond that the buildings lining Central Park South, and down below the thin ice of the pond and the occasional quack-quack.
It is a New York place, which is to say that while its tranquillity has a limit, its capacity to inspire and mystify does not. A man sitting at one of the park benches facing the pond took long swigs from a can of Budweiser hidden in a plastic bag. The signs posted on fences and lampposts screamed for attention: Rabies Advisory. Newly Seeded Lawn, Please Keep Off. Please Do Not Feed Birds and Other Wildlife.
In much smaller print are the messages on silvery plaques on some of the benches, many of them by and for New Yorkers fond of the area: “Ellie and Gene Goldberg Sit Here, June 28, 1997,” “For Noodling,” “To Bill, Nov. 27, 1998, I’ll Love You Always, All Ways, T-.”
Mr. Di Giulio stood a long while, recording the scene with his video camera. He and the other tourists stood still, facing the pond, the trees and the ducks, and behind them on the path New Yorkers streamed by, jogging, walking their dogs. A man wearing headphones who appeared to be on his way to work said out loud: “They don’t look cold, do they? They look perfectly happy.”
Maybe he was talking about the ducks. Maybe he was talking about the tourists.
