New York Diary

Street Fairs

I love this city! Today, I awoke to find a fair on my beloved 84th Street. People were selling everything from books and latkes (I bought some of both) to pillows and jewelry (which I did not buy). The local Lutheran Church was giving away free cookies. Children were gasping at the real! live! ducks! (This, incidentally, amazed me. I grew up staunchly in suburbia--no farm-kid background for me--but it had never occurred to me that a six-year-old may never have seen a duck before.) Everybody was wandering the streets, chattering away in German and English and French and Spanish and Chinese, having a great time.

I like the institution of the street fair. I suppose everybody's got 'em: Neptune Beach had similar fairs four or five times a year out by the beach, and Ithaca populated the Commons with fairs a few times a year. But the honest-to-goodness, walking-only, closed-to-traffic, everybody-on-the-front-stoop street fair is a thing that I think can only exist in a city.

The first urban street fair I ever attended was the Haight-Ashberry fair in San Francisco. I went with my Uncle Charles, and was overwhelmed by the sheer size of the thing. Here in New York, the experience is similar (if rather more sober and less hippie). What's amazing, though, is that it remains at once a densely-populated and fiercely local event. It seems like everybody at the 84th-street fair, for example, lives within a block of 84th street. We're all neighbors, all several thousand of us. One stall even features T-shirts sporting the logo "10028"--our zip code. It would be bizarre to find a SoHo-dweller at our fair.

In Neptune Beach, the fairs serve the populations of "the beaches," as well as Jacksonville, Mayport, and maybe even Ponte Vedra. In Ithaca, similar festivals are geared to the whole city. But here in New York, anybody from the West Side just isn't local.

posted by Skay @ 3:44 PM