I have two favorite times of the day. One is very early morning between 6:00 a.m. and about 7:30 a.m. I love to watch the city wake up. My other favorite time of day? About 12 hours later in late spring, early summer. The city is calm. the light is soft. I indulged myself early this morning and hit a double whammy because it's a holiday weekend. Even though there are a lot of tourists visiting New York City and I started out a bit later, Chinatown was still just waking up and A Clearing in the Streets was sitting there waiting for me, for anyone.

What is A Clearing in the Streets? A very creative exhibit commissioned by the Public Art Fund and designed by Julie Farris and Sarah Wayland-Smith, placed carefully in Collect Pond Park. The park has its own tragic history having once been an actual 60-foot deep freshwater pond that had been abused in the 19th century and therefore, drained.  It sits just south of Canal Street wedged between Chinatown and New York City's courts and nestled up against a skyscraper or two.

The exhibit opens Wednesday, May 27th and runs through October, but I wanted to see it from seedlings upward and onward. The exhibit is a temporary landscape housed inside of a ten-sided plywood structure 15' in diameter where the seedlings will become a flowering meadow by October. The interior of the plywood is lined with sheets of taut material painted to be an endless blue sky. Eight inch gaps in the plywood allow visitors to peak into the scene from different angles.

Imagine walking through busy, noisy downtown NYC, happening upon a plywood structure seemingly plopped down in tiny park, being curious enough to stop and inspect and wow there's a flowering meadow.  Imagine doing that at different times of the day over the course of several months.  That little exhibit could become an entire reasearch project in and of itself.

It's so tempting to keep this treasure to myself, but alas, I'll share:

A Clearing in the Streets from holly on Vimeo.