Around sunset this past Saturday, I took this photo
of Paley Park, on East 53rd
Street in New York. I worked across the street from this “vest-pocket” park for
a decade, but, even though my office only relocated about five blocks south about
20 years ago, I have had few occasions to go there since.
Last weekend was a reminder of what I had been
missing—indeed, it gave me a different impression of the site, as I can never
recall it at end of day. The pieces of the Berlin Wall that I remember vividly were relocated a few years ago indoors very close to here, in the lobby
of 520 Madison Avenue.
But I love what remains: the seating, the
ivy-covered walls, the waterfall in the background that drowns out the noise of the
city beyond. What you don’t see here, just to the right of this shot, is a café,
which makes it a hangout for nearby office workers.
The site (named for the father of CBS head William
S. Paley) was once a hangout of a different sort: the legendary Stork Club, one
of the great watering holes of Gotham for three and a half decades. At one time
or another, from its founding in 1929 to its closure in 1965, one might have
come across celebrities like Walter Winchell, Ernest Hemingway, Joe DiMaggio, Judy
Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Dorothy Kilgallen here.
That was an exclusive world, however. The same space
belongs now, blessedly, to the public, an oasis amid the noise and haste of a
crowded city.
