Canyon of Heroes: Not Early Enough; Crowds

I'm referring, in the titles of theses blog posts, to the Canyon of Heroes. This is a stretch along Broadway in Lower Manhattan from Bowling Green up to City Hall. It's called "Canyon of Heroes" because the tall buildings make it look like a canyon, and the astronauts from the Mercury Project rode through in the late fifties, and the nickname stuck. Barricades are put up the night before, and traffic is finally closed off as the timing of the start of the parade nears, and the parade goes north of Broadway, which is opposite to normal.

The parade was scheduled for Friday at 11 am. I left with Corrie at her usual work time, and left the train station where she transfers (and where I used to back in the day). That stop is the first stop in Manhattan for our train.

I came up above ground at about 8:30 in the windy blue chill of Friday morning to an already drunk sea of nearly 25,000 people. I got a cup of coffee (staves off the headaches)(booze at that hour? Maybe six years ago, or while camping...) and picked my spot. The crowds were throwing rolls of toilet paper back and forth across the street, traffic seemed nonplussed.

Around me the crowd would chant "MVP! MVP!" at passing by buses full of school children, at sanitation workers, at photographers...pretty much anyone could have been an MVP that morning. At one point, a few minutes after nine, the crowd having grown behind me, a man wearing a Mets jersey and Mets hat walked by, sheepishly grinning, being hoarsely "Awwwedd" at, which quickly turned to "BOOOO!" which, just as quickly turned to chants of "Ass-Hole! Ass-Hole!" This became the new chant for the morning.

Before, most anybody could have serenaded as "MVP! MVP!", but now, the most common refrain was "Asshole!" over and over...for cops having a good time with the fans, for cars that wouldn't pull the roll of TP from their hood and toss it back to the drunken crowd, even for a short teenage latina girl who couldn't throw a roll of TP across the street from a position of sitting on somebody's shoulders. That seemed too much for me.

As the hours passed, and my feet moved maybe six inches, my legs began to cramp up something fierce. Only now, a few days later, do they feel normal.

By the time the parade arrived, my legs were hurting, I was kinda thirsty for a drink since all around me were high-school kids cutting class and drinking liquor (I'd been smelling vodka and cheap whiskey for hours), and I was hungry. At about the third hour mark, the first floats began to come by.

Here are some crowd shots. The second is after the parade ended, and everyone is trying to exit. Please remember, that this scene was happening for a nearly two mile stretch up and down Broadway and not just limited to my little neck of the woods.